Maggie Gee: Writing the Condition-of-England Novel 9781441108784, 9781472542595, 9781441100870

Citation preview

Maggie Gee

Also Available From Bloomsbury Angela Carter, Edited by Sonya Andermahr and Lawrence Phillips Contemporary Women Writers Look Back, Alice Ridout Doris Lessing, edited by Susan Watkins and Alice Ridout Women’s Fiction 1945–2005, Deborah Philips

Maggie Gee Writing the Condition-of-England Novel Mine Özyurt Kılıç

LON DON • N E W DE L H I • N E W YOR K • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc



50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

175 Fifth Avenue New York NY 10010 USA

www.bloomsbury.com First published 2013 © Mine Özyurt Kılıç, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Mine Özyurt Kılıç has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-0878-4 e-ISBN: 978-1-4411-0087-0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kılıç, Mine Özyurt. Maggie Gee: writing the condition-of-England novel/by Mine Özyurt Kılıç. p. cm. – (Bloomsbury literary studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4411-0878-4 (hardcover) – ISBN 978-1-4411-6277-9 (ebook) – ISBN 978-1-4411-0087-0 (pdf) 1. Gee, Maggie, 1948–Criticism and interpretation. 2. National characteristics, English. 3. England–In literature. I. Title. PR6057.E247Z73 2013 823’.914–dc23 2012034850 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

To my mother, Leman

vi

Contents Acknowledgements

viii

Part 1  Introduction

Contextualizing Maggie Gee’s Fiction

3

Part 2  Major Works 1

Author Flinging Herself from the Ivory Tower: Dying, In Other Words (1981)

23

2

Of the Nuclear Family and the Hibakusha: The Burning Book (1983)

37

3

Telescopic View of England, England: Light Years (1985)

54

4

Hard Times: Grace (1988) and Where Are the Snows (1991)

67

5

Are Such Things Done on Albion’s Shore?: Lost Children (1994)

89

6

Environmental Crisis, from Fact to Fiction: The Ice People (1998) and The Flood (2004)

101

7

Of the Two Nations: The White Family (2002)

128

8

Authorship in a Globalized World: My Cleaner (2005) and My Driver (2009)

140

Part 3  Author Interview 9

Interview with Maggie Gee: Mine Özyurt Kılıç, 17 April 2010, İstanbul

Bibliography Index

153 163 175

Acknowledgements I wish to thank Bloomsbury editors Laura Murray, David Avital, James Tupper and the project manager Subitha Nair for all their help in bringing this book to print. Thanks also to Colleen Coalter for her professional support when this book was just a proposal. My most important debt of gratitude is to Maggie Gee whose interest in my work, comments, suggestions and her friendship made the normally stressful time of writing a very rewarding experience. I am also grateful to her for giving permission to publish the interview of April 2010, İstanbul, as well as generously agreeing to another one, on women and writing, which will be published separately in the Oxford Journal Contemporary Women’s Writing. Special thanks to Maggie Gee and Nicholas Rankin for their hospitality during my short research visit to London, and the sources they provided. They made me feel very lucky and very happy! Writing while teaching full time was a challenge. But I am grateful to Professor Dilek Doltaş and Assistant Professor Oya Berk for their support and encouragement, which allowed me to finish the project on time. Grateful thanks to my colleagues and friends at Doğuş University for their support, interest and comments, especially to Murat Sayım and Hülya Yağcıoğlu who always helped not only with their ideas but also with books, articles and essays. I am grateful to GEMMA, Erasmus Mundus Master’s Degree Programme in Women’s and Gender Studies in Europe, for their Visiting Scholar Scheme, which enabled me to share my research with their brilliant students and do a lot of reading and research at the University of Bologna and the University of Granada in 2011. Special thanks to Professor Adelina Sánchez Espinosa and Professor Vita Fortunati for their support and interest in the seminars I offered for GEMMA. I am also grateful to the ESSE, The European Society for the Study of English, for the bursary that helped me reach the sources at the British Library. Thanks to my friends and colleagues Dr Sema Taşkın and Dr Olu Jenzen for reading and commenting invaluably on some of the chapters despite their research and heavy teaching schedules. The careful technical help that Müge Tekin kindly offered enabled me to spend more time on writing in the last stages: Many thanks for that! And infinite thanks to my family, Leman, Kemal, Can, Emine, Buse Özyurt and Bülent, for always being there to share the joys, as well as the pains, of writing!

Part One

Introduction

2

Contextualizing Maggie Gee’s Fiction

Maggie Gee (OBE) is a prolific and influential contemporary novelist whose work has been translated into 14 languages and shortlisted for two prestigious global literary prizes, the Orange Prize and the International Impac Award. In 1982, Maggie Gee was selected as one of the original twenty ‘Best of Young British Novelists’ and became Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia; from 2004 to 2008, she was the first female Chair of Council of the Royal Society of Literature; and in 2006, she and Hilary Mantel were appointed as the two Visiting Professors of Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. Maggie Gee has been an active and critical participant in the literary world as a reviewer, as a member of the Board of Management of the Society of Authors and a member of the Government’s PLR Committee. As a Professor of Creative Writing and the first female Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, Maggie Gee is well aware of the public image of the contemporary author, and this awareness is reflected both in her fiction as a leitmotif of being a writer, an English writer, in a globalized and transnational world, and in the critical analysis of the contemporary literary world in her autobiography My Animal Life (2010). Unemployment, global warming, violence, homeless people, militarization, the threat of nuclear war, infertility, childcare, gentrification, cuts in social services, the lowering of standards in publishing and the commercialization of culture and current literary ideas are only some of the social problems that Maggie Gee addresses in her fiction. With this range of subjects, Maggie Gee’s fiction demonstrates not only the ways in which contemporary British fiction is shaped and influenced by contemporary British society, but also the potential ways that fiction can shape and influence it. An author of 11 novels and many short stories, who explores many important and controversial issues using different literary genres and techniques, Maggie Gee is making a significant contribution to contemporary British fiction. Every age brings its own forms of writing, and the novel, a literary genre ‘openended, socially engaged, exploratory’ in nature, inevitably evolves in parallel with social and cultural changes: ‘[It] challenges and stretches the canons of knowledge (“the conventional wisdom”) as well as the prevailing standards of perception, subjectivity, and literary representation in its bid to picture and probe an evolving contemporary reality’ (Shaffer, 33). Maggie Gee’s fiction can be seen as a literary commentary applied to specific social and cultural conditions with novelistic techniques that are also specific to those same conditions. Her belief in the referential nature of fiction is evident in her response to Mariella Frostrup interviewing Gee in 2008; revealing her interest in realism, she says she aims at ‘[b]ringing the reality of our everyday lives into fiction!’. Focusing on ‘the ordinary, the mundane, the minutia of everyday life and familiar

4

Maggie Gee

things’ as mid-Victorian social-problem novels do, her novels bring the reality of our lives into fiction and present a broad picture of crisis-ridden contemporary British society (Purchase, 185). On the one hand, employing experimental techniques like those of the self-conscious author, intertextuality, parody and pastiche, and attentive to literary detail and pattern, on the other hand, raising environmental consciousness, cultivating an ethical stance and seeking connection through an appeal to the human heart, Gee’s fiction challenges and stretches the bounds of the condition-of-England novel while using its conventional wisdom. As a novelist who can be seen ‘in the tradition of Fielding and Dickens where the author is ever-present, ready to comment or intervene’ (Cotton, 352), and whose early influences were modernists like Woolf and Nabokov, Maggie Gee establishes a fine balance in her writing between craft and meaning, personal and social. Through new techniques and modes, Gee’s novels improve and adjust the subgenre of the ‘condition-of-England novel’ to fully represent the present condition of British society. Although the focus of her earlier works seems to be on stories of individual lives, all her books manage to offer a panoramic vision that connects these particulars to the whole. Overall, this book, Maggie Gee: Writing the Condition-of-England Novel, argues that Gee’s novels can be defined as versions of midVictorian social-problem novels, and by employing the technique of self-conscious fiction and introducing new methods in narration, Gee has revived this mid-Victorian realist tradition. Gee’s version of ‘England’ is a richer, thus a more truthful portrait of Britain, mixing the voices from the margin with the mainstream. By encompassing characters who are white, black, gay, lesbian, straight, young, old, educated and working class and treating them all as parts of an ensemble, Gee’s novels offer a body of work that cuts across the boundaries of race, class and gender. This modification of character range in the genre instigates the question of the function of art and literature. As her vision of Edward Hopper’s art in her review ‘View from Outside’ suggests, like Hopper, Gee is interested in her ‘wider subject - not individuals but the human species’ (38), giving a panorama, seeing the whole and the link between the individual and the whole, rather than simply looking at the particular: This comment on Hopper perfectly applies to my reading of Gee’s fiction; bridging the gap between ‘the familiar and the vast unknown’, the individual and what is outside the individual, most of her texts offer a view from outside. These are multilayered and faceted novels rich in people and points of view. The use of free indirect discourse and tonal shifts given in a cinematographic fashion reinforce this panoramic view and make Gee’s social satire richer. In that sense, Gee enlarges the Victorian narrative perspective by merging diverse voices and represents social heteroglossia. Giving the narrative voice objectivity, this technique also allows critical distance to help the reader reflect on what is happening in the world outside. Gee reveals her interest in criticizing external reality in ‘the literary jungle’ section of her autobiography My Animal Life, where talking specifically about those of her novels that address problems like racism (The White People), war (The Burning Book) and nuclear threat (Grace), she explains what she wanted to do in them: I wanted to protest; as Dickens did against the evils of his day, and Thackeray, and George Eliot- so many great nineteenth-century novelists. It didn’t make them less

Contextualizing Maggie Gee’s Fiction

5

literary. Many of my literary models are modernists- Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov- but for me the modern aesthetic breaks down when it isolates the writer from the world. Like the modernists, I love pattern, and try to give each book an overall controlling form, but I also have one eye on reality. (175)

Accordingly, most of her works take post-welfare Britain as their background and give a commentary on social decline. And her millennial novels show how the social and cultural problems still waiting to be solved make fissures in the idealized image of Britain as a big multicultural society. Before my next section, which will give a brief survey of the condition-of-England novel, it may be useful to compare Maggie Gee to mid-Victorian condition-of-England novelists who dealt with the ‘Condition of England Question’, and suggest the idea that if the mid-Victorian novel gives a portrayal of a country divided into ‘Two Nations’, a term coined by the prime minister of the day, Benjamin Disraeli (who himself wrote a condition-of-England novel pondering the question), then Maggie Gee’s fiction can be considered as a response to many similar questions, such as Margaret Thatcher’s outraged declaration in  1992, which marked the demise of the welfare society: ‘There is no such thing as Society’; Tony Blair’s attempts to revive a sense of unity through some new ‘values’ for New Labour; and David Cameron’s idea of ‘Big Society’, which saw the August 2011 riots and the Occupy London protests, to name but a few.

Condition-of-England novel One of the most popular and significant subgenres of the Victorian novel took its name from the ‘Condition of England Question’, a phrase coined by Thomas Carlyle in 1839 to describe the poor conditions of the English working class. Carlyle also described ‘the condition of England’ in his Past and Present (1843), in which he saw the ‘Rich English Nation’ ‘fast sinking into a state [. . .] there was literally never any parallel’ (2). Complaining about the hollowness and enervation of the age, which turned England into a modern hell, many intellectuals and writers pondered these social problems and the divide between the idle land-owning aristocracy and ‘the great dumb toiling class’. On the ‘Condition of England Question’, Carlyle warned politicians about the urgency of this ‘matter’ and called them to action to ‘touch the disease’: A feeling very generally exists that the condition and disposition of the Working Classes is a rather ominous matter at present; that something ought to be said, something ought to be done, in regard to it. [. . .] To us individually this matter appears, and has for many years appeared, to be the most ominous of all practical matters whatever; a matter in regard to which if something be not done, something will do itself one day, and in a fashion that will please nobody. The time is verily come for acting in it; how much more for consultation about acting in it, for speech and articulate inquiry about it! (1)

Many of the important novels during and after this time, known as the ‘Hungry Forties’, addressed this question both in order to give a portrayal of the country in

6

Maggie Gee

unrest and to raise awareness of the divisions in society. Margaret Drabble and Jenny Springer contend that such novels attempt a diagnosis and expose selected targets within the economic, industrial and political establishments, responding to problems that were ‘the products of changing demographic patterns and changes in work practices associated with the accelerating industrialisation of the British economy’ (Guy, 3). Since they were reacting to the Condition of England Question generated by the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, the Chartist uprisings of 1848 and poverty, these novels were also defined as ‘social-problem novels’ and ‘industrial novels’ (Wheeler, 35). Leading to a close intertwining of novelistic and humanitarian engagements, these novels centred their attention on the poor in conjunction with social problems such as poverty, unemployment, squalid housing, factory conditions, child labour and political unrest (Adams, 60). In other words, they were not only about the ‘The Great Unwashed’ and their poor working conditions; for instance, Hard Times goes beyond displaying the sense of hopelessness and monotony that pervaded Coketown, a typical industrial town, and its workers, and ‘realistically mirrors the complexities of life’ (Simmons, 349). In their explorations of the genre, representative novelists like Elizabeth Gaskell, Charles Kingsley, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot wrote social-problem novels that gave ‘vivid portrayals of urban poverty’, and described the ‘overpowering sense of oppression and dismal decay’ (Guy, 117). To illustrate, Gaskell’s Mary Barton describes life in the Manchester of the 1840s and exposes the human problems of rapid industrialization, while also offering a political analysis and a suggested resolution. It also offers a detailed observation of the city, and exposes the ignorance and indifference from which people suffered in their daily lives (Sanders, 409). Gaskell’s later novel North and South juxtaposes ‘the snobberies, chivalries, and artificiality of the country gentry of the South of England with the distinctive energetic anti-gentlemanly world of self-made manufacturers of the North’ (Sanders, 410). Drawing on the rift between the rich and poor, Disraeli’s Sybil: or The Two Nations, which became a catchphrase to describe the condition of England, also shows ‘a real grasp of modern social complexity’ (Sanders, 412). James Eli Adams notes that the condition-of-England novel can ‘aptly be called the “insurrection novel” because combined with expressions of deep sympathy for the predicament of the working class, they feature a riot or related acts of violence that were part and parcel of the mid-century industrial life’ (63). One of the earliest examples, Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke, for instance, is about Chartist protests and these riots are set against ‘London poverty, and fever-haunted London slums, frank descriptions of the effects of a cholera epidemic in the slums’ (Sanders, 411). Similarly, Dickens’ Hard Times and Gaskell’s North and South give an account of strikes and lockouts in the factories in Preston in 1853–1854 (Simmons, 348). Dickens’ historical novel Barnaby Rudge is also set at the time of the Gordon Riots of 1780 and describes an anti-Catholic protest aggravated by nationalistic, economic and political grievances (Sanders, 406). So, in nineteenth-century Britain, writers like Dickens, Eliot, Disraeli and Gaskell responded to the need to envisage the ‘condition of England’, which ‘seemed to be both an enactment of the problem of imagining the whole of a nation and a utopian prefiguring of such a vision of healing unity’ (Connor, 44). To Wheeler, ‘the reformist drive’ is essential to these social-problem novels (37).

Contextualizing Maggie Gee’s Fiction

7

These novels also deal with human problems ‘which are always on the verge of violating class boundaries to become the human problems of the middle class as well’ (David, 83). Charlotte Brontë ’s Shirley ‘takes industry and industrial matters mainly as a backdrop for its action; the middle-class characters’ lives and romances are the centrepiece’ (Simmons, 346). Similarly, Gaskell’s North and South, in which the factory question is intrinsic to the action, can also be read as a typical Victorian romance novel (Simmons, 349). By mainly exploring class conflict, these mid-Victorian condition-of-England novels highlight a ‘kind of class apartheid’ (Wheeler, 38); as such, they are meant to teach the middle and upper classes about the ‘real’ conditions of England (Simmons, 337). As its title famously suggests, Disraeli’s Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845) reports to its reader the widening gap between the rich and poor: Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws. (Book II, Chapter 5, 40)

Informing the middle class about the life of the poor, these novels marked an important growth in consciousness about the nature of society and ‘served as a bridge across that divide’ by showing that the two nations are ‘ineluctably bound to each other and as a consequence are also responsible for and to each other’ (David, 79, 82). Wheeler also emphasizes this awareness of connectedness and regards a grasp of social context as one of the common features of mid-century fiction. He argues that ‘[. . .] change and development in the individual is often related to external social change’ (37). In his analysis of Gaskell’s Mary Barton, David also emphasizes this consciousness of the connection between the interests of the two classes and states that in these novels, ‘it was both politically and morally essential to understand the price of individualism paid by the “other nation” ’ (80). Put simply, the subject matter of these novels is ‘a social problem, rather than a dissident individual’ (Guy, 69), and accordingly, the life of the individual in the family, in courtship and in marriage is always related to larger historical, social, political or spiritual themes (Wheeler, 37). Describing the genre’s treatment of society, Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth maintains that the rise of these novels marked a certain experience in the mid-nineteenth century in which ‘most readers and virtually all novelists writing in English [. . .] understood “public” to mean a common world shared by everyone, however problematic the sharing might be’ (124). She argues that in their world, society was ‘all-inclusive’, ‘a single system of mutual interdependence and mutually informative relations’ (125). Referring to George Eliot’s formulation of society as a ‘web’, Ermath contends that since the Victorian novel explored new social options in its experimental laboratory, it represented a society as ‘[. . .] a headless and footless network of relationship where tradition and the individual talent contribute to a gradually shifting social emphasis’ (132). In other words, as Adams argues, responding to the emerging concept of society as a web, the condition-of-England novel was naturally a rich guide to understanding the Victorian culture and society:

8

Maggie Gee The novel seemed a discourse uniquely suited to capture the textures of social interaction, aspiration, conflict, and anxiety, within which social hierarchy could seem both a barrier and a stimulus to new awareness, including [. . .] “new consciousness of interdependence” connecting disparate individuals and groups. (51)

To give a detailed description of this new consciousness of interdependence, Ermath discusses the mid-Victorian concept of society in line with changes in music in the nineteenth century, which I think is very important in outlining the generic features of the condition-of-England novel. Ermath notes that as a response to the rapid changes caused by industrialization and urbanization, music in the nineteenth century saw the older polyphonic traditions, in which each musical line is relatively independent of the others, become obsolete. In the newly emerging symphonic music, by contrast, it was mainly the interplay between different instruments that pleased the listener. This new music, in tune with the new perceptions of the times, reflected the concept of society as a web, which depended on increasing attention to the individual’s constituent role in the whole (119). In the same way, independent of the whole to which they contribute, symphonic ‘parts’ make little sense (117). In brief, both as an ensemble and as a composition, symphonic music constituted a new version of corporate order in music (118). Following Adams’ definition of the condition-of-England novels as ‘self-consciously panoramic treatments with primarily urban settings’ (54), one can argue that developments in the visual arts of the era also testified to this changing perception of society as a web. In the mid-nineteenth century, panoramic paintings like those of John Martin representing landscapes and historical events from a wide-angle view became very popular. As a newly emergent technical practice, panoramic painting was an attempt to provide an all-inclusive and realistic representation of life. Echoing the overarching perspective of symphonic music and panoramic painting, the socialproblem novels of mid-Victorian literature use the image of society as a web to explore new areas of connection. They saw the rift between classes as a source of problems, and rather than focusing on the particular, they represented society as a unity formed from particulars. In that sense, the ‘cotton wool’ metaphor that George Eliot employs to describe the social web in Middlemarch can be taken as a key to understanding this new idea of order: each individual occupies a place in the web, always in relation to other individuals. This focus on the social in fiction corresponds to prospective solutions being mooted by non-fiction writers of the day to the social problems of their time. Taking the significant non-fictional works of the era, by Carlyle, Ruskin and Marx, David notes that ‘the sovereignty of the individual is squarely opposed to the requirements of the social’ and underscores the condition-of-England novel’s moral impetus (80). Social-problem novelists commonly credited with the intention of education, then, inevitably called for a change in their readers’ opinions and prejudices. In so doing, they are seen to imply that the novel can, and should, have an important role to play in social and political life (Guy, 4). This stance gained the condition-of-England novel its ethical quality, which is parallel to its satirical potential. Overall, the condition-of-England novel emerged as a subgenre in a time of crisis, and became a tool employed to respond to turbulence in society; a literary device that

Contextualizing Maggie Gee’s Fiction

9

helped its author describe the questions of his/her time and offer new visions, the condition-of-England novel derived its power from the premise that literature has a social role, that it could offer a serious commentary on its own society and cultivate values that would improve social conditions. Thus, Victorian condition-of-England novels tried to be a repository of social conscience, and cultivate an ability to empathize with unbearable social iniquities and injustices (Diniejko, 2). As such, they not only played an important role in the development of literature, but also in Victorian politics and culture (Simmons, 351), illuminating the path for both nineteenth- and twentiethcentury welfare reforms (Diniejko, 2). Although they can be criticized for not offering any fundamental change in the political or social order (Adams, 63), for representing middle-class fears of the workers in distress and for their conservatism and ‘distrust of collective action’ (Guy, 115), these novels did something invaluable for their time by raising awareness about social problems. At least, they helped each class ‘understand the plight of the other’ (David, 85). As Adams notes, since politics in the condition-of-England novel is often ‘resolved into personal relationships’, it offered ‘forms of individual moral understanding and sympathy’ and appealed, if not to a common goal, ‘to a “common human heart”’ (63). As questions of empire, nation and identity took the place of the central concerns of the industrial culture, this subgenre slowly died away (David, 95). Through the end of the century, it became a ‘victim’ of its own accomplishment because as legislators passed reforms and the working class enjoyed improving conditions, other issues such as socialism and feminism forged ahead (Simmons, 351). But by leaving an important record of the culture’s desire ‘to reconcile its material needs with both its political and its altruistic hopes’, the mid-Victorian condition-of-England novel gave British society a truthful self-portrait (Keen, 198).

Modernists and anti-modernist backlash Many Edwardian novelists employed the realistic and naturalistic conventions of the Victorian novelists and explored the conflicts and contradictions of their world. But before they could explore ways of expanding the prevailing subgenres, the Great War came and obliterated not only the sense of reality but also the means to depict it. Virginia Woolf marked the change in conditions in her 1923 essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, writing: On or about December, 1910, human character changed. I am not saying that one went out, as one might into a garden, and there saw that a rose had flowered, or that a hen had laid an egg. The change was not sudden and definite like that. But a change there was, nevertheless; and, since one must be arbitrary, let us date it about the year 1910. (319–20)

She was indicating the major about-turn, which would be called ‘modernism’. Trying to portray individual experiences in this shattered world as truthfully as possible, modernists experimented with form. In her ‘Modern Fiction’, Woolf criticizes the

10

Maggie Gee

Edwardian novelists’ strict adherence to formal realism which she saw as reducing the novel to excessive attendance to detail, and complains that in the hands of these ‘materialists’, the novel becomes a dull record of material things. Thus, in the belief that in such writing ‘Life escapes’, she took interest instead, like ‘Mr Joyce’, in describing the spiritual (2). In their works, Joyce, Woolf and Conrad conveyed the experience of reality ‘not just as something that can be measured by universal norms, but as something deeply personal and particular’ (Nicol, 19). Shrinking away from public to private, from the social to the introspective, from the political to the individual, modernist fiction explored the inner worlds rather than the world outside (Hewitt, 130). But the condition-of-England novel re-emerged in the 1950s and enabled postwar novelists to comment on the social and cultural life of Britain. Connor argues that the post-war version of the ‘Condition of England novel’ was a return to the social realist ambitions of the nineteenth-century novel but also responded to the sense of the author as a socially marginal figure and dealt with the uncertainties of literature’s audience and function as did the previous generation (45). In his Reading the Novel in English 1950–2000, Brian Shaffer categorizes the responses to literary modernism into two different groups: the first one was characterized by a desire to return the novel to an earlier, more realistic and linear model, and the second, which was beginning in the early 1970s, revealed a strong dose of scepticism about the poetics and politics of literary realism (6). This means that in the ‘neorealis[t]’ spirit of the 1950s and early 1960s, novelists like Kingsley Amis, John Braine, Iris Murdoch, C.P. Snow, John Wain and Angus Wilson rejected the innovative literary practices of modernists and once again tended to give a representation of their own country in their works (4). In other words, ‘With modernism a distant dream, attention turned from the condition of the novel to the condition of England’ (Stonebridge and MacKay, 1). It is important to note here that seeking a more overarching philosophical and ideological frame, this post-war fiction relied on ‘a powerful residual sense of the potential of the novel to imagine, project and preserve forms of national and collective identity’ (Connor, 47). In that sense, like their mid-Victorian precursors, these post-war novelists were trying to provide answers to problems of their time. These novels mostly discussed Englishness and the problems of the English, which was both a revision of the sense of national identity that the two wars fostered and a response to the question of who was ‘British’ caused by immigration, specifically by the Empire Windrush immigration in  1948. They also represented the establishment of the welfare state and increased educational access in Britain.

The campus novel: A variant of the condition-of-England novel Concern with social change and the problems of post-war Britain in the 1950s gave rise to the British campus novel, in which the university serves as an ‘eccentric microcosm of society per se with the routine menu of human characteristics and idiosyncrasies

Contextualizing Maggie Gee’s Fiction

11

exaggerated or comically inverted by the detached, perversely unreal environment’ (Bradford, 35). Connor describes this as a variant of the condition-of-England novel because although the campus seems to be a limited and closed society, it stands, in fact, for the whole of Britain and becomes an arena through which the author satirizes not only academic institutions, the education system, promotion policies and the quest for power, but also the social and moral issues of post-war Britain, namely ‘conflicts and transitions between competing values and structures of belief ’ (69). In the ‘Afterword’ he wrote to his own campus novel Eating People is Wrong (1959), Malcolm Bradbury marks the satiric potential of the genre and informs the reader that he meant the book to be about ‘the tensions and contradictions and comedies of the liberal life, as it was lived by a group of people, in the changing and chaotic world of the middle fifties, and for this a provincial university seemed an apt setting’ (291). His remark about his desire to give ‘a realistic reporting of the social and material world’ rather than stay with an ‘experimental self-questioning’ tone is further evidence that the campus novel turned to realism to depict the postwar condition of Britain (295). In their British Fiction After Modernism: The Novel at Mid-Century, Stonebridge and MacKay emphasize that the campus novel’s interest is more in its social than novelistic issues: ‘By the time England had shrunk to the size of a campus novel, the novel (much like Britain itself) was in dire need of rescue from its own parochialism’ (1). In showing individual characters in a network of relations within society, thus hinting at the social causes of problems, the campus novel was indeed similar to the midVictorian condition-of-England novel. Representing the conflict ‘between academic values and the values of the world “outside”, often the industrial or commercial world’, many campus novels written later, during the 1980s, when university life in Britain was threatened by Thatcher’s liberal policies, were responding to a specific problem, a question like the ‘Condition of England Question’ in the 1850s (Connor, 73). Kenneth Womack’s contentions about the ethical aspect of the campus novel shed light on its potential to ponder social problems; he holds that contemporary academic novels propose a kind of ‘anti-ethos’, a ‘pejorative poetics’, and ‘ultimately seek to enhance the culture and sustain the community through a more ethically driven system of higher education’ (329). In addition to dealing with social problems in a satirical way, the campus novel also meditates on literary ideas, thus on the condition(s) of literature and its capacity to represent life and society. Since representatives of the campus novel like David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury are themselves scholars, academic novels not only represent the literary ideas of the era as products of certain sociocultural conditions, but also play with them in a self-conscious manner. In his collected essays No, Not Bloomsbury, Bradbury highlights the genre’s concern with the questions of audience, function and value and suggests that campus novels ‘explore amongst other things the relation between the writer or general intellectual and the intellectual institution which now served as a new artistic milieu in the age of a fading avant-garde and an incorporated intelligentsia, the campus itself ’ (332). As such, the campus novel also served as a medium for investigating and responding to post-structural and postmodernist discussions of literature.

12

Maggie Gee

Perhaps the best example showing the campus novel both as a condition-ofEngland novel proper and as a fictional representation of current literary ideas is Lodge’s Nice Work (1988). With a plot relying on Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, it is a self-conscious rewriting of an 1855 condition-of-England novel; nicely employing the generic features of the condition-of-England novel, it not only comments on the effects of industry and liberal policies on the campus, but also highlights the constructed nature of the text. Patricia Waugh holds that as a novelist and former literary academic, Lodge represents his concerns about the condition of the novel and literary theory through his main character Robyn Penrose, a postmodernist literary scholar proposing a post-structuralist conceptualization of the self, and hints at his wish to ‘distance the novel both from the academic culture of the scientist and that of the contemporary literary critic and defend its place in an ongoing liberal or radical humanist tradition’ (75). In this academic novel, through his literary allusions to mid-Victorian condition-of-England novels, Lodge also suggests that postmodernist techniques such as self-consciousness, intertextuality and parody can be used to write a social-problem novel. Describing Nice Work as a novel exploring the space between realism and postmodernism, Michael Greaney sums up the difference between condition-of-England novels and postmodernist novels and says: [. . .] these novels function as hard-hitting documentary records of contemporary social problems. Dickens, Gaskell, Disraeli and Forster belong to a novelistic tradition that takes its social responsibilities altogether more seriously than seems the case with postmodernism, where metafictional games-playing rather than documentary realism is the order of the day. (33)

This exploration of the two different novelistic traditions in one work makes the implication that: ‘though conditions may have changed, the structure of perception that belongs to the nineteenth-century novel may still be reliable and appropriate’ (Connor, 8). In their article ‘The Shadows of History: The “Condition of England” in Nice Work’, Marshall and Winston underline the changing features of the genre in its contemporary version and argue that written after Lodge resigned from active teaching, it ‘seems to be reaching well beyond the academy to write compellingly and knowledgeably about “real life” for a broadly educated general readership’ (2). As a subgenre aiming to represent society and its problems, the condition-of-England novel captures the pulse of its time. Just as 1950s fiction depicted the establishment of the welfare system and the economic and cultural upswing that followed, novels written during the regression years represented the grim and grey England under Thatcher’s laissez-faire policies. Once again, the country was facing a crisis, and once again the novel was responding to it by representing the clash between the ideals of the welfare state and liberalism. Not just the NHS, housing policies or education, but the whole idea of ‘society’ seemed to be declining at this time, with the prime minister proclaiming: ‘There is no such thing as society’. If there was any society, it was at best something like the divided mid-Victorian society described as ‘Two Nations’; now the division was not only between the rich and the poor, for cuts in education soon

Contextualizing Maggie Gee’s Fiction

13

created a rift between the educated and the ignorant. There was, of course, also the colour divide to be taken into account when assessing various claims to Britishness/ Englishness. Thus, the novel depicted ‘an obsessive debate about declining national prestige and prosperity, involving mourning and reparative narratives of all kinds’ (Connor, 60). Accordingly, the campus novel in the late 1970s and 1980s comments on ‘the absurd budgetary constraints that have been imposed on the academy from outside’ (Robbins, 26). As a variant of the condition-of-England novel, the campus novels of the 1980s both have an impulse to portray social problems and embody some features of experimental writing and postmodernist techniques. Interpreting Martin Amis’ Money: A Suicide Note (1984) and London Fields (1989), Daniel Lea suggests that while these novels rely on the potential of the condition-of-England novel genre to make a bitter critique of the materialistic attitudes promoted by Thatcherite capitalism, they also adapt the subgenre to the postmodern taste: Despite their metafictional flourishes these novels belong to the tradition of the “condition-of-England” novel, the tradition beginning with such novels as Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil (1845) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1855). Amis’ novels lie firmly within the conventions of nineteenth-century realism: they present a mimetic rendition of the objective realm for the purposes of social commentary. (70)

It can be argued that the condition-of-England novel has been evolving to encompass not only new subjects and subject matter, but also new discursive formations. Pamela Thurschwell’s comment about Jonathan Coe’s two condition-of-England novels, What a Carve Up! (1994) and The Rotters’ Club (2001), which explore the political and moral problems of the post-welfare state, supports such a tendency: ‘Coe’s narrative universe is one where parody, Gothic and gritty realism coexists’ (29). Lyn Pykett’s interpretation of Pat Barker’s Liza’s England (1986) also shows that as a contemporary novelist, Barker employs realism ‘to confront and explore the individual’s experience of family, the local community and the wider society’ (73). As the earlier title of the novel, The Century’s Daughter, implies, Barker’s novel gives a panoramic view of twentieth-century England, which makes it, ‘among other things, a “condition of England” novel’; referring also to her Blow Your House Down and Union Street, Sarah C. E. Ross maintains that Barker does not portray women as ‘the only victims of social evils’ and ‘explores gender, class, society and history in complex, multiple interactions’ (132). Maggie Gee, similar to Barker’s attitude as Pykett sees it, thinks that the act of writing goes beyond physical gender, and in her response to being referred to as a ‘woman novelist’, she finds ‘woman writer’ as a category ‘reductive’, and says: I hope we are slowly daring to emerge from the room of one’s own that half a century ago was our boldest dream, and filling bigger, more populated spaces with our visions and voices. I hope some of those visions will show women and men able to realize all their different selves, crossing borders, shape lifting, blissfully transgressing, plural and playful. And I speculate that that kind of playfulness, that

14

Maggie Gee kind of manifold expression, is also a dissolving of the rigid, repetitive categories of hatred and violence. (1998, 178)

It can be argued that Gee’s desire to fill ‘more populated places’ makes the conditionof-England novel a more useful device in her hands, with its inherent quality as an open-ended form made ready to adapt to new aesthetic and ethical demands. Gee’s condition-of-England novels have an overarching perspective that cuts across gender, race and class.

Maggie Gee writing her condition-of-England novel Maggie Gee approves of a characterization of her work, first suggested by Elaine Showalter, as a ‘skeptical realist’, like Pat Barker and Hilary Mantel who use the realist form and yet ‘question its mimetic accuracy’ (2009, 1). What aligns Gee to the ‘skeptical’ vein are the technical innovations she introduces to the realistic panorama of the condition-of-England novel. She also deftly merges the characteristics of different novelistic traditions. For instance, in her contemporary version of the subgenre, ‘a strong authorial presence in the narrative’ (Wheeler, 39), a prominent device used by mid-Victorian novelists, turns the texts into self-conscious narratives in which the author characters, like their kindred spirits in the campus novel, discuss literary ideas and become tools to convey Maggie Gee’s ars poetica. In other words, Gee’s conditionof-England novels also learn from the campus novel and have a double function: while shedding light on the conditions of scholars and writers, her fiction sometimes comments on the campus as a microcosm of Britain. But, more importantly, these writer characters often function as mouthpieces for Maggie Gee and make revealing comments about the text itself. Gee’s scepticism does not lead to a disbelief in the possibility of representation and the referentiality of literary meaning. John Cotton holds that, usually set in contemporary urban landscapes, Maggie Gee’s novels present the effects of her ‘compassionate but unblinking eye at a world in which there are no happy endings’ (353). Because they describe, among other things, social, political, cultural and environmental problems, as Gee also states, many of her novels are characterized as ‘elegiac’; responding to this as a novelist with ‘one eye on reality’ she says: I don’t think this is at all surprising; it would be surprising really, if any of our activities weren’t affected at some level by the second World War, to which we are still so close in time, and which caused one of the great losses of life in 150,000 years of human history. (1996, 11)

Although nostalgia and loss are integral to Gee’s rendering of contemporary society in distress, the comic vision is also a very powerful component of Gee’s fictional universe, which always offers a refreshing suggestion of the joy of life and a strong sense of connectedness. Despite an awareness of the problems that humankind faces, her novels breed hope and optimism, often reinforced by metaphors of light.

Contextualizing Maggie Gee’s Fiction

15

I think that a tendency to categorize her work too simply as ‘elegiac’ can be understood both as an implicit comparison with the impersonal and playful nature of so much postmodernist writing and as a symptom of the ‘English taboo on expressing emotion’ that Gee discusses in her ‘How May I Speak in My Own Voice’; however, in Gee’s novels the narrative voice is ‘shaped to express the emotion [her] culture represses’ (1996, 12). Gee speaks in a similar fashion when she comments on women and writing and says: I personally believe that serious fiction should speak at some level to the heart. If novels are purely cerebral constructs and have nothing to say about the things readers care about, people will surely defect en masse to biography or film. (1998, 175)

This address to the human heart is one of the underlying features of her writing, which forms the backbone of the ethical stance. Gee’s fiction suggests that it is only through listening to other people’s stories and developing empathy for them, in short through an interest in others, that we can go beyond the limits of our selves. Displaying the link between individual lives and larger structures, many of her novels represent a strong sense of interconnectedness, not only among human beings but also between human and animal/nature. Thus, I argue that Gee’s fiction can be seen as a project that goes beyond the limits of time, space, class, race and gender, and offers a holistic representation of contemporary British society in the context of a planet where human beings are one species among many. In this sense, it is a call to social and environmental responsibility replacing indifference with a planetary ethics, which resonates in her definition of the soul in My Animal Life: For me [the soul] is also the net of connections that haloes every consciousness, linked to the future as well as the past, streaming both towards and outwards from our bodies. It’s our sensitivity to what’s outside us: pain and joy, beauty and horror, a capacity that differs for every living thing. It’s also our power to generate surprise: to move at a tangent, to be ourselves, to sing, bark, swing, laugh, play, sulk, fall, to improvise our role in the great living tapestry that makes our planet extraordinary, its whole restless surface a sea of souls [.  .  .] And every animal on the planet emanates livingness, which is change. In that uniqueness, the soul pulses. (227)

These features make Gee a unique voice in contemporary British fiction, a literary figure in search of a vision not divided by differences but unified by her inclusive vision. She manages to underline the need for oneness by carefully avoiding the tempting traps of multiculturalist and populist policies. Speaking in a voice, simple, clear and revisionary, she describes her work as a state of ‘being-in-the-world expressed as performance’, and asking herself ‘What are writers doing in this [literary] jungle?’, she gives an answer that summarizes her fictional experience: ‘The rhythm of my body imprinting on the page, what my eyes have been, what my heart has lived. And the movement of my hand lets me share it with others. I am here, now. I am writing the truth of it (2010, 195).

16

Maggie Gee

Part two Major works This book offers close readings of Gee’s texts in the context of broader debates about the representation of Britain and Englishness, as well as discussions about race, class and gender. It studies the texts’ thematic concerns like environmental problems, housing policies, family relations, ageing and authorship, among many others. Since subject matter and style in Gee’s writing are so inextricably linked, with craft and pattern integral to meaning, despite many common traits in these novels, I analyse each book separately in order not to destroy the texts’ organic unity. The only exceptions are My Cleaner and My Driver, which have the same two central characters and very similar themes explored in different settings, Britain and Uganda, respectively. But in line with the intertextual nature of Gee’s fiction, I suggest thematic frameworks for this chronological study of the 11 novels both by making loose clusters of works and by using chapter titles alluding to the mid-Victorian condition-of-England fiction and the social problems they tackle. The chapters that follow have strong intertextual references that establish a network of relations between the novels; in doing so, they make clear the underlying traits in the continuum of Gee’s writing as well as evaluating each novel’s unique contribution to Gee’s house of fiction. Reading Gee’s novels as contemporary condition-of-England novels, this book also investigates the way they enlarge the scope and technical features of the subgenre in its contemporary version. Tracing the theme of authorship in Gee’s writing, the first and last chapters in Part II discuss Dying in Other Words and My Cleaner and My Driver as novels depicting the conditions that surround their author. In that sense, they offer an overarching framework for Gee’s writing that spans almost three decades. The opening chapter ‘Author Flinging Herself From the Ivory Tower: Dying, In Other Words’ is a critical reading of that novel as a response to the discussion about the death of the author, and argues that by featuring as its protagonist, Moira, ‘your author’ (3), an evidently dead woman rewriting the story of her own death, Gee makes her debut with a firm belief in the role of the author, and author characters, as one way of conveying her critique about social, cultural and literary issues. Starting from this first novel, Gee reflects her keen interest in the self-conscious novel, already evidenced in her doctoral dissertation on the self-conscious author in Woolf, Beckett and Nabokov, and like them, experiments with narrative techniques. In line with this understanding, this chapter sees this first novel as Gee’s earliest literary manifestation of the idea that she later puts in a speech ‘How May I Speak in My Own Words’. Seeing fiction as the thread that leads to the lost authentic self, our ‘unacted parts’ in the idiom of Woolf, Gee says that: ‘Imaginary space, the space of invention and creation, is the place where we can create ourselves, play with the patterns into which our lives have fallen, explore the paths which have been forbidden to us’ (7). Put simply, this chapter holds that in Dying, in Other Words, Gee tries to merge her desire to try new techniques and methods in narration with a concern about social problems in contemporary Britain. The next chapter, ‘Of the Nuclear Family and the Hibakusha: The Burning Book’, discusses Gee’s second novel as a self-conscious text that both tells the story of a British family and

Contextualizing Maggie Gee’s Fiction

17

presents the harrowing effects of war by using Nagasaki and Hiroshima as backgrounds to the failure in this family. As a condition-of-England novel, The Burning Book gives a portrayal of a country in distress through the image of a family suffering from poverty, violence and a lack of communication and love; with a wide range of characters representing different historical periods, the novel successfully portrays a panorama of contemporary British society with its ‘burning’ problems. Steven Connor’s discussion of the novel as a successful narrative that both breaks and preserves the taboo on representing apocalypse also reveals an underlying novelistic trait in it that merges two different traditions: The Burning Book borrows both from the ramifying, accretive, organic time of the nineteenth-century novel and from the distilled, epiphanic, momentary time of modernist fiction, but sets against them a wholly alternative chronology, in which events are measured according to their distance from their inevitable destruction in what the novel repeatedly calls “the final violence”. (241)

Light Years shares many of the traits of The Burning Book. Chapter 3, ‘Telescopic View of England, England: Light Years’, explores the fictional space of this novel and argues that it is a condition-of-England novel that employs postmodernist narrative devices such as pastiche and intertextuality. Placing individuals against a vast landscape, the novel enables the reader to see the connection between the historical and the universal planes of reality. This chapter discusses how, as it portrays decay in Thatcherite Britain, this subverted romance becomes a satire on cuts in the coal mines and the lack of education in the young as well as a commentary on the sense of Englishness. A close reading of the novel, which consists of 12 sections and 52 chapters to represent a year, suggests that placed within a framework of ‘infinite space’, the condition and social problems of contemporary British society can be looked at from a universal standpoint. This, I believe, creates the all-inclusive attitude that pervades Gee’s later works and enables her to give a fuller representation of contemporary British society. Accordingly, the next chapter ‘Hard Times: Grace and Where Are the Snows’ examines the two novels, written around the same time, as social-problem novels that portray hard times in British society. The first part, ‘ “Meddling with the very buildingblocks of the universe”: Grace’, argues that drawing on the real-life murder of an antinuclear activist, Hilda Murrell, Grace is a commentary on the political and cultural conditions of Britain. In her characterization of Grace as a communist for decades, a feminist and a pacifist, Gee proposes a serious critique of war and the use of nuclear power. Featuring an author character, Paula, Grace’s 37-year-old niece, who is writing a novel about Hilda Murrell, Gee introduces metafiction as a device that helps the reader acquire a critical perspective and thus contributes to the condition-of-England novel. Through Paula, who represents the politics and poetics of Gee’s fiction in the same way as other writer characters in Gee’s novels of the 1980s, this chapter discusses Grace as a contemporary condition-of-England novel that maintains the fine balance between being a self-reflective tool and a text calling the reader to action in the social context. The second part of this chapter ‘ “What a waste of planet, what a waste of life!”: Where Are the Snows’ examines Where Are the Snows as a family saga that gives a critique of consumerism and the role of money in contemporary life. Focusing her attention on the central couple, Christopher and Alex, Gee deftly juxtaposes individual lives with

18

Maggie Gee

the social plane of reality, and shows how the two are related. In that sense, this section reads Where Are the Snows as a fictional version of the statement Gee makes in her lecture ‘How May I Speak in My Own Voice’ in 1996: The novel only flourishes in developed societies with a strong but problematic sense of the individual, where there is potential conflict between the inner and outer life, and where the structures of social repression are inflexible enough to force huge amounts of energy, that complex interaction between the culture saying No and the individual voice saying Yes, which burst out, from time to time, in novels. (15–16)

I suggest that with Where Are the Snows, Gee’s author characters not only dispute novelistic issues but also portray the cultural industry and its impact on authorship; this chapter shows how, through her author character Alex, Gee portrays writers as public figures in constant relation with the market and its demands, and includes a criticism of the publishing industry as part of her panorama of contemporary Britain. Although Gee’s novels elaborate on cultural issues like authorship, publishing and academy, they always retain their tie with smaller units. ‘ “Are Such Things Done on Albion’s Shore?”: Lost Children’, Chapter 5, explores the way Lost Children goes beyond being a story about individual families in despair, to show the contemporary western lifestyle as the breeder of conflict in family and thence society. Thus, this chapter studies Lost Children not only as a fictional documentation of poor housing policies and cuts in education budgets in contemporary Britain, but also as a typical Gee novel fostering a sense of hope through the motif of the child as a life-affirming force. Set in a London full of homeless people, the novel draws on the theme of loss by describing it in financial and physical as well as emotional terms. As Michèle Roberts also suggests in her 1994 review of the novel, with Lost Children, Gee seems ‘to have inherited many of the qualities of her great Victorian forebears, such as Mrs Gaskell. Relishing traditional third-person/ omniscient narrative, with its surface securities, she lets herself dive under that surface and bring up frightening home truths’ (1). The focus of Chapter 5 is the space ‘under that surface’: namely, the theme of loss in relation to ageing, motherhood and housing, as part of the panoramic fictional space that represents the decline in post-welfare Britain. Chapter 6, ‘Environmental Crisis, from Fact to Fiction: The Ice People and The Flood’, discusses Gee’s use of speculative fiction in the context of a panorama of contemporary Britain. Thus, it investigates the way dystopian energy facilitates Gee’s social criticism in both these novels generated by environmental disaster. The two sections in Chapter 6, ‘ “Of the best of days, and the end of days”: The Ice People’ and ‘From Noah’s Ark to Blair’s Helicopters: Dystopian Future in Maggie Gee’s The Flood’, argue that the context of disaster helps Gee explore the current state of British society. My discussion of The Ice People as a contemporary condition-of-England novel suggests that by fictionalizing global warming, the novel implies that unless we review our habits of production and consumption and the distribution of wealth and power (thus all our ethical and political values), we are likely to witness a crisis similar to the one portrayed here. In the second section of this chapter, I argue that in The Flood, Gee also weaves her text as a dystopia satirizing present-day social conditions and questioning the point of our attachment to objects, thus condemning consumerism. Elaborating on a range of social problems from unemployment to racism, this section demonstrates that the

Contextualizing Maggie Gee’s Fiction

19

sharpest irony in the novel comes at the end when the healthy and rich are to be saved by helicopters while the poor are left to the ‘law of nature’, namely to the survival of the fittest. As is also evident in the summary that Alfred Hickling gives in his admiring Guardian review, I suggest that the novel almost reproduces the Victorian ‘Two Nations’ theme, as it leaves ‘the wealthy on the higher ground and the lower classes struggling in a partially submerged area called The Towers’ (1). This section also reads The Flood in the context of the ancient myth of the flood to imply that Gee’s satiric tone allows a transformative and politicized reading of modern society organized by differences in race, class and gender. By making references to other Gee novels, both of the sections in this chapter on environmental crisis analyse the two novels’ potential to raise consciousness both to criticize and transform social and cultural conditions in contemporary Britain. The chapter on The White Family, ‘Of the Two Nations: The White Family’, draws on the theme of ‘Two Nations’, this time representing a society divided by racism. Like Grace, the writing of The White Family was stimulated by a real-life event: the racial murder of Stephen Lawrence, in April 1993 in London. As Gee explains, behind the determination to write and publish The White Family lay a strong desire to give a portrayal of the society she lived in; in her autobiography, Gee puts the question she had in mind: ‘How could I get my portrait of Britain out to the British?’ (2010, 195). So, this chapter reads The White Family as a contemporary condition-of-England novel presenting working-class and middle-class racism in England. I argue that describing the unsettlement that the subjects from different racial backgrounds experience, it breaks the educated silence about racism. Studying other social problems caused by recession and liberal policies, like gentrification, poverty, cuts in funding libraries and education, this chapter not only evaluates The White Family in Gee’s oeuvre, but also suggests that it makes a significant contribution to the literary representation of multicultural Britain. Bringing the authorship discussion closer to the one explored in my final chapter, my interpretation of The White Family also traces the way Maggie Gee employs author characters to articulate her ars poetica. Since this novel raises issues of representation through its author character, Thomas, a blocked writer who is confused by the assumptions of postmodernism about the loss of meaning, I maintain that like Gee’s earlier writer characters, Thomas seems to replace the intervening author in the realist tradition and reinforces the referential nature of the text, thus suggesting an ethically aware realism for our postmodern times. My last chapter ‘Authorship in a Globalized World: My Cleaner and My Driver’ investigates the two novels as texts merging Gee’s interest in writing about crosscultural and racial encounters with her ongoing discussion of authorship. Thus, it examines the way Gee represents the confrontation between two female author figures to discuss two different notions of authorship, and two different literary contexts. As such, this final chapter of Part II argues that representing the conditions of Britain from the perspective of two authors, this time Gee tells us more about the nature of writing and delineates the conditions on and under which she writes her novels. Similar to the tone of Gee’s earlier characters, Vanessa Henman and Mary Tendo describe the decay in post-imperial London, but my analysis mainly focuses on Gee’s representation of authorship and related issues such as the commercialization of culture, literary prizes, publishing and writer conferences, and shows how this representation contributes to her overall critique of the contemporary literary establishment.

20

Maggie Gee

Part three Author interview This volume ends with a conversation with Maggie Gee. Shortly after the publication of her autobiography My Animal Life, she came to İstanbul to give a keynote speech at the 1st International Akşit Göktürk Conference, ‘Visions of the Future: Now and Then’ at Istanbul University. In this interview, Maggie Gee not only interprets her work as a novelist but also speaks as a Booker jury member, a Londoner, a literary critic with a PhD, a lover of nature, a reader and a writer of a novel in progress, ‘Virginia Woolf in Manhattan’.

Part Two

Major Works

22

1

Author Flinging Herself from the Ivory Tower: Dying, In Other Words (1981)

In Gee’s early novels, one can easily see the motifs and themes that she explores in  almost all of her later novels; both in terms of form and ideas, there are already many characteristics in Gee’s early novels that can be considered as typical elements of her fiction. This first novel’s focus is the death of an author, which enables Gee to explore the death from two different aspects: we can read the novel both as an account of the death of a writer, Moira, and as an allegory on ‘The Death of the Author’, a literary form of the theoretical discussion about the concept of authorship, author and the text. Set against the backdrop of this discussion, the novel develops multiple intertwined themes that help Gee describe the context in which the author functions. Through a discussion of themes such as ageing, death, poverty, loneliness, alienation, dysfunctional families and marriages, challenges to heterosexual norms and repressed sexuality, Gee both discusses the author in a social context and gives a panoramic view of society that adds a condition-of-England element to the subverted detective novel. This thematic and technical richness becomes one of the most outstanding features of Gee’s writing. As a first novel, it can also be read as the manifesto of a young writer through which Gee situates herself in the contemporary literary landscape. By placing an author, Moira, and a journalist, Les Hawtrey, at the centre of her text, Gee can easily switch to an allegorical tone and elaborate on the nature of the text. The young writer Moira dies and the journalist is there to shed light on this death. Through the journalist’s efforts to get a reliable account of the death, the novel discusses how a text relies on those threads, stories collected from various witnesses with their own different perspectives. This also fits in with the detective genre. Les’ interviews with the tenants in the block where Moira has lived contribute to the argument that it is impossible to get an objective truth about someone. The third-person narrator is there to remind us that every new account of Moira’s death and every single description of this young woman is just another subjective record. In a sense, witness statements of people who know Moira are like the various interpretations that readers naturally bring to the text. However, Gee does not annihilate the author from the text, nor does she weaken her. By contrast, she tries to show that our author who is writing about the death of an author is in full command of her text. And by bringing the text full circle, she suggests a reading that equates these two authors as the same person telling us a story.

24

Maggie Gee

Gee’s use of metafiction and the presentation of her text as a Chinese box shows that we are reading an experimental novel foregrounding an author with certain claims about her writing. The first part, titled ‘Author’s note’, which tells us ‘How Not to Read This Novel . . .’ (i), is evidence of the presence of a skilful author in control of her text. This brief authorial note is followed by a ‘Prologue’ that sets the tone and describes the main tenets of the novel, ‘DYING, IN OTHER WORDS’. Trying to establish a bond, the author addresses the reader and provides guidance on how to read her work: ‘(Those who are angered by stage directions, needn’t read this note till the end of the book, when it will, like everything else, come round again.)’ (i). As an author in control of her text, she presents herself as fully aware of the reader’s potential expectations and ways of reading, and warns against misinterpretations: ‘. . . in other words, this is not a realistic novel.’, ‘This is not on the face of things a serious novel.’, ‘This is not quite a novel’ (i). Like a stage director in command of the play in performance, the author states that ‘It is time for the book to begin’ (i). The novel unfolds in instalments; it consists of 70 chapters that bear descriptive titles that sound like newspaper headlines, as in ‘1 Splayed on the cold stone, dead’ (5), ‘4 All Sorts of other peculiar things’ (14) or in ‘62 Shimmering nets’ (137). Some of these chapter titles allude to an earlier piece or explore an opinion voiced before, as in ‘28 “You couldn’t say this was a leg and that was an arm” i’ (72) or in ‘26 “Got things on ‘is mind” ’ (66). The overall impact of such narrative devices is to weave a composite text, raising awareness about the complex nature of writing. Having to deal with pieces presented as a jigsaw puzzle, gaining a new dimension with every new piece, the reader can see that all the individual pieces, which seem to be composed separately, are connected, and that the text is possible only if the pieces are placed in the right order by its author. After these 70 pieces, which the author calls the ‘novel’, comes the part called ‘THE PAPERS’. This 52-page epitextual part elaborates on three axiomic statements: ‘Earning a living, dying, in other words, ii Living inside: love is the seed, iii Living outside: men in formation The end of armies. The end’ (163). ‘THE PAPERS’ can be read as an epilogue that serves both as a sophisticated overview and a close-up of the main characters. Gee’s novel ends with a brief ‘Dedication’ (215) by the author, who makes references to real people in real places. Rereading the ‘Author’s note’ helps us interpret the last part: The novel is written away in only 161 of the book’s 215 pages. On a stage thus cleared of conventional fictional props and moribund characters, the ritual death of the whole sad world, including a few familiar faces, takes up a mere 52 pages: for fables and cautionary tales and jokes are so much quicker than fiction, and the end result is the same (dying, in other words, gone.) And then, yet again, at the other end of destruction, the will to stories goes on. (i)

The author’s note, prologue and long epilogue tell us that Gee is experimenting here with theories about writing, and wants us not to read the novel just as a detective story based on an investigation of a particular death. We are expected to be interested more in how the story is told than how Moira died; the focus is on the act of telling rather than dying, so it is about ‘dying’ but ‘in other words’. This way of reading the novel demands from its reader: attention to detail, openness to authorial interventions,

Author Flinging Herself From the Ivory Tower

25

willingness to enjoy the playfulness of the text and that the reader follows the clues that ultimately reveal the constructedness of a story. Thus, rather than just offering answers to the simple question ‘whodunnit’, Gee’s subverted detective novel promises a kind of intellectual game about the nature of a text and its author. It is different from the conventional detective novels also in its diction; for a high-speed detective novel, it is too overweighted with sophisticated, riddle-like sentences, descriptive passages and intricate metaphors. This subversive technique directs the reader’s attention to ideas and people rather than to the death of its central character. Gee’s ‘detective novel’ is not a plot-led text, but has many things to say about the characters and their lives. As is usual with first novels, there are many things that its author wants to describe in detail, and she also wants to help her characters express themselves through narrative shifts, focalizations and extra information given in parentheses. Several passages in the novel put the characters under a magnifying glass to achieve full empathy: for instance, when the piece ‘15 A mystery visitor from London’ sets out to present John X as someone potentially related to Moira’s death, it starts telling about a scar he got at the age of eight and his emotions then: ‘the awful sounds of (John’s) father, just home, half-crying (for men didn’t cry)’ (42). In another piece in which the milkman is expected to shed light on the death, we have details about his eyes, ‘resentful and raw as strips of anchovy’ (18). The piece soon becomes a vehicle to describe the inner world of a side character: ‘Thirty years, and never once in his life a willing woman or a really good pay packet was too long’ (18). So we understand why he draws ‘sweaty and sperm-soaked conclusions’ (19) when he sees John X leaving the house in the early morning, ‘still heavy-eyed with sleep, his short blonde hair sticking out in all directions’ (19). Gee’s eye is quick to note details in describing her characters in action: Les’ ‘absurdly public-school voice emerging, in timid contralto bursts from the deep pink folds of his chins, protected by the raincoat’ (32). Apart from describing her characters, Gee also uses details to give a sense of precision in the text. One understands that a precise third-person narrator is present; Jean-Claude mourns the death of Moira, thinking ‘his best friends had deserted him, cruelly, said not a word’. He does not eat anything for days, neither can he sleep, but then he finds the energy ‘To be new, to wash it away, to be clean’ (77). The narrator here cites the number of empty whisky bottles, ‘(eight!)’, and the cologne he uses after bathing, ‘Yves St. Laurent: Pour Homme’ (77). These notes exemplify how like a detective the narrator is in recording minute details, and how much she wants the reader to study her characters carefully and understand them. This also manifests the intention of the author of this text to be in control and command of it. If precise detail and a narrator trying to supply it are certain traits of detective fiction employed in Dying, In Other Words, suspense is another that Gee successfully adds, though she also maintains a philosophical tone that hints at the subjectivity and constructedness of the story. We try to understand if Moira’s killer can be Bill the milkman, the serial sex murderer, or if the two boyfriends are to be suspected. Gee gradually builds the text by first featuring Les Hawtrey, the journalist collecting data from people, then by introducing other characters one by one as witnesses who tell us more about themselves than about Moira. In a sense, by connecting the various characters and their accounts via the journalist, the narrator both offers clues as to

26

Maggie Gee

whether Moira committed suicide or was murdered and builds a web of people, a network that functions as a metaphor for the novel itself. The novel is also about writing and authorship. Gee’s name for the central author character, ‘Moira’, is very suggestive in terms of this layer of the novel. The Greek word moira literally means a part or portion, and, by extension, one’s portion in life or destiny. Moira is the name of a single goddess of fate in Greek mythology. (‘Moira’) Together, the three goddesses were known as the Moirae. The Fates are Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos. They controlled the metaphorical thread of life of every mortal being from birth to death. (‘Moirae’) So, a metaphorical reading of Dying, In Other Words reveals Moira as the author controlling the life and fate of both the characters and the text. As such, the novel stands as a response to discussions about the death of the author. In 1968, in his essay ‘The Death of the Author’, Roland Barthes argued that an author does not exist prior to language and cannot claim any authority over the text s/he is creating. He suggested that the author cannot control the meaning of a work and is replaced by a scriptor whose power is reduced to rearranging the already written texts in new ways. Calling ‘The Death of the Author’ ‘a piece symptomatic of the antiauthoritarianism’, McDonald states that in Barthes’ idiom ‘[. . .] the meaning of a text is not found in the author’s intention. The text floats free from the hands of its creator, its continually proliferating meanings realized in the act of reading, not that of production.’ (117) In a playful manner, Maggie Gee starts her novel with the death of an author, as Barthes puts it, and seems to show that the absence of the author Moira, that is, her death, does indeed open up interpretative horizons for the active reader. This is made evident through the detective element of the novel, which has Bill the journalist asking questions and receiving several interpretations of Moira’s life and death. However, a refutation of Barthes’ argument that ‘The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.’ (148) follows when Gee inserts in the text an ongoing sound of typing. Moira is said to be dead, yet there is someone constantly writing and producing a text, typing in the attic; we may hazard a guess that this latter is a reincarnation of Moira, refusing to die. The narrator also puts in place another author figure, the old woman, Clothilde. Interestingly, this Clothilde is like the modern version of the second Moirai, Clothos, who is depicted with a spindle. In a sense, Gee playfully argues that the act of writing will live on, and so will the author. At its worst, we have the second fate, Clothilde, which implies that the death of the author is the birth of another author. Clothilde is an old woman whose paranoia makes her think that both Moira and Frank (who is writing a book about jokes) are envious of her, and thus always stopping her from writing. She thinks that they ‘had been plotting against her to bring her down to their level, to make her a figure of fun’ (112). With a developed sense of her own dignity, she feels that she is ‘always the artist’, as she writes in her notebook, and is sure that literature is ‘more martial than music’ (113). Only she is the artist; she is not like Frank who can only write about jokes. Praising literature, she corresponds to the idealized image of the author, the artist who is given ‘poetic attributes such as inspiration, imagination, freedom, and genius’ (Shiner, 111), whereas, requiring mechanical things like skill, rules, imitation and service, Frank is an artisan. Clothilde feels that she does not receive the respect she deserves, she lives in poverty and isolation. Two copulating

Author Flinging Herself From the Ivory Tower

27

mayflies ‘insolently placed’ on her pillow and a saucepan of uneaten food cooked several months ago are suggestive of the artistic rejection and suffering associated with the ‘curse of genius’ (Shiner, 203). But she has her dignified soul, and patience: ‘Clothilde would survive. In the end, she would win, she the artist. The artist would always go on when the animal hadn’t the stamina, brutally, painfully, lacking her patience and dignity, died’ (114). She compares herself to the debased figure of the author today and as the artist, she feels superior to those writers, and decides: ‘she was the writer now that Moira was dead’ (114). Maggie Gee enters a parenthesis just after this, making Clothilde, curiously, hear the typewriter ‘boastfully typing, long after she was in bed’ (114). She leaves us with the question: who is that writer? If the author is dead, and if the artist is not fit enough to write, who types on? This reads like an allegorical form of the question about the death of the author, and the work. Later, when ‘THE PAPERS’, a sort of epilogue, places Moira and Clothilde as two different voices, inside and outside, Moira, who lived ‘in symbol’s and who dies in ‘symbolic decorum’, starts speaking in a prophetic voice. She says she was making an art of her life, and ‘all art needs command over life, all life needs not art but an order. The order is (Live) or (Love)’, thus finally revealing a message that does away with the line between art and life: (a message came/ together/ or learn to love/ another/ outside/ it asked/ it cried/ the end/ is love/ outside? (187)

And the ‘Dedication’, which can be read as both Maggie Gee’s and Moira’s, has a tone   that internalizes the message ‘love’: the author gives her art, made out of her life, ‘to the people who helped (her) survive, with gratitude and love’, even to friends she doesn’t know in ‘distant cities, standing in bus stations, shadows, long queues, or glimpsed behind glass as the curtains open and close’ (215). This love, gratitude and awareness of the interconnectedness of all people goes beyond the bounds of her text, and may remind us of Mrs Dalloway, the party scene in which Clarissa wants to reach out to an unknown old woman glimpsed behind glass. Thus, Maggie Gee shows the web-like nature of everyday life, the web of interpersonal relations, or as Woolf puts it in her essay, the ‘cotton wool of everyday life’. Gee experiences a social web of threads like a spider’s web, something even more visible in her later novels. Spinning wool and the image of writing helping the artist make art out of this cotton wool, permeates Gee’s text to emphasize the textual, weblike quality of writing in Gee’s novel. This also sounds like a reference to Roland Barthes’ ‘From Work to Text’. Using the same semiotic techniques on great works of literature that they used on marriage customs, clothing styles or news stories, the structuralists treated literary works as ‘texts’, as tissues of social and linguistic codes (Shiner, 285). Dying, In Other Words probes questions about the nature of writing to see whether authorial genius is less important than the general circulation of signs, whether language still reaches its object rather than constantly making references to itself, and whether meaning is deferred. Gee asks if the author is dead, and if the reader will read on.

28

Maggie Gee

Doing this, she uses many self-referential elements like the repetition of the phrase ‘The author knows’, and sets the ignorant readers and characters against the author, knowing what will happen next. There are sudden narrative shifts, or parenthetical insertions of a different perspective, characteristics of a polyphonic novel. And through a representation of a journalist at work, collecting data, writing and rewriting, editing and reviewing, Gee exposes the process of writing and constructing a story. The motif of the news report as a piece of writing, its stories based on the accounts of many different people, helps Gee develop the discussion of both subjectivity and writing. To make an eye-catching news story and be a successful journalist, Les Hawtrey omits some details, skips certain explanations and highlights the elements to do with sex, thus, in his case, writing is neither fact nor fiction; he offers people a distorted version of the truth. The news story cites unimportant details: Moira is presented as ‘the attractive redhead’, who lives in ‘one of Oxford’s most elegant terraces’ (12). The narrator makes a comment about the distortion of facts: her hair was remembered by most to be brown, anyway red was ‘a colour found often in stories but rarely in life’ (9). The news looks only at the outside of things, a reference to the message in the epilogue about the tension between the voices outside and inside. Then, the narrator informs us that the news report based on the account of the milkman is less vivid than what the milkman actually said. And what Les the journalist calls ‘treatment for shock’ is to Bill the milkman ‘some chat and a cup of sweet tea and some pills they were sure would help him’ (67). He firmly rejects the news report, because he never took the pills, but ‘tipped them down the drain’ (67). Mary Evans also sees the news text as lacking; ‘the journalists wrote what they felt like writing, you understood less of it all every day’ (133). Also following the leitmotif of the subjectivity of the text, whether it be a novel or a piece of news, Les’s confession about the way he makes the news places the emphasis on the maker, the writer who is in control of the text. In the chapter that describes Les at work, he confesses ‘in fact (Mary Evans) had said a bit more than’ he reports (37). As Les later notes, reporters ‘rephrase’ things to change the focus (115). Text may not be a reliable source of knowledge, it is a construct produced by its author, and ‘facts’ are at the discretion of this author. In this first novel, Maggie Gee investigates the place of the author in contemporary society; both her author character and the inward-looking metafictional trait in the novel become devices to further the investigation. Moira as a young writer scribbling in the attic, out of touch with real life, is an image of a writer imprisoned in her own small world. The papers catalogue her death as ‘TRAGIC BALCONY PLUNGE OF LOVE TANGLE BLUESTOCKING’ (9). The text opens with the image of a modern writer flinging her naked self from the balcony of the attic; she liberates herself from the symbolic ivory tower at the cost of death. She kills herself, but is happy to leave her orderly chapters numbered, so she can say goodbye to the world with a feeling of completion and satisfaction: ‘she was sure it would be a glorious morning, a brilliant morning as frosty and fresh as her body, and she would be out in it, there in the sun’ (159). She leaves her safe position in the attic by flinging herself naked to the people; her death is like an attempt to communicate, she says ‘all that is needed is somebody else’s hands’ and addresses her reader, asking him or her to reach out and touch her

Author Flinging Herself From the Ivory Tower

29

(161). Funnily enough, her death brings liveliness to the sullen neighbourhood. On a symbolic level, the death of the author means a refutation of the image of a writer withdrawn from the social context she lives in. Gee’s later novels also discuss the place of the author in the social web. In fact, self-referentiality is employed to comment on the need to go beyond the bounds of such a form of novel writing. This novel poses the question of what it means to be an author in this world, what it means for the characters and what it means for the reader. Gee starts her writing career by probing the question of the death of the author and, in a sense, asks what has become of fiction, and what the function of fiction is. These questions about the nature of authorship and fiction were the very questions that literary critics and theorists of the 1980s were discussing. In making her debut with a novel exploring this vital literary discussion both thematically and stylistically, Gee was placing herself at a significant juncture in contemporary fiction. Following the image of authors and intellectuals in Dying, In Other Words through to her later writing, it can be observed that Gee always shows them in close relation to others, placing them in a web of relations as part of the rich tapestry called the ‘social context’. Describing the everyday life that surrounds the author, Gee tries to give a truthful portrayal of contemporary life, and this renders the novel an account of the ‘condition-of-England’. This awareness of social problems is evident in the letter that Moira writes to her friend Clara who understands that ‘Mo did their crying out for [others]’, because Moira holds the belief that the artist has a social responsibility; ‘. . . let the artist make sorrow speak for all too timid to speak . . . and let anger cry out on behalf of all those who bowed down, went without, and accepted . . .’ (50). With such an ideal, Moira corresponds to the image of the artist as a hero, a redeemer of humanity, an agent speaking for the silenced. The role of the artist is to represent all and attain a unifying vision. This way, Maggie Gee can subvert the detective novel by superimposing not just philosophical discussions about the death of the author, but also a novel of social awareness. To this end, the setting of the apartment building with various tenants functions as a microcosmic England. Gee portrays the tenants in this building as individual entities living in their own cells without any meaningful contact with others. They do not have any communication. What they all have in common is a sense of loneliness, with each tenant seemingly representing a certain problem in society. The dominant feeling in the novel is alienation, a sense of defeat and helplessness that overwhelms these characters. There is also a modernist nostalgia for the loss of order and communication. As readers, we feel that we are there to witness the deep sorrow and pain that these characters share. Underscoring an overall sense of loss, Dying, in Other Words plants the seed of funeral scenes that most Gee novels successfully portray and offer as a glimpse of the conditionof-England. First and foremost, we witness the death of an author, and the lives of those neighbours and friends who are indifferent to her death as well as to her life. In the final analysis, Gee draws a picture of a society in which people fail to communicate as if to suggest that we are all like these tenants living under the same roof, yet knowing nothing about each other. She also draws attention to the gap between how people appear and how they feel. For instance, John X ’s wife Felicity, an ageing woman living her own drama, is by no means as happy as her name suggests. And Clothilde, from

30

Maggie Gee

the outside, seems just another octogenarian whose days are numbered, reduced to a useless living dead; however, as we enter her room, we understand that she always wanted to be a writer, and entering her consciousness we see that she is a soul vibrating with all the others, and has a claim to life just as others do. Focusing on these ordinary people, the novel judges those who see nothing other than themselves, and encourages an empathic stance. As in The Flood and The White Family, characters coming from various layers of English society live different lives but live the same ‘moment’ with a similar anxiety: what they want is to be understood, to communicate, share and love. The range of characters alienated from each other is further widened by the presence of migrants and foreigners; how the French and the black are perceived is also a marker of our alienations. The novel is meant to ‘make sorrow speak’, as John Sears also underlines in his essay ‘ “Making Sorrow Speak”: Maggie Gee’s Novels’, and Gee gives voice to many different people from different ranks of society, adding to the multivocal tone of the novel. At the centre of the web is Moira, the author. The prologue presents Moira as an author, an inward-looking young woman, up there in the attic typing. She is portrayed as an observer ready to record lives: Yet most of the time she stays in, stares down and stares in. Her name is Moira, your author. How many others, she wonders, are moving slowly about in the house below her like sleepy koalas, rubbing their morning lids pink and forgetting the ominous dreams which woke them, starting again and dreaming the books of their lives? (3)

As other people live on, Moira wonders, ‘stand[ing] high above them, watching their stories begin’ (4). As an author, Moira is described as distanced from the crowd, and her death is foreshadowed with the idea that although she will die, her stories will live on. As the final part of the prologue, the following line of thought starts the novel: The stories she thinks, though in some non-narrative world there is somebody splitting and bleeding, storyless, blood-splattered, splayed on the cold stone, dead - the stories, while memory lasts, will always go on (yet the wordless drone of faint planes is threading the sun . . . .) And so we begin. (4)

Gee starts the ‘novel’ by a playful juxtaposition of that ‘some non-narrative world’ with the narrative one we are in, because the prologue is followed by the opening sentence of the first part ‘1 Splayed on the cold stone, dead’: ‘The naked body of the girl was found on the pavement by the milkman, reaching the Crescent just after 7 a.m. on a frosty brilliant morning’ (5). Now Moira is dead and all the characters in the novel are there to comment on her. At the very beginning of the novel, Gee juxtaposes the world of fact with that of fiction with the author figure standing at the threshold of these two worlds; as Mary Evans the landlady describes her, Moira is a queer and outlandish young woman who ‘never had much to say for herself. Up there in the attic, scribbling and scribbling away’ (5). Right from the beginning, Moira is presented as an alien whose life is boring and beyond the normal. Judging from outside, the landlady concludes that Moira was not

Author Flinging Herself From the Ivory Tower

31

one of them: ‘What a life’. To her, Moira ‘was only a kid, after all, and a pleasant enough to me’, but the time she spends in a room of her own, to the landlady, is simply being ‘locked up all day long in that hole’ (5). ‘Our author’ is described as an isolated figure, out of touch with the ‘common’ people. The landlady’s slight resentment about Moira’s detached attitude resonates in her statement to the journalist: ‘And a very nice smile, when she showed it’ (6). The way Gee places Moira in a web of common people who make judgements about her can be read as an allegory of how alienated the author is from the social context she writes in and about. There are various accounts of Moira and her death, and the text/story of Moira is based on other texts created by different people with different orientations, adding to the theme of the subjective nature of the text. Several other characters in the novel hint at the sense of isolation and the gap between the educated and the common people, and this later becomes a motif in much of Gee’s writing. Jean-Claude Dupré, one of the tenants and a friend to Moira, is a university teacher leading a life similar to Moira’s, ‘see-saw(ing) between a life of wild gaiety and one of total seclusion’ (31). One of Moira’s boyfriends, John X, is a lecturer out of touch with life outside. To the tenants, he is ‘a mystery visitor from London’. His wife Felicity, who ‘wasn’t an intellectual’ like John or Moira, helps us see how separated academia is from ‘real life’. Set against the isolated intellectuals, Felicity is an activist mingling with the common tide of people, working ‘for long hours for low pay in a wide range of radical fieldwork, everything from race to political prisoners’, taking her ‘clear head and her patience and energy anywhere she thought they were needed, typed or made coffee or picketed’ (42). When juxtaposed with Moira sitting in her attic ‘playing at culture’ (42), Felicity who ‘was never jealous’ (42), who ‘was always good’ (44), often ‘away for the night, at a party [John X] felt too gloomy to attend’ (43) stands as an emblem of bliss, which is one meaning of her name. Of course, this reads as slightly ironic when it is considered that Felicity, to John, is an ‘Aunty’ wife, ‘the angel’ ready to serve when he needed help, assistance, love and affection. Apart from representing the beaten-down wife, Felicity still functions as a foil to Moira and John, committed intellectuals, alienated from the crowds they think they grasp theoretically/ intellectually. The exclusiveness of the academy and intelligentsia is also hinted at by the teenager Pet Lockwood’s thoughts; she is a teenager who works on Sundays to save up ‘some money for boots and the makeup her Mum wouldn’t buy her’ (53). When her father wants Pet to sound intelligent, she sums it up as talking like a university student, and does not want to be like her educated father whose world, to her, is ‘sarcastic, dried-up and exact’; the father’s world is ‘extinct’ and is not ‘real’: ‘he just wasn’t in touch, couldn’t talk to real people’ (54). Clara is another figure who contributes to Gee’s portrayal of artists and intellectuals in contemporary England. She teaches drama and art, and concludes that she is an outsider: ‘outside the well-lit and well-off world of - oh, Pelham and Jean-Claude and their parents -’ (136). From the landlady’s perspective, after all, Moira is ‘a different type altogether’ with some ‘peculiar friends’ (143): Moira . . . (the type coming thinly and coldly, not smiling or nicely talking, the type coming louder and louder high up at the top of the house which was emptying, darkening), always looked peaky, half-starved, and unless she was actually smiling she never looked happy, not really, not to her eyes, . . . (143)

32

Maggie Gee

With details about the poor living conditions of writers, academics and artists, the novel also becomes a satire on the conditions that contemporary England offers to her bright children. The ‘half-starved’ Moira can only afford an attic, she is not Virginia Woolf ’s middle-class woman writer creating in comfort in a room of her own, and John, who the narrator presents as a ‘poorly paid politics lecturer’ (41), lives in a ‘slightly seedy London flat’ whose kitchen is ‘neolithic’ even by the standards of his mother (42–3). Les the journalist’s observations about the fate of Moira Penny read like Gee’s satire on the living conditions on writers and academics: In her fate we may find a warning about the hectic pace and almost unbearable pressure in the lives of many of our brightest and often most vulnerable young people, maturing in the hothouse atmosphere of University towns. Squeezed into cramped and often squalid living conditions, their budgets even more restricted than their accommodation [. . .], they react to the strains of too-long hours of study with private lives of hectic and diverse activity but little real contentment. (38–9)

Gee fully explores academia from many different angles, through many characters she develops in her novels. As evident in her autobiography My Animal Life, Gee is also drawing on her own life when she gives a literary representation of academia and of writers. The short chapter titled ‘61 Surviving’, in which Clara ponders the death of her friend, also shows how difficult it is for writers and artists to survive. In addition to feeling mentally and emotionally isolated, Clara thinks ‘They were both outsiders, too, in the sense of being poor’ (136). Moira always had to live on grants and then later ‘on the dole queue’, a queue of people waiting for employment. And Clara, rather than practising her own art, lives on a ‘tiny wage’ that she earns ‘teaching drama and art to mentally retarded children’; sometimes a picture or an ‘extravagantly sequinned cushion’ she makes sells, and helps her for a while, but sometimes when she is ‘desperate’, she tries to make money ‘nude modelling down at the art school’, which she thinks is ‘real suffering’ (136). So, ‘the real world’, which is ‘most of the world’, Clara concludes, is a world ‘with no money for teeth or new clothes or extending their short lease on youth or on beauty’ (137). Gee’s class-conscious satire sees the two artists as freer but less fortunate when compared to other members of their class, because Clara and Moira as artists ‘had somehow managed to slip unnoticed out of the shimmering nets of their class and their education, managed to slip through a blistered door to the other side’ (137). Gee’s portrayal of poor living conditions is not specific to the intelligentsia; she also shows less privileged characters trying equally hard to survive under difficult conditions. As such, the novel gives a wider portrayal of the condition of England. These common people who we might think fail to understand and appreciate our author, under Gee’s magnifying glass are all seen as unlucky people trying to survive. Naturally, they feel resentful of the intelligentsia. The milkman Bill Dutton is one of these characters; when he is asked for his witness statement about the death of Moira and talks to the journalist who takes a picture of him, he feels exhilarated and important. The photograph that he thinks will accompany his opinions in the next day’s paper becomes a motive for him to wake up early, and he breaks ‘his usual serene electric journey to pick up the News of the Weak’, a play on the British newspaper the News of the World: He feels ‘good’, ‘brisk’

Author Flinging Herself From the Ivory Tower

33

and ‘lordly’ (66, my emphasis). Ironically, it is only a death in his neighbourhood that liberates him from his deadly routine. However, seeing neither his image nor his name in the paper when it is finally printed, he switches into his habitual mode of thinking, and feels: ‘Reduced, cut down and betrayed!’. Shrunk down to a couple of words ‘quoted not under his name’, he feels infuriated because the news reminds him of his social position. He is the milkman serving those who ‘all moved on’ and did better than him (67). He sees himself dismissed by the privileged as ‘others’ (67); ‘the buggers’ ‘stuck together’ making him ‘look stupid’ (68). Finding no place in the news report, he remembers that he has no place in this world. The newspaper talks of emotions, ambitions, ‘pressures’ and books, but not about him. Here, the name of the newspaper sardonically proves right, for it places Bill in the queue of the ‘weak’. Violence is the only weapon he has; his defence mechanism is a diatribe against the powerful: ‘Drop a bomb on them’ (68). As a powerless, poor and weak member of society with a tendency to violence, Bill is another typical Gee character representing the condition-of-England. Like Bruno of Grace and then The Flood, like Dirk of The White Family, like Smeggy of Light Years, he is a threat to public safety waiting his time, like a time bomb, to exert his power and express these feelings of anger and resentment. Like Dirk and Bruno, Bill chooses a weird public place to relax; his favourite spot is ‘the back of the Public Lavatories’ (67). He plans an attack; one day he will take revenge and show them that Bill has a place in this life: In this life, however, you just couldn’t win. Bloody rubbish: the world in the hands of the doctors, reporters, and women, he thought, revving up, sitting back, driving on with the paper violently folded under his feet and his blood pressure violently rising. Blow them all up. (67)

He does not blow them up in the text; but an analeptic account of the narrator about Kitty reveals his violence: ‘Kitty didn’t know [. . .] That Kitty would die in the dark at the back of the Public Lavatories’ (63). This narrative both connects the two seemingly irrelevant characters Kitty and Bill in the texture of the story and highlights the motif of murder in public places. A similar thread connects Jean-Claude to Macbeth; the third-person narrator says: [Jean-Claude] was found in the morning at the back of the Public Lavatories, dead on his back with his keys and his coins beside him, normal and brigth in the sun.[. . .] The doctor found evidence of anal rape, (128). Violence involves homophobia as in The White Family in which Gee’s black gay character Winston is stabbed and raped by Dirk at the back of the public lavatories. The tendency to exert violence on people is also linked to fascist inclinations. Like racist Dirk in The White Family, Macbeth in this first novel is a fascist whose reading activity is limited to ‘accounts of slow Nazi atrocities’ making the Nazi in the fat red book in the library a hero (129). After committing murder, Macbeth walks, as the narrator describes him, with his teeth ‘flashing sometimes out of the night as a warning’ (129). People like Bill and Macbeth become important pieces of the puzzle in the overall detective structure of the plot, but they are also there to suggest that the condition of England as described by Gee is alarming, and without offering such people a place in society, we can never attain an overall state of content. Bill, for instance, feels that the only feeling of fraternity he could enjoy was in the army: ‘one for all and all

34

Maggie Gee

for one’ (99). Now he feels nostalgic because of the lack of friendship in his life; he has lost even his limited power as ‘ex-sergeant Bill Dutton’ in the army some 30 years ago. Now he knows, sadly, that if you are ‘quite on your own, in the world’, the power is all with the other side. So he feels excluded and ‘othered’ (100). Gee asks us to understand Bill, yet she also places Les Hawtrey there who sees a ‘rapist’ in him; soon we learn that Bill is a misogynist who thinks that women are ‘randy little beggars underneath, they can’t get enough of us’ (16). And Les’ judgement is confirmed. Legal action is taken with the defence attempting to establish insanity, but evidence suggests that he is completely sane; so: ‘Bill Dutton was a sex murderer. The courtroom saw his finest hour. In the dock he confessed or rather laid claim to five other offences, all of them committed in the area where for over thirty years he had been “a familiar and well-loved figure”  ’ (16). This account of Bill Dutton both shows him as an ostracized and lonely figure and raises the question if an objective and reliable account about one’s identity is possible. A similar question is valid for Macbeth; he is a gay basher and a fascist on the one hand, on the other a disillusioned boy, a lost soul who wanted to be a spaceman, do good things and feels it is ‘too late now’ (102). When he asks the careers master at school if Britain has spacemen, he gets a crude matter-of-fact response reminding him of his place: ‘he was heading for nowhere but the dole queue’, and unfortunately this comes true (102). When the science master gives him a similar hopeless answer, Macbeth has to ‘warn’ him, threatening him with ‘a bit of razor’ (103). He feels that it is ‘much too late to change anything, for any of them, now’ (103). Without giving these poor, underprivileged youth their place, England can no longer be a safe garden. Fear, ignorance, loneliness and violence cast their shadow on both the educated and the uneducated. The portrayal of Mary Evans also helps Gee show the divide between intellectuals and the uneducated, as well as shedding light on the tragic aspect of their lives. Like Bill, Mary Evans feels important when she speaks as Moira’s landlady. She becomes visible because now she has a position in the story of the death of a young writer, and feels she has ‘Something to think about. A purpose. A reason for people to look at her in the street and want to stop’ (8); tragically, only events like the death of a tenant can bring a feeling of importance and happiness to an ordinary life. The narrator’s proleptic account of the landlady calls for sympathy and understanding despite her emotional indifference and self-centred attitude towards the death of Moira: ‘She was asked more questions in those few days than in the next twenty years before her heart lurched one morning, and lurched, and stopped beating’ (9). These characters who first appear as witnesses to shed light on Moira’s tragedy are themselves tragic, which makes the overall tone of the novel sorrowful. However, Gee’s attention to detail in the quotidian and her rich observations of human eccentricities add a comic dimension to the text and to her flesh and blood human beings realistically portrayed. For example, the way Kitty, the shopkeeper, Pet’s boss, is described brings humour despite the fact that she is a 30-year-old virgin whose sexual life is reduced to cheap romance novels. She reads so much so that the pleats of her ‘terrible’ pleated skirts are always ‘pushed out at the back, from too much sitting’ (56). She is meant to be the pathetic virgin, yet the way her reading is depicted brings another bit of comic relief to the novel: she is not exactly cross-eyed but Pet notices the funny way she reads: ‘(one eye never moved quite as quickly as the other) [. . .] and anyway Kitty had turned her eyes (one slightly after the other) firmly downwards again to True Love’ (55–6).

Author Flinging Herself From the Ivory Tower

35

Gee’s playful postmodern techniques also bring comic relief into the mainly tragic setting of the novel. Moira’s friend Jean-Claude, philosophizing over the meaning and importance of birthdays, suddenly remembers Moira and his love for her, and the next thought, of course, is that Moira is now dead: ‘And yet death was a general truth, and had the last word’ (86). Right at this point, Gee opens a parenthesis to insert a playful sentence: ‘(someone acidly typing agreed.)’ (86). This textual joke immediately dilutes the heaviness of the discussion on death and brings to mind that this is just a text in the making, under the control of an author who is there to intervene any time she wants. Again, as Clara meditates on surviving, the narrator brings the line of discussion to a halt by diverting our attention to something outside her thoughts: ‘High up, on dry land, in the attic, someone typed on’ (141). The narrator’s tone is light-hearted enough to see details and look at the bright side of things, despite the critical stance Gee takes towards social ills. This light-heartedness has a vital function in maintaining an all-encompassing and understanding panoramic vision; it also helps Gee achieve objectivity and impartiality in her portrait of the condition of England. The sex murderer Bill Dutton’s distorted statements in the pub about his experiences with women are naively funny and help us focalize through Bill’s eyes: I like living alone. Keep everything regular and tidy. Couldn’t stand having a woman under my feet  all the time, fussing and squawking and not letting you get anything done [.  .  .] My mother’s the only woman I ever had much time for, as a matter of fact! Not that I haven’t touched a few feminine hearts in my time-touched a few other places too . . . (19–20)

One can easily feel sympathy for Bill when the conflict between how he sees himself and what he ends up being is revealed through his ironic lack of self-knowledge. A humorous tone is also achieved through a sense of the absurd: Clothilde is 90 and still thinks everybody envies her because she is ‘so much superior to them, and prettier’ (107). She also has the illusion that the ducks she feeds in the park follow her with terrible envy because she cuts her grey hair every week and washes it with herbs, so it looks like their soft grey down (107). The death of the author is not just a literary theme, for the novel also develops the theme of death and ageing, as is shown by Gee’s portrayal of Clothilde and hinted at by the playful title of the novel: the text the author unfolds will approach death and dying from many different angles. The idea of dying pervades the text, with images of death from nature too. For example, as Claire Dutton knits the hat, she unconsciously thinks about the omnipresence of death: ‘as all bright living things (and black jokes) sink into the black oily water, sink through the slime of dead leaves, go dark and go down’ (72). Parenthetical author interferences also place an emphasis on the inevitability of death. When Jean-Claude resolves that ‘Life wasn’t so bad’, a comment in tune with the title functions as a leitmotif: ‘(it was dying, in other words, somebody said)’ (127). Gee also brings in a brief comment on the unfair nature of death through the landlady who wonders: ‘Why take all the young ones, since she was so useless, wasn’t it time for her to be taken away?’ (134). Clothilde, the oldest character in the novel, also feels the imminence of death. She is 90 and feels that ‘[. . .] she wouldn’t last long, nor want to’ (132), and thinks ‘And all those young ones are dying!’ (132). Then she concludes it does not matter if death comes when one is young or old, ‘But it didn’t make death

36

Maggie Gee

any different [. . .], it was still serious, it still took people away’ (133). Jean-Claude’s comment also disregards the differences in the way one dies; death is death: ‘they said [Moira] had broken her spine, what does it matter what else if her skull was broken?’ (127). The centrality of death is also emphasized by the presence of the funeral scene, which is another motif in Gee’s writing. The scene juxtaposes life and death, and brings the quotidian and the eternal together on the same plane to give a glimpse into the human condition. Moira’s friend Clara, who works as a drama teacher, brings her pupils to the funeral, retarded children who don’t understand what is happening. They love the flowers and the priest in his surplice, thinking that this is another ‘cheerful play’ their ‘kind’ ‘Miss’ is teaching (141). Such scenes are often life affirming and unifying since they bring together a wide range of people from different walks of life. Mary studying people’s outfits: ‘it was really a very nice outfit, the kind of thing she would choose to wear if she had a bit of money’, firmly connects life to death. ‘Exalted and churchlike and solemn’ feelings brought on by funerals stand side by side with people’s daily worries and anxieties. For Hetty Sear, the octogenarian, happiness also confirms the thin thread between life and death: ‘She never felt so happy as she did in a graveyard, watching a new one go down, especially a young one, knowing that she had outlived them’ (142). Every new person brings a different angle to the overall picture. ‘A crowd of old lovers are eyeing each other discreetly, wondering whether that odd-looking fellow could also have been a lover’ (141). Young and old, rich and poor, all coming from different layers of society, Moira’s witnesses watching ‘Another one gone’ are like a ship of fools (142). The funeral scene is both a motif that brings her various characters together and a forerunner of the social-problem novel that Gee will later write. Interestingly, this is a scene that the death of the author makes possible. Switching from the past tense to the present, the narrator mentions an author composing the scene for the reader. At the point when Hetty feels rejuvenated because she has survived Moira, our author, the narrator makes a textual joke and performs an act of poetic justice by stating: ‘But one of the young ones is watching her, up in a dark room some kind of justice is typing’ (142). Thus, the narrator playfully tells the reader that the author is still alive, weaving her text; and later, in parenthesis, comes another sign of liveliness: ‘someone in the attic was trying to remind (Mary)’ that life wasn’t bad, it was just another way of dying, ‘dying, in other words’ (144). In that technical sense, the ending of the novel functions as another subverted funeral scene, which is literally life affirming for the author. Just as Moira is ended, the book begins, and the text makes a full circle to the beginning with the identical sentence: ‘The naked body of the girl was found on the pavement by the milkman . . . a frosty brilliant morning . . . blood and black ice . . . . . (she was ended, the book could begin)’ (160–61). Here at this last point, the author addresses the reader and calls for help: ‘Reach out and touch me, reader. Flying, flying and falling. Other chance hands will support me. Take Moira, take me, take these pains’ (161). With these words, Gee emphasizes not only the physical and mortal aspects of the human author, but also the potentially infinite nature of writing. And then follows ‘The Papers’ lengthy epitext, ending with an affirmation: ‘No-one. No-one. Gone’, which can be read in two ways: that no one survives, and everyone is gone, or that no one is gone, and this author will go on.

2

Of the Nuclear Family and the Hibakusha: The Burning Book (1983)

Dealing with a wide range of social issues, The Burning Book is a true social-problem novel. Unemployment, poverty, rigid class boundaries, unequal gender roles, dysfunctional families and racism are among its main subjects, and as such this second book is very important as a novel that presents many characteristics of Gee’s writing. Above all, as the first statement of the novel clearly explains, this is a family saga: ‘This is the story of a family, the Ship family, not forgetting anybody’ (15). On the one hand, it discusses issues that span the three generations of Lorna and Henry’s families; moving through the family tree it offers for clarity, the novel explores the inner world of almost all of the family members as individual cases (238–9). On the other hand, through a wide range of characters representing different historical periods, it successfully portrays a panorama of contemporary British society. This enables a reading of the book as an evolved version of the condition-of-England novel. The story involves the period between three Georges: George, Henry’s brother, lost in World War I; George, Henry’s son who dies in World War II; and George, Guy’s brother who dies on the underground trying to stop people protesting the war. The family history, which extends over four decades, helps a comparative historical outlook and renders the reader a witness of sociocultural events. As a result of the book’s awareness of history, the reader is also encouraged to evaluate individual characters in their own specific conditions, and thus ceases to be judgemental about their behaviour. The contextual richness that Gee allows her characters and readers is enhanced by the use of intertextuality, weaving into her text the voice of the ‘hibakusha’, the casualties of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. By informing the main body of her text with narratorial comments on the atomic bomb, Gee also adds a political dimension to the novel. While the family saga delineates domestic peace threatened mainly by poverty and unemployment, comments on the atomic bombing in Japan deal with threats to peace as a much wider problem. Such narrative traits help explain the different layers of ‘peace’, and this in turn inevitably leads us to racism as one of the most acute social problems of the bigger family, contemporary British society. With such traits, as we shall see in Grace and The White Family, the novel becomes a plea for pacifism and finding the unity in differences. The egalitarian and anti-militarist tone of the novel can easily be linked to a search for an all-encompassing vision that aims to unify and heal the cracks in contemporary British society and the world. The novel’s

38

Maggie Gee

main strength lies in its scope, maintained by timely zooms in and out of the family saga to the universal plane of reality. In terms of the richness of characters, again The Burning Book is a typical Gee novel. There are many characters portraying both different historical periods and different sociocultural orientations. All of them share a claim to the novel’s centre; Gee gives us an ensemble with a great number of characters acting in order. The novel thus becomes a texture woven by individual characters that are portrayed in action and in connection with other characters. As its narrator often indicates, the novel is like an epic play with a stage director intervening to present, make comments, break the illusion of the representational effect of the story and direct the reader’s critical faculties through verframdungs effects. With a text that abounds in stories and characters, to give ‘comfort’ to the reader, Gee starts with a synopsis (18). The narrator informs the reader that this is the ‘story of Lorna and Henry and Angela, Guy and George, or the boys’. She both gives the synopsis and makes introductory comments about her characters: ‘The boys were quite different, so here are their stories in order’ (17). The synopsis signposts the issues that will be explored in the following 14 chapters of the novel. In a sense, Gee is offering a helpful route to be followed on a journey that has chaotic and emotionally intense moments. Indeed, as the text dives into the depths of various histories, the narrator stays with the reader to ensure a full understanding. The novel gives us an organized family picture, a ‘nuclear family’ that ‘looks tidy’ (18–19). As told in the synopsis, the novel will extend the narrow limits of the nuclear family and try to embrace everyone. Of course, the idealized family picture almost always ignores somebody, ‘a lot is cut off by the frame’, and so the novel sets out to remember and record all the excluded ‘here’. This is an attempt to offer a perceptive and egalitarian view of reality alternative to the so-called ideal family frame, which is in fact reductive, indifferent and uncaring. Gee’s representation of the contemporary family as a unit that has been losing its functions raises awareness about the condition of Britain today, and through the intertextuality of English and Japanese voices, suggests a new frame of mind: perhaps one should not limit oneself to one’s own everyday needs and concerns, but take responsibility for his/her social context. The first attempt is to repair the maimed collective memory and remember the hibakusha as those fellow human beings killed by ‘stupidity’. The narrator shows a willingness to extend the limits of her text to bring to the fore the forgotten; this reads like a conscientious excavation of parts of the buried collective history of humankind: ‘Yes, we are here inside, reluctant to cope with their pain. Ashamed, I must open the windows’ (20). She zooms in to include in her picture the underprivileged crowds that most frames leave out: There are people not spoken about, people not written about, people (whose name is a way of saying they are not there. Hibakusha, atomic victims- the scarred who carry our scars [. . .] Hibakusha, queuing and pleading- for jobs and money and help. Even worse, they beg us to see them. [. . .] It’s as if their brains have been burned, as if they cannot forgive us. They try to make us feel guilty. Their cries will not leave us in peace. (21)

Similar to the awareness of interconnectivity implied in Dying, In Other Words, the narrator is arguing that without giving people the place they deserve, we cannot attain

Of the Nuclear Family and the Hibakusha

39

a peaceful and happy state. This voice expressing a higher level of moral and social consciousness connects the seemingly separate narrative strands that delineate the stories of different people. Such awareness also indicates a novelistic vision that regards the text as a potential platform on which problems are diagnosed and possible solutions are offered. Here, ideas about the role of the writer and fiction that are hinted at in Gee’s first novel, are explicitly vocalized by the novel’s narrator. Frequent extratextual interventions on the structure and the scope of the novel put forth Gee’s notion that fiction is not a world apart, divorced from reality. In that sense, The Burning Book can be said to embody Gee’s ars poetica in its narrative shifts and authorial interventions, often entered in the form of parenthetical information. The same narrative voice, also the focalizing one, helps the reader see into individual consciousnesses. The author makes her presence quite visible while often leaving the reader with individual characters tête-à-tête. Taking the responsibility for her text, the author explicates her novel’s scope. She also lays bare its claim to realism by suggesting that fiction is not necessarily a safe haven in which the reader happily escapes the problems of real life. It is implied that when there is so much chaos and pain outside, fiction cannot be a space for mere entertainment: ‘with such a hubbub outside, great cracks appear in my novel/ other novels do better, build us a paper home’ (52). Not giving her reader a ‘paper house’, a world of make-believe that gives an illusion of reality, Gee’s text contests the illusionary boundary separating the real world and the fictional one. The ‘stage’ metaphor often used to describe the function of the novelist-as-dramatist also supports the link between Gee’s writing and Brechtian epic drama, which practises a continuous attempt to do away with the imaginary fourth wall, that is, the imaginary boundary between the audience and the play. The ensemble-like quality of the characters in Gee’s fiction also facilitates the transition between different levels of discourse. Since there is no one single central character, and the novel involves (hi)stories shared by all of them, it is easier to imagine and mentally accept the narrator levelling the hierarchy between life outside and inside the text. This is a continuation of the discussion of ‘the voice inside’ and ‘men outside’ that features in the epilogue to the novel Dying, In Other Words. The way the novel fosters in the reader an understanding of characters as voices also facilitates an image of transitionality, a membrane that involves the units from seemingly separate spheres vibrating together. This is the vision of society that Gee encapsulates in her writing. She achieves this through the voice of the narrator merging and involving other voices into her opera. For instance, a narrative shift comes when the young Lorna visits her friend Maisie and discovers, to her shock, that there are homes functioning with a pattern very different from the one adopted by her family. Maisie’s mother is mad, and Lorna’s nice clothes and cleanliness do not mean anything in this context. While Lorna feels both frightened and disillusioned, the reader also confronts horrid scenes from Maisie’s life. To highlight the realistic aspect of the novel, the narrator interferes and makes a comment: ‘voices tearing the paper/paper torn with that pain’ (59). Gee also adds such metafictional elements to speak her mind about writing. Showing Henry and Lorna as parents trying to keep a family of five, yet failing to foster love in the climate of their house, Gee also asks for an understanding for them. The narrator enters and, confronting the world of fiction with that of real life in an ironic way, speaks

40

Maggie Gee

from Henry and Lorna’s perspective: ‘it is novels that hunger for love/we need to have something to eat before we can think about love’ (115). Drawing further on the irony, Gee’s narrator shares her awareness about the gap between artists and ordinary people in a critical note. She knows that her novel, which is about ordinary and poor people, will not reach them; thus, she feels guilty: ‘I know I am writing a novel, and novels are not for them’ (116). Once again, Gee’s critical voice, which tries to show the position of the author in the social network, is heard very strongly: And then, there are far too many of them. You must keep their canvases small. A couple, a marriage, a family- yes, my nuclear family. But how can I keep my eyes on the page when those faces move like the sea. I wish that I knew who they were. You’d think that they might try and help me. But they cannot define themselves, except as a focus of pain. (116)

She sets out to reach those people she does not know; Gee’s writing aims to cite and address those fellow human beings, even those she does not know. In this early novel, this is an attempt to make her writing an overarching, all-encompassing arena, something also hinted at in the ‘Dedication’ of Dying, In Other Words. There, the author thanks people she knows as well as those she does not. Holding the belief that even those she does not know make the context she writes both in and about, she expresses her gratitude to them all. Similarly, the small Ship family in The Burning Book gets extended and becomes a very large one to include all those whose ‘names and details are lost’ (116). Hinting that fiction has a responsibility to widen its horizon to address as many people as possible, the narrator of The Burning Book prophetically claims that, ‘The bodies will have their revenge on the novels which left them out’ (117). The lyrical tone of the narrator remembers the hibakusha, and says she knows that ‘paper and skin both burn’ (117). Confronting the world of the novel with the real world once again, she contends that the paper worlds that authors create are not any different from the real one; they are one and the same. This idea is also articulated in the final picture of Henry and Lorna in the heaven-like Kew Gardens: ‘(no, it was here/there was only one world/despite all those hundreds of leaves of paper/only one world/and one last picture)’ (297). Parenthetical entries cut into the narrative to remind us that all these characters in the novel are the very people we pass by: ourselves, our family members, relatives, friends, colleagues and neighbours. Employing the stage metaphor again, the narrator attempts to erase the boundary between the text and its audience. She underscores the idea that the characters on the page are just people we know, put under the stage lights: ‘(All of us live in a novel and none of us do the writing. Just offstage there are grim old men, planning to cut the lighting)’ (202). To strengthen the motif of life-as-fiction and fiction-as-life, the narrator comments on the life of one of her characters, Angela Lamb, saying: ‘Yet a novel about Ange would have had its events’ (249). As a character in the novel, Ange is presented as a real person, the events of whose life could be recounted in a novel. On the whole, Gee suggests that, in fact, we are all potential novel characters even though currently staying in the dark. In addition to the realistic vision such statements cultivate, the novel also articulates Gee’s belief in the function of fiction to record events and make people remembered. The narrator powerfully states that ‘Nothing was lost which was written down.  .  .’

Of the Nuclear Family and the Hibakusha

41

(223). This assertive remark vocalizes a vision that renders fiction a reliable catalogue of things that happen. Gee’s narrator also criticizes the commonly held belief of the illusive nature of fiction. Once again, she reminds her reader that fiction cannot and should not offer a safe ground when there is too much suffering outside. Also making a reference to the title of the novel ‘The Burning Book’, she confides in the reader, saying: ‘Don’t ever trust to a city of paper. Pages smoulder and people stifle’ (246). The novel’s treatment of language not as an enclosed and self-referential system, but as a powerful tool to generate communication marks a significant aspect of Gee’s writing: Words, to the narrator of the novel, are there to help people express themselves. When Frank, who leaves his family behind, enjoys the silence that replaces ‘plenty of language’ and the words his wife Rose used, the narrator comments: ‘And yet (words) are also essential, to promise and to record. He would need them to claim a meaning, in the silence before he died’ (259). Such views of language accord with the function of fiction as a document that sheds light not only on individual lives but also on the sociocultural dynamics behind these lives. Thus, it can be firmly suggested that Gee’s novel has a strong claim to realism. An outstanding feature of Gee’s work, also evident in her first novel, is the presence of a writer character making comments on writing and fiction, which is also a facet of the self-conscious realistic fiction that Gee practises. It must be remembered here again that her PhD thesis, finished less than 2 years before she wrote The Burning Book, was on portraits of the artist in the self-conscious novel from Laurence Sterne to Samuel Beckett, in which she discussed critical self-consciousness as a characterizing feature of twentieth-century writing. Angela, the young novelist-to-be of the third generation Ship family, becomes a mouthpiece for Maggie Gee. In line with the views probed by the narrator, Angela connects fiction to real life and associates it with ‘seeing herself in a mirror’ (226). Fiction to her is more than just artistry; it means ‘inscribing her urgent self ’ on paper (226). Burdened by the social and political problems and an acute sense of awareness to pain and sorrow, she feels that she should not be living in this ‘horrible century’ (228). But then she feels that maybe she is chosen to feel intensely and record things for people. As a writer, she wants to create ‘something to leave behind’. The self-image that Angela develops corresponds to the romantic image of the writer as a suffering hero, like Wordsworth, hearing the ‘still sad music of humanity’, feeling sorry for fellow human beings, making them speak and passing the word on to stop the pain. Like the narrator who calls the bodies of the hibakusha in pain the ‘wordless cry of that opera’, Angela hears people in fear and sorrow and wants to express these feelings. Like the voice of the romantic speaker in Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’ who becomes a ‘living soul’ having a capacity to see ‘the life of things’, Angela wants to see, write and improve things: ‘Inside her head was another world where everything was different, perfect’ (232). It is different from the real world that felt cold and lonely; however, in time, this dream world grows ‘solid’ and ‘dull’ as she grows older, and she loses ‘the vision of goodness’ (232). And this idealism stands in sharp opposition to the introverted postmodern image of the artist poking fun at the world. In the face of chaos and disorder, the artist’s response is sorrow. In the same vein, the novel ends with Gee’s narrator speaking sadly about the fate of her characters; she informs us

42

Maggie Gee

that they all died, and ‘[she] loved them all’ (303). In the final instance, Gee’s narrator treats the characters like real people and in posing herself as a go-between breaking the membrane between the text and context, she claims a hold in the real world where we also love these characters and feel sorry when they die in our act of reading. To state that such idealism should be supported, Gee places a scene in which schooling is presented as a way of numbing the young people (243). Her teacher, Miss Tucker, discourages Angela from asking too many questions that reveal her deeper feelings and worries about the future; the teacher regards Angela’s worries about the war and her wish to rewrite the future as ‘taking things so personally’ (243). But Angela perseveres and manages to become an independent thinker; character­ istically, this means departing from the ground everyone shares, thus risking alienation. As she tries ‘to write her book against war’ (155), her mother sees her as ‘too thin-skinned’ (244); her brother Guy, who always thought Angela a bit peculiar, now thinks she’s become ‘glossier, neater, more distant’ (197) and her voice has grown ‘much posher’ ever since she started college (198). The gap between them is so wide that he feels this girl reading queer books and eating tasteless healthy sandwiches ‘wasn’t just his sister anymore’ (197). She herself often feels out of place, craving for someone to understand her, and has ‘Aches which melt in a blaze of pain, the final homelessness’ (157). To hint at the idea that Angela is a version of her very creator Maggie Gee, the novelist facing alienation, Gee reverts to a joke, employing a technique of self-conscious fiction; the narrator sneaks into Angela’s study, reports that there are many books against war on the table next to her typewriter and adds, ‘There were other things on her pinboard, other things leaning against it. Dying, in Other Words by Maggie Gee, open at the last few pages. Things which helped her to write; things which would help her to write, if the writing really started [. . .]’ (155). Gee’s writer, mirroring Gee herself, is a sensitive person recording problems in society. Having black friends, being ready to confront the tensions in the family and reconnect with her past in a revisionary outlook, Angela stands outside the narrow bounds of her nuclear family so that she can reach out and touch others; thus, she ‘escapes from ignorance’ and ‘wanders the infinite city of words’ (250). Using words to give voice to those silenced, she writes about burning issues, the smoke ‘erasing the triumphs of the characters’; to her, all that the characters learn is to live in a novel, ‘learning to be “human”, learning to “survive” ’ (250). Giving the blueprints of her ars poetica, Gee states that fiction is a medium through which we learn to care for each other, live together in peace and be human. In the panorama of society that Maggie Gee draws in The Burning Book, family has a representational function in explicating the condition-of-Britain. Like the family pictures included in the panoramas of many classical Victorian social-problem novels such as Dickens’ Hard Times, the nuclear families portrayed here help Gee present social problems in British society, such as unemployment, poverty, alienation, violence and racism. The family pattern also enables Gee to focus on interconnected individuals, and to accentuate the impact of such large-scale problems on a micro level. Since ‘The Ships were the equal of anyone in England.’, the family demonstrates the condition of contemporary Britain in many ways (147). And before facilitating an outlook into society, the Ship family first sheds light on the family as a social unit.

Of the Nuclear Family and the Hibakusha

43

Gee employs this family as an alienated, self-enclosed entity that has lost its aim to function with a set of shared goals and values. Its members fail to maintain a sense of solidarity, or to provide one another with a sense of place and position in society. As an idealized unit to help unify society, Gee underscores that, the family has long lost its function. Composed of such dysfunctional nuclei and failing to offer alternative unifying values, society becomes a group of people defining themselves in terms of difference and negation. Angela’s inner voice informs the text with a sense of disbelief in the unit: ‘Feelings don’t come in families, feelings can never be shared’ (131). Her father Henry has a similar sense of the lack of empathy. Feeling alone, he writes to Angela, only to find that she never writes back; he sadly remembers the rule of thumb he learnt as a child: ‘Never upset the family’ (221). He is taught that in order not to disappoint family members, one has to pretend everything is all right. To Guy, family simply means people ‘locked in their houses, pretending to love each other’ (166). Nobody listens to anyone else in a family; that it is a happy unit is just an illusion conveyed by the instantaneous glimpse taken by a camera. Frank expresses a more acute distrust for the connectedness and solidarity of family. He even regards the family as a machine that kills: That was clear, because the family would have killed him. He would have been a grandfather, going down the pub, flashing his teeth at his cronies. [. . .] He would have to have aged to order, so they could recede side by side. To the back of the family picture: Grandma and Grandpa Ship. (257)

Thus, in order not to experience a premature death, he rebels against the rule and pattern he saw in his family. Frank chooses independence and freedom and pays for it with foreignness, the perpetual strangeness of not being at home. He prefers being a foreigner in Switzerland to loneliness, intolerance and lack of understanding within the family. Gee tackles family as one of the ailing segments of society, but when Angela, who is the most sensitive member of the family, ponders these problems, understanding their roots and showing a willingness to forgive, the novel offers an alternative view that shows family members as individuals. For instance, Lorna and Angela enjoy a ‘moment of intimacy’ when they stop relating to each other as a mother and daughter with a past full of tension. Lorna shares with Angela a memory of those days before she was born: ‘I used to be your type exactly, seeing all the bad in the world. Only now I’ve got so many worries of my own I can hardly think about . . . those things’ (238). This helps Angela see herself and Lorna as fellow beings ‘locked in their tight worlds’, not talking because they are busy fighting each other (239). Getting rid of the stock identities imposed on them, they can connect to family members as fellow humans who share a common past and culture. Despite the ‘absences’ and ‘differences’, Angela at last sees that there is a likeness between the members of a family. Espousing hope and change in the image of a baby, one of the striking, repeated motifs in her writing, Gee speaks positively about families through Angela: Something linked them all, some pattern. Something comforting, like the weight of past time, said that nothing final would happen. That time would always lurch on, that there would be time to grow in . . . all that they need is time. Families can grow in time. She might be part of growing . . . dreams of having John’s baby . . . (155)

44

Maggie Gee

Proposing it as a potential source of love and solidarity, Gee’s writing still treats the contemporary family with a critical eye and shows how crippling and negating it could be in the absence of empathy. However, when conditions allow, life with loved ones is one of the best experiences one can attain in this world. Frank misses the feeling of being touched by familiar people; in the ‘endless emptiness of waking alone’, he prays: ‘don’t let me die on my own’ (151). As she suggests the idea of seeing family members with fresh eyes, Gee also encourages a problematization of traditional gender roles. It can be said that the novel also promotes a critical outlook on the social gender roles that divide men and women into two separate categories. As a woman writer, Gee goes beyond the limits of radical feminism and portrays both men and women equally suffering from rigid rules and patterns. She illustrates characters from two opposite sexes trying to function in a family that imposes a set of roles. Lorna’s sisters Melissa and Clarissa put it simply: ‘Family life is a pattern. Family life is the rule’ (34). Narratorial intervention comes at this point to contest the authority of roles. Implying how null and void such roles are in the face of war and the laws of nature, the narrator gives voice to the hibakusha and lays bare the constructedness, thus the transitoriness, of rules and patterns: ‘(voices pelting like stones/wild stones pelting the window/out in the cold/no loved ones/rules and patterns are fiction)’ (34). Gee also demonstrates how rules and patterns can be nullified by showing Lorna’s mother Prunella in a process of change. At first, she is a ‘decent’ mother transmitting the social norms in order to produce ‘well-mannered daughters’ (36). She gives them ‘rules to live by’ (36): ‘girls should be gentle/girls should be mothers/mothers should be gentle/beating through her head’ (32). Having internalized a version of femininity that keeps her a domestic caretaker, Lorna imposes a form of masculinity on her husband Mervyn too: ‘Call yourself a man . . . you can’t even keep your own family’ (31). She criticizes him because he is not authoritative enough and lets her 11-year-old Lorna wear a ‘skirt round her waist’ (36). But after seeing her father dead, her husband die and her mother senile, she gets to think that maybe rules do not have to be followed. One day, Prunella looks in the mirror and understands how meaningless it is to maintain a system that restricts one. It wasn’t a pattern, but her own awkward limbs, the raw disarrangement of truth she was left with. So far she had dressed it to do as she was told. Only now the instructing voices were silent. No one could help her, there were no rules. [. . .] Next day she went out and bought herself some lipstick. Her mother had worn lipstick, why shouldn’t she? She tried it at home in the safety of her bedroom. It sat on her face like a sharp crimson fish. She didn’t look pretty, but she did look alive. (35)

At the age of seventy-four, she rebels against the pattern, which she names ‘the neatness she’d tried to instil in her daughters’ (34). In other words, she breaks ‘her own rules’ (35). She stops the voices instructing her what to wear. Thus, she buys purple eyeshadow, dyes her hair crimson red and accepts that: ‘She was tired of all her daughters’, and ‘She was fond of young men, and sex’ (37). As she liberates herself from the rigid bounds of femininity, she questions the pattern that has made her a ‘normal’ mother, and stops nagging her daughters. Most importantly, she understands that prescriptions only reduce people to roles, and concludes that they

Of the Nuclear Family and the Hibakusha

45

can’t make one happy: ‘There wasn’t any way you could get it right by doing what everyone else did’ (35). Gee delineates a female character liberating herself from patriarchal gender boundaries; she portrays how patriarchal norms of masculinity can be restricting too. Frank, for instance, chooses to leave home to keep his integrity. The novel also shows Henry, Lorna’s husband, as a man suffering from the gender roles imposed on him. He is just another individual surrounded by rules and patterns, reduced to a husband and a father trying to make money and be good, but often failing in doing so: He tried to be a man with all that he had, and the father of the family too. He always worked hard, as a decent father should. But he never made very much money, which shows that rule doesn’t help you. At first, when he worked in the Brewery, the money wasn’t too bad. But now that he had a family, he couldn’t do the watches, evenings. The Brewery was hell, without watches. So Henry wasn’t very happy. It was silly of him to think so. Fathers can’t expect to be happy. (111)

Like Prunella does as a young girl, Henry follows the rule as a boy and repeats: ‘be a good boy to your sister’ (112); and now as a father, he is expected to be strong, ‘big, slablike and serve as an oak front door’ (112). Squeezed between conventional expectations in their life both inside and outside the family, individuals suffer and fail to offer love and understanding to each other. The novel portrays what happens to the members of the Ship family as part of the tapestry, namely, a society that cannot sustain model families. The comment that the narrator makes on Lorna and Henry contributes to the novel’s objective handling of social problems in contemporary British society: ‘They shouldn’t have tried to have children while they were still children themselves’ (115). Here, we are reminded that they married and had children, in other words, they followed a pattern because they wanted to escape condemnation from the family that would only accept them as a married couple: marriage was the norm. The same rule now confines their daughter Angela and her boyfriend John; the same pattern pushes them to get married because cohabitation is not decent enough and because, as Angela recites, ‘You could never quite escape from your family’ (200). In its picture of contemporary British society, The Burning Book shows unemployment and poverty not only as main drivers behind familial problems, but also as forces threatening the peace and well-being of society. As the narrator summarizes the present condition of society, it is evident that violence and racism are triggered by economic conditions. The first image of general poverty is ‘The sun setting over the Empire’ (182). It is now the ‘sinking England’ where the little shops sink too, it is now ‘a nation of sinking shopkeepers’ (216). One of the many figures of the unemployed in the novel is Henry. He closes down his shop and stops repairing timepieces, which is the very thing he delights in doing; to keep the family, he can only find a job in a bar in a small hotel ‘after eighteen months on benefit, living on eggs and potatoes’ (217). Apart from their poor living conditions, he also suffers from a sense of uselessness; in a society that expects men to look after their families, being unemployed means an end to respect. For instance, Lorna’s mother mentions Henry in her letter only to ask if he could get a job; she recites a proverb that stigmatizes those who do not earn money as stupidly proud and fastidious: ‘ “Pride

46

Maggie Gee

doesn’t butter any Parsnips”. Especially these days and Christmas coming to . . .’ (277). Unemployment and disapproval are intimately connected. Lorna and Henry’s son Guy undergoes an alienation comparable to his father’s. When he leaves school because everyone says he is ‘dim’, he lines up at the unemployment office every fortnight ‘feeling terribly ashamed every time’ (17). The result of this pattern is that even at best, the unemployed just become passive members of society withdrawn into their own corners. If they become angry, they threaten the peaceful, orderly lives of the employed. The narrator’s reference to how unemployed youth are drawn to fascism and violence implies this: ‘As Britain grew smaller and smaller, they thought they could swell it by shouting’ (182). This comment adds a political dimension to Gee’s panoramic view of contemporary British society. The way society is organized does not allow the unemployed to function as ‘normal’ members of it. Alienation is another social problem: rigid class boundaries divide society and ensure that the poor are ostracized. The novel presents its characters as victims of these divisions. For instance, as the bearer of a fixed notion of class, Lorna’s grandmother Joanna, voicing a rule she has obviously long internalized, confirms: ‘You chose which drawer you would go in, and then you made sure you would fit’ (25). As the metaphor implies, there is no interaction between the ‘drawers’. The same class pattern applies to Lorna’s generation too. The moneyless are doomed to feel ashamed in public places. During their short stops at the Capri Grotto for coffee and cakes after shopping, with ‘the carrier bags full of veg’, Lorna’s daughters ‘blush as red as stain’ (55). They warn Lorna that nobody will be able to move if all the shopping bags are put down. But the truth is they fear that they will be judged by the things they could afford to buy; a feeling of inferiority pervades them despite Lorna’s encouraging self-satisfied air. Poverty and unemployment make socializing outside the family almost impossible. Inviting guests is also a risk because, Lorna complains, meat ‘costs half a week’s money’; therefore, having people for dinner would be too stressful to deal with (73). In brief, the social and economic conditions that the novel describes show that money and the means of making it divide people into categories. The culture shock that Lorna experiences when she visits her best friend Maisie’s house is indicative of the isolation that poor families suffer from. Maisie’s father is a farm worker, and her mother has lost her mental health. Lorna feels completely alienated from the different rules and patterns that Maisie’s family follows. Young Henry’s attraction to Lorna before they got married is also filled with early worries about the class difference: ‘To Henry, Lorna was posh. To own a shop was quite something’ (108). Here, the narrator focalizes on Henry and reveals his awareness in a tone that speaks for Gee’s solid materialism. Henry observes that the life of Lorna and her sisters is sharply different from his: ‘It was posh to leave your hair long and loose and have sisters whose names were all hissing. And Lorna said she had drunk wine. [. . .] Melissa, Clarissa and Lorna. Would she ever look at a Henry?’ (108). Lorna looks at him partly because he is confident and nicelooking, and largely because she wants to escape the gloom and poverty threatening her home too. Gee consistently exposes the dominant role that money plays in contemporary British society. Even an idyllic day that Henry and Lorna spend at Kew Gardens can be tainted by the shadow of money. As they enter the Tea Bar to warm up before they

Of the Nuclear Family and the Hibakusha

47

picnic, both spot the warning, ‘No food or drink whatsoever to be consumed here unless bought on the premises.’ (289). Luckily, since it is the first outing of their new life together after so many years, they remain joyful enough not to be demoralized by the writing in the Tea Bar. Gee’s treatment of poverty and unemployment as forces shaping the public and private lives of people in contemporary British society is interwoven with her portrayal of violence. Often induced by harsh living conditions, different types of violence at different levels become part and parcel of everyday life. Gee exposes this in her text not only by interweaving the voice of the hibakusha with her family saga, but also by inserting narratorial comments on the political landscape of Britain. Violence pervades the text, culminating in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it is also presented as a phenomenon that surrounds us in our everyday life. To illustrate this, the novel exposes an everyday conversation between friends drinking in a pub. Discussing war and poverty, which reduces them to passive observers, ‘sitting and waiting like sheep to be killed one day’, Henry and his friend try to capture their lost power in their bold use of slang. When the barman simply signals closing time and says ‘Time, gentlemen, please’ (78), they instantly start swearing at him, which leads to a fierce fight in the pub. The violence that so easily breaks out in the public places where people supposedly go to communicate with each other is a symptom of a different type of alienation. Gee skilfully situates this scene in a context suggesting that such aggressive behaviour is not limited to public space. Domestic violence is also one of the social problems of modern Britain, and lives side by side with aggression in public spaces. Going home from the pub, Henry’s feelings of resentment and helplessness are aggravated when he tries to hug Lorna and receives the response, ‘You should see yourself. Stupid bloody bastard’ (78). Henry’s swollen, bloody face infuriates Lorna; and when she calls him ‘disgusting’, what follows is ‘The Horror again. He had hit her, out on the landing’ (79). Henry, drunk, attempts to strangle her and attacks his son Guy. The overall impact of this aggression on Guy is total despondency and bitterness. The automatic response he makes to repeated acts of violence is a desire to ‘kill them all. . . .’ (81). Violence contaminates his imagination; Guy’s sex fantasies always involve violence. To regain his power and autonomy, Guy imagines himself making people do things as he masturbates; the depressed inner voice produces a distorted vision that dictates power: You had to have power over people. People never did things for love (at least they never did things for Guy) [. . .] they were down on their knees, and weeping. It was really fantastic doing it, but afterwards he felt depressed. It left you with nothing you wanted to do, nothing to do all evening. It sometimes seemed to Guy that his penis was the only living part of his body. He wished he could live inside it. He had found a safe source of joy. (162)

This consuming habit and excessive interest in his body further alienates him from healthy thoughts and communication; he is trapped by sexual sadism (162). Beaten by an acute sense of anger and unfairness, he has an intense ‘longing to burn and kill’ (196). He finds solace in ‘The Happy Land’, where PlayStation machines look to him ‘clean and masculine’. In this ‘happy land’, he plays with the idea of killing people,

48

Maggie Gee

giving orders: ‘SMART BOMB/THRUST/FIRE’ (197). Depicted as one of the boys who regularly attend such places, Guy represents the violence that is a central feature of contemporary British youth culture. Gee’s portrayal of Guy helps the reader see the forces behind this: ‘He was poor, unemployed, and ugly. He hadn’t enough money to play the machines. And even his mother didn’t care’ (196). There are many dynamics in culture that generate violent behaviour; for instance, scenes of fighting and domestic horror on television also instigate hostility and aggression. To underscore this, Gee inserts a scene in which silence is interrupted by the sounds of a fight on television: ‘Gun firing, then yells’ (80). Having no real power, Guy relies on fantasies; like his sex fantasies, he also enjoys dreams of being a colonel in the army and making ‘everybody listen to him in the end’ (197). In this ideal picture, there is no room for people from his real life; his imagination can only accept his sister Angela, but only on the unlikely condition that this future novelist will be appointed as ‘an Army Writer’ (198). Dealing with different forms of violence, Gee presents it as an important social problem contaminating contemporary society. Making the two world wars a back­ ground to the family saga, she considers violence as more than just a part of the tapestry; it is the threat that may destroy the tapestry itself. To this end, hostile behaviour in public and private spaces is echoed by Winston Churchill’s remark about the atomic bomb; for him the atomic bomb is just an innocent tool for defence after which babies can be ‘born satisfactorily’ (81). Portraying small-scale aggressions in English public and domestic life, Gee also places violence on a much bigger scale on her canvas, showing that aggression ultimately culminates in massacres. The scenes referring to British foreign policy reveal Gee’s political concerns. She seems to say that both parliamentary leaders and teachers in schools should do a lot more to stop violence. The novel shows Angela’s teacher Miss Tucker as politically ignorant, naively assuming that leaders are experts, clever men who always ‘want what’s best for us all’ (243). In response to Angela’s doubts about their skill in maintaining peace, she simply says, ‘Only don’t take things so personally’. As the class visits the House of Commons to see leaders at work, Angela’s doubts only grow: ‘But the giant fiction with the giant bombs was not being written in the Public Gallery. Clever men thought in small locked rooms, clever and grim old men. And sometimes the adjectives slip. Clever and mad old men’ (243). Frustrated, Angela meditates on the story of ‘one of these clever leaders’, the US Defence Secretary James Forrestall, who lost his life in a curious way. Musing about his death, said to be caused by a fall, in pyjamas, from his 16th floor room at the National Naval Medical Center, but which obviously calls his mental health into question, Angela reflects that Miss Tucker does not teach such stories. Narratorial interventions also propose the idea that if leaders look strong and important, it is merely a matter of perspective. Through Angela and the narrator, Gee makes her criticism of political leaders, and by means of the metaphor of the stage to describe life, she reminds her reader that: ‘Their size is a trick of the light’ (21). They are presented as powerful figures ‘with final control of lightning’ (21), but in fact, they have nothing to rely on but image: ‘Their outsides are frail lacquered cases. Their sound-effects come from machines. Their scripts are written by hacks’ (21–2). Applying this general comment to a more specific case, Gee condemns Winston Churchill, who was the leader of the United Kingdom during World War II. The text cites what he said of the British atom bomb to show

Of the Nuclear Family and the Hibakusha

49

how confused he was about the concept of ‘beauty’: ‘it went off beautifully’ (231). The narrator also recalls the message he received after the atomic tests, which shows powerful men as reckless and indifferent: ‘After the Alamogordo atomic test Churchill was handed this message: Babies satisfactorily born’ (67). With passages that systematically juxtapose the condition of British society with images of war, The Burning Book is also a contestation of war as the most visible and dangerous form of violence. The narrator makes an ironic comment about the names of the atomic bombs dropped in August 1945: given human attributes, ‘Thin Boy’ and ‘Fat Man’ were actually designed to eradicate human life in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Here, Gee offers a reading that melts her family saga into the texture of nuclear tragedy. And the text achieves a serious critical tone through Gee’s skilful juxtaposition of the inner voice of Lorna’s father Mervyn, ‘babies ought to be spoiled’, with the narrator’s comment that ‘Babies should not be killed’ (83). To ‘spoil’, that is, indulge, or, as spoil also means, ‘wreck’ and ‘destroy’ his baby, Mervyn becomes a horse singing ‘Gallopy, gallopy, gallopy’, while Thin Boy and Fat Man drop on pregnant women (83). The text offers the image of Urukami Church as the emblem of global violence exerted by human beings throughout history. It delineates innocent people who were paying their regular church visit, lying ‘heaped in the water now dark with blood’. Urukami Church in Nagasaki was completely destroyed by the atomic bomb on 9 August 1945. When people congregated to hold Mass, heat waves and collapsed walls instantly killed them en masse. The tragic coincidence already underscores the capacity of human beings both to envision unity in a solemn form and to cause destruction. But Gee makes it more visible by the irony that is generated by ‘a vision of hell’, punctuated by Churchill’s statement one more time: ‘Babies satisfactorily born’ (83). The bitter irony sounds both as a direct criticism of political leaders who underestimate the effects of violence, and as an urgent call for peace. The narrator leaves the reader with grave questions: ‘What if Babies kill babies?’, ‘What if soldiers are butchers and babies are just raw meat?’ (67). Throughout the text, Gee’s critical tone about war and violence is heard at different pitches. Sometimes, she pities humankind because they are busy finding rules and patterns that imprison them in loveless units, but are unprotected against the real risks: ‘Rules have not yet been found which are proof against radiation’ (40). In the end, the narrator speaks through Einstein, and concludes: ‘We are worse than beasts, [. . .] Stupid. Stupidest. Stupid’ (303). Like the author in Dying, in Other Words, Gee’s narrator in The Burning Book ‘make(s) sorrow speak’, and creates an egalitarian platform by putting the leaders ‘backstage, with final control of the lighting’ (21). She regularly speaks from the perspective of the under-represented and silenced. This vast canvas includes the hibakusha and a full panorama of British society; and also placed on this canvas are ethnocentric rightwing policies and racism, which is a form of violence. While meticulously exposing the forces beyond racism as poverty and unemployment, Gee calls for a unifying vision. The silenced black citizens will be given a more direct voice in Gee’s later novel The White Family, but by ridiculing the supporters of the fascist nationalist party, Gee openly reveals her position in the discussion of racism. Poverty, unemployment and violence easily feed the racist, nationalist vein in the country. Gee explicates the mindset of nationalists through Guy. He is 16, and cannot

50

Maggie Gee

bear to think about the future: ‘There was nothing for Guy but the Dole’ (195). A dropout with no job to support him, he joins the New Empire Party because it makes him feel important and useful. Thus, he finds solace in uniting with its followers who hold that loving England means hating the ‘niggers’ (206). Hope for England, for them, resides in purifying England from the ‘coloured’ and waging war against the threats to the country’s purity. Rejected by the army because of his ‘weak chest’ and irregular ‘heart’, Guy plans to take revenge on those who leave him out (17). In uniform he looks tall and just like the others; he wants to be ‘frightening’. Watching the anti-war protesters, and getting angry about their claim on England, he fantasizes that there must be many ‘coloureds’ among them. He hates black people because he thinks that they are the very people who make him less privileged; he muses, ‘perhaps he would never get a proper job. The jobs had been taken by coloureds [. . .] unfair, unfair, unfair’ (208). The worst thing is the unemployment office, ‘the office was full of niggers. There were even some behind the counter’ (195). He also thinks that people make things easy for ‘niggers’, ‘whereas everything felt hard, for Guy. Unfair, unfair, unfair’ (192). Reminding us of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968, Guy thinks there are some white people stupidly supporting the rights of black citizens. So, anti-militarist protesters for Guy are second-rate creatures knowing nothing about how to save England; he feels resentful because ‘They were supposed to be representing England’ (208). Guy’s own version of patriotism, fostered by the extremist party he joins, is extremely odd: Nazis, to him, are their German brothers, who he thinks have been ‘Much . . . mis- . . . presented’ (171), but he isn’t even educated enough to get the word right, which shows that his historical views are to be discounted. The ‘New British Empire Party’ in the novel fights ‘for a future free from coloureds’ (160). Believing they are threatening his home, his garden (173), the Party’s leader Ray Perkins preaches that ‘niggers’ should be ‘hacked into little bits if they went with white girls’ (167). He cites them as ‘funny brown friends’ (170). What draws Guy to ‘Mr’ Perkins is the fear that is evoked by his gigantic size; the smaller Guy feels, the nearer he draws to this thrilling image of a butcher flourishing his bloody knives and waving them about for a joke (167). Mr Perkins puts his son and Guy on a mission: ‘You gotta learn to look after England’ (169), he says, and corrects Guy when he uses the term ‘Britain’ instead, saying that ‘the two sweetest words in the language’ are ‘British Em-pire’ (170). And Mr Perkins’ xenophobia extends to all that is not English: ‘And Pakis and jewboys and wogs and coons’, he thinks, are the same: ‘They’re the vermin’, ‘the rats in the cellar. Dirty, greedy’ (172). They threaten English people’s safety and comfort; no wonder his fascism gives him a macho role protecting ‘decent’ women from these ‘vermins’ (172); he sees them all as potential rapists. He is full of rage not only against black British people but also against those who welcome them: lawyers supporting their rights are ‘commy’, ‘sticking up for them’ (173); girls, vicars, students and social workers are ‘rubbish’. If English people lose their pensions, their National Health Service and jobs, it is, he thinks, because of the coloureds (173). He heroically calls the English to ‘unite!’. Ironically, this ‘strong’ hero of poor, unemployed boys is, in reality, a weak husband ‘hopeless in bed’ (176). His wife Martha Perkins thinks that Ray is just leading a ‘bunch of dangerous loonies’ (175); she knows that if Guy had seen Big Ray in bed with his

Of the Nuclear Family and the Hibakusha

51

‘small cock’, he ‘would have felt quite let down’ (176). Mrs Perkins thinks that ‘darkies’ ‘all the same’ are ‘people’, and she always finds those she meets ‘quite pleasant’: indeed, she plans to leave Ray when she feels stronger, go to the police and tell them all she knows about their plans for the coloureds (175). She sleeps with a West Indian bouncer, Jimmy, who Ray calls a ‘nigger’; knowing about Ray’s plans, Jimmy one night organizes a raid on Ray’s shop; Martha pretends to know nothing, and takes revenge on the cruel Ray who always thinks she is dumb and stupid. Gee’s narrator aligns with Martha and against Ray. Although she does not speak through a black character here, Gee places one more sympathetic black character, Prunella’s Pakistani boyfriend Rashid, in the book. He is characterized as a sensitive man, and through Rashid, Gee shows the prejudices in British society against black citizens even at times when the context is not explicitly nationalistic or ethnocentric. Prunella muses that if her daughters knew she had a black boyfriend, they would be shocked and automatically call him a ‘Paki bastard’, and then the narrator comments on how hard it is to erase prejudices and really see black people as equals: ‘(good manners are often skin deep)’ (38). Later in Gee’s writing, characters like Ray and Rashid will speak in their own powerful voices, another element that renders Maggie Gee very important as a white woman writer in the map of contemporary British fiction. As in Gee’s Grace and The White Family, The Burning Book presents racists as frequently adopting homophobic attitudes too, suggesting that violence in one particular area generates violence in another. The white English teacher, Henshaw, who is ‘known to like niggers’ is, to Guy, a ‘swarmy-voiced poofter’, ‘worse than the niggers’ (192). Guy’s hatred knows no bounds; he is also a misogynist, thinking women are ‘all pretty stupid’, creatures whose talk one has to put up with (168). Following the racist ideals of the Party, he is ready to label his sister ‘filthy’, and even hate her, because ‘She likes niggers’, she is a ‘nigger-lover’ (165). The fact that the chapter of this book exploring the theme of racism and nationalist tendencies is titled ‘Chapter of the Loveless’ helps the ‘love is the cure’ leitmotif in Gee’s writing surface. As in Dying, in Other Words, the novel suggests ‘reaching out’, listening to each other with empathy, as one of the solutions. The narrator explains that Guy’s soul did not get any love, and in return it never grew lovable. Underscoring the importance of communication and love, she holds that ‘Nothing can grow without sunlight. In the dark it grew shrivelled and small’ (193). Since Guy thinks ‘yes, he was little, he was poor, nobody loved him’ (164), he grows up stunted and finds the strength he longs for in the fascist ‘New British Empire Party’. Accordingly, the novel presents Angela and John as model lovers who understand each other and listen when one or the other grows anxious or fearful; in the same vein, Gee portrays Henry and Lorna remembering in old age that they love each other and shows that this is what has kept them together during many years of darkness. The novel claims that violence and racism grow when people fail to understand each other, lose their potential to love and feel unloved. Therefore, the fascist ‘New British Empire Party’ becomes an arena for people like Guy to get the illusion that they can be important, if not [important] to people they care for, than [important] to those they hate; thus they can change things. Drawn to Big Ray, the leader, feeling ‘the nearest thing to love’, Guy falls ‘in love with being strong’ (160). Gee’s narrator, becoming a mouthpiece for Gee, reflects, ‘This is a

52

Maggie Gee

problem for novels’. These small people lie on the page of her novel, and she is not sure if it manages to represent them fairly enough, or if it can contain them: ‘(I hardly think they fit in.)’ (193). Despite all the pain and sorrow voiced in it, the text upholds a typical element in Gee’s writing, the belief in the potential of people to create a better world, and thus ends on a hopeful note. Again, the ideal of peace and well-being is presented as a state enjoyed in public places like Kew Gardens, a unifying strand in Gee’s fiction. Individual moments of peace and happiness experienced in the open air with other people, testify to the strong theme of connectedness. In that sense, the scene with Henry and Lorna in Kew Gardens becomes a motif of heaven on earth, and prefigures a fuller realization of this theme in Gee’s novel The Flood. The royal botanic gardens, an image of beauty constructed by human beings for human beings and for plants and seeds from all over the world, offer everyone ‘A HAPPY DAY’. In the context of the novel, it also becomes a higher stage for Henry and Lorna, a place where they recapture the happiness long ago lost in the hustle and bustle of their difficult lives. Their symbolic reunion in the garden under ‘Ailanthus altissima, the “Tree of Heaven”  ’ (293), presents the reader with a contemporary version of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. To their surprise, which is reminiscent of the bewildered Adam and Eve, they can stay outside under the tree despite the November cold. Seduced by the beauty of nature, Lorna says ‘I want to cuddle you Henry’ (295), and soon Henry merrily states how much more wonderful than anything Lorna is (296). This new state of intimacy has in it the awareness of their mutual love; the Edenic bliss they enjoy reads like a reversal of the original story of Adam and Eve. With their knowledge of the death of their sons, their own sinful nature and that of their fellow beings, the hostility between brothers, of labour and love, Henry and Lorna are now free of their innocence. But such knowledge gained through painful experiences instils in them the determination not to make mistakes again. They want to preserve this peace and happiness between them, adding a utopian element to the darkness of the Ship family’s story. Blending individual happiness with universal peace, the narrative voice immediately switches to describe the Day of Peace in the Peace Park in Japan and strikes the keynote: Inscribed on the Peace Memorial, carved hopefully on the grey granite: Rest in peace. The mistake shall never be made again. (245)

Gee brings peace and reconciliation for her writer character Angela too, a harbinger of the works that an artist at peace with herself will create. This reconciliation too is gained in Kew Gardens. Angela comes to terms with her mother Lorna during the time she spends under a weeping willow on a sunny day; she is purged of feelings of hatred and anger, and longs to be one with her loved ones. She captures a state of wholeness and concludes that: ‘Wholeness returns in time. All that they need is time’ (156). As she grasps the knowledge of interconnectedness through a peaceful day in nature, Angela sees everything as particles of the same substance: light. A long paragraph in parenthesis brings together all the characters: ‘IMMORTALS’ and ‘MORTALS’, members of the family, past and present, dead and alive, all are united as if in a new imaginary family picture that the reader takes in her/his mind’s eye. This family picture is made possible

Of the Nuclear Family and the Hibakusha

53

by the ‘light’. The light means two things: the glory of natural light, and the terrible light of the atom bomb, which yet has its own unearthly beauty. The novel’s first ending is the ‘final violence’ caused by the atomic war breaking out and killing all. Darkness, literally three dark pages, follows the narrator’s voice reporting: ‘All was as if it had never been. / Blackening paper, the last leaves burning’ (298). To resist and oppose this ending, Gee counterposes another short chapter called ‘. . . Against Ending’, in which she gives a life-affirming image of birds: ‘Birds, lightbodied and strong on the wind, make signs of love over Europe. Brave on the vast cruel wind, over Moscow, Washington, London’ (303). This image can be read as a bridge between the past, present and future in that it recalls the archetypal image of doves, harbingers of life, in the ancient flood myth, but also stands for the contemporary world in a state of peace. Pasting her text into bird-like shapes on the paper, Gee successfully embodies her vision in a printed image, literally making the novel a paper world, visible enough, perhaps, to stimulate peaceful scenarios in real life. Thus, Gee’s contemporary version of the condition-of-England novel extends its borders to the whole world and offers a comment on the human condition: ‘Consider the sheep in the fields. They maim not, neither do they kill. Yet Attila in all his crimson glory is not as deep in blood as some of these’ (41). Like The Ice People, The White Family and The Flood, The Burning Book sets out to warn its readers against all sorts of violence as well as to portray their world in its complexity.

3

Telescopic View of England, England: Light Years (1985)

Light Years, a love story interposed by a non-fictional account of the universe, is a subverted romance. Framing the story of the year-long separation between Lottie and Harold Segall, an English couple, Gee’s frequent non-fictional insertions promote an awareness of how infinitesimal we human beings are in this starry void. Dividing the focus between the love story and the characters’ perception of the world they live in, Gee proposes an outlook where we see ourselves as parts of the universe. Accordingly, while the first epigraph, from Dante’s Divine Comedy, ‘Paradiso’, places an emphasis on the power of love, ‘Love, which moves the sun and the stars’, the second epigraph from The World of Wonders (c. 1883) highlights the significance of keeping a perspective refreshed by a sense of wonder. Thus, right from the opening sentence, ‘In a year, light travels six million million miles’, the reader is implicitly requested to devise a perspective juxtaposing historical and universal planes of reality and see things from a wide window. Gee’s third-person narrator provides ample information about space and time for the reader: [Light] flies from the sun to the earth in eight minutes. It crosses the whole solar system in eleven hours. [. . .] The whole observable universe would take thousands of millions of years for light to cross. But a single year is a very long time to us. (13)

In a way, these scientific facts help position the reader to see the romance material, namely the separation of Lottie and Harold, as detached observers. For the same purpose, while one episode gives the story’s historical coordinates, 21 December in the mid-1980s, and figures Lottie asking when Harold will be back, another reminds us of the truth about the cosmos and our place in it: ‘Set down at random in the cosmos, the observer’s chances of arriving near a planet are one in a billion trillion trillion’ (137). As in many other Gee novels, the reader is similar to a spectator in an epic drama in which identification with the characters on stage is constantly interrupted by narratorial interventions and alienation techniques. This detached position both allows for impartiality in examining characters as individual cases and endorses the realist strand in Gee’s writing. Therefore, although as a love story it generates an emotional response from the reader, the novel also gives a serious critique of the state of Britain. Placed within a framework of ‘infinite space’, the condition and social problems of

Telescopic View of England, England

55

contemporary British society are presented from a universal standpoint. Moreover, encouraging an attitude of reading the text while also thinking about the reality outside of it, the novel also calls for action; the narrator addresses the reader and says: ‘Gaze up into the sky from off the page you are reading and try to pierce as far as your eye can reach, and then as far as your mind can conceive’(12). In this call to action, Harold is presented as an example to the reader; realizing the vastness of the universe, he can go beyond himself and his everyday worries. A victim of love whose life ‘had shrunk to the sound of that phone’ (53), Harold sees himself like a planet, Pluto, the ‘smallest, coldest’ one and says that ‘Though the sun is around three thousand million miles away, Pluto cannot escape’ (64). As he compares the bodies in the solar system to human beings, Harold develops a consciousness of the presence of others: ‘There are a lot of bodies in the Solar System. [. . .] But there are many others who are virtual strangers. Strangers with fantastic names’ (37). On reading many books on science, Harold starts to internalize this longer perspective and shifts his focus from everyday problems to life outside himself: ‘He tried to think about stars. The stars were clear, and brilliant’ (175). Warning those who cannot see the wood for the trees, Light Years can be seen as a project to increase the reader’s overarching perspective. Interestingly, the structure of the novel is based on the annual cycle of nature. In tune with its title ‘Light Years’, the novel starts with a scene in January and ends with a Christmas scene that signals a new order. In a sense, the order of nature, the four seasons, anchors the text in a space that is juxtaposed with the unstable nature of everyday life. This fictional world that rests on the cyclical nature of the universe also corresponds not only to the ‘against ending’ motif, but also to the theme of interconnectedness in Gee’s writing, which offers a comic antidote to the grim and grey facts boldly documented. At times, episodes and insertions from the Victorian text, The World of Wonders, function as narratorial comments. More often than not, the scientific data enhance an allegorical reading. For instance, an explosion in the planet Mercury, which ‘breaks open thousands of smaller wounds in the surface through which molten lava streams’, corresponds to the emotional explosion in Harold’s inner world (259). The ‘sudden and violent’ explosion shaking the whole planet is parallel to Harold’s crisis, culminating first in his mother’s death and then in his father’s arrival after so many years. This eruption also brings with it a new consciousness and he starts thinking: ‘I don’t want to be a lonely naked man, strutting the beach for company’ (270). Thus, the scientific data are employed as an intertextual device to mark the thematic development in the novel. Harold obtains awareness as he compares his life against cosmic time; he thinks how foolish it is to waste life ‘in regrets’: [Harold] tried to concentrate on those two words, on the size of a human lifespan. There were four or five billion of us on earth. Four billion lives being lived. But somehow the whole four billion lives were a tiny layer between past and future. A layer thin as human skin. The tracts of time each side seemed enormous. On his own, he felt four billion times less. (221)

This metaphorical thinking brings him home as he resolves to call his mother, to ‘phone home’. An awareness of the universal space and time contradicting the limited

56

Maggie Gee

perceptive of human beings stretches the narrow bounds of Lottie’s mindset too; as she opens her window to the starry void outside, she starts asking herself challenging questions: Why am I here in Paris, hundreds of miles from my son? Why am I here on August 6, hundreds of years from the man I first married? Why doesn’t anything last? Why does all come crashing down? [. . .] She went and closed the window, and stood for a moment, hugging herself. What have I done with my life? Why does it all feel wrong? (220)

The consciousness that she is a part of the universe ultimately reveals to Lottie the absurdity of her whims and caprices, leading first to self-love and then to love that, as the second epigraph exposes, ‘moves the world’. This symbolic act of opening the window brings a new vista for her. The widening and enriching cosmic view in the novel not only helps individual characters gain an understanding about themselves, but it also gives a telescopic view of contemporary Britain. This view sharpens the depiction of the decay in the country that makes the novel as a ‘condition-of-England novel’ of the 1980s. Like Swift’s portrayal of Lilliput in Gulliver’s Travels, a miniature England of his day, Gee offers a satirical view of Britain in her miniature Great Britain. It describes recession and high unemployment during Thatcher’s leadership, which is evident in the playfully ironic tone of the narrator as she describes Lottie’s indifference to her mother-in-law’s death: ‘She said how sorry she was, as if the prime minister had died’ (327). Gee’s satire on the state of Britain is embodied in the image of an amusement park, Tucktonia, where there is ‘a sort of Great Britain in miniature’ (148). By placing this park at a pivotal point in the novel as a plot device, Light Years presents England’s run-down state as a problem to be investigated. While giving a portrayal of social problems in contemporary British society, Tucktonia, Harold’s ‘pet place’, advertised in the local library as ‘Europe’s largest model landscape’, offers a caricature of England and Englishness. Like Julian Barnes’ widely acclaimed fantasy England, England (published 13  years later), which also rests on the idea of a miniature version of England as a theme park, Gee’s Light Years presents the image of a real-life miniature model of Britain. The short chapter that shows Harold and his girlfriend visiting this theme park explores the model Britain as material for Gee’s satire. The image of England as a very old-fashioned and traditional society that can offer neither comfort and safety nor hopeful prospects reads like Gee’s representation of contemporary Britain. The printed guide to this theme park built in  1976 says it promises to depict ‘Britain’s architecture’, ‘her natural beauty, her transport and industry, her technological achievements’ (150), but, ironically, Tucktonia looks ‘more American, surely, than British’ (149). Saying that one cannot tell the difference between the two, Harold implies the harrowing effects of capitalism and the consumer culture sneaking into his good old England. It is a ‘strange country’ in ‘desolation’, which has apparently undergone ‘some great depression’ (150). In this allegorical piece, St Paul is reduced to a ‘grey plastic’ (150). Although pictures in the guide show the park ‘bright and glossy’, the only bright spot is, ironically, a nuclear power station: ‘The trains moved and the

Telescopic View of England, England

57

planes moved but the people were all dead. The model people of Model Great Britain had been frozen where they stood, many of them in the last convulsions of mystery diseases’ (151). This critique of investment in nuclear weaponry endorses Gee’s call to peace and disarmament in The Burning Book and Grace. Gee is also critical about what Tucktonia can offer for recreation. For instance, the pub called ‘The Golfers’ Arms’, has the air of gloom pervading the country; the place people attend in order to communicate is, paradoxically, full of ‘shouting people, trying to get drunk enough to drive into a wall before Sunday early closing’ (152). That it is described as ‘a nightmare of dogs and bags and electronic rock and Space Invaders’ signifies the theme of chaos in the public life of British people. Corresponding to an image of the urban setting in the earlier pages of the novel, ‘the faint urban glare of the sky’, Tucktonia suggests a total decline (14). Coin-operated models do not work, nor do the church bells toll. The ball in the miniature cricket match has vanished. Nothing works properly in this park; a non-flying space ship, an oversized rubber castle, blue electric trains, lorries delivering things to the Kelloggs’ factory, a model oil rig on a real lake, a cricket match and a church wedding, all these representations of Great Britain give the image of a country in decay as if devastated by ‘pitiless winds or the blast from some bomb’ (150). That Gee draws this scene from the viewpoint of her writer/scholar character also feeds on her critique of academia. It is ironic that Harold is smart enough to see Tucktonia as a metaphor for the collapse of social welfare, but only finds it funny. Trying to cheer up April who hates this ‘gloomy’ place, he makes a comment that reveals his indifference to social problems: ‘I think the whole place is magical. It’s a metaphor, don’t you see? I mean, Britain is like this. Nothing working and everything going to seed, and all the old rituals going wrong. I think, it’s simply classic’ (151). April cannot understand the joy that Harold gets in observing decay and criticizes him: ‘It’s all right for people like you’; I think her comment functions to shed light on the gap between the intelligentsia and the ordinary people. It also implies that unlike the modernists who brooded over decay, intellectuals today enjoy their detached position and see failure in society as an object of parody. This reads as a reminder – in line with Maggie Gee’s ars poetica explicated in her first two novels – a position which sees art and literature in constant interaction with society and its members. The satirical vein in Light Years is also strengthened by Gee’s portrayal of decay in the countryside. Through the scenes in which Harold visits his birth county, the environs of Bournemouth in Dorset, as ‘a Londoner’, the text informs the reader about pollution in nature. As Harold sits in a bar ‘watching the big boats swell and fall’, he sees a warning about industrial poisoning and disease. The notice board has a lengthy message with a list of toxic chemicals in seawater. Remembering how he loved these docks and ships as a child, Harold grimly questions industrial progress and asks: ‘Was it an advance, to see everything black?’ (280). When he visits the train station and clambers aboard the miniature train which he used to take as a child, his tone gets bittersweet and nostalgic; no longer fitting the little train, he feels ‘very bald and much too large’ (281). This recognition of the irreparable losses both in himself and in the life of the country adds to the overall sense of decay in the image of what was once ‘Merrie England’. In a state of melancholy, Harold thinks that he ‘hate[s] the things spoiled or lost’ (281).

58

Maggie Gee

But still, like Vanessa’s process of awakening that takes place at her childhood home in the countryside in My Cleaner, Harold’s experience in Poole stimulates a change and liberation of outlook. As opposed to Lottie who sees city people as taxpayers waiting in long queues, with ‘hopeless faces and querulous voices’, Harold can see people as individuals here (134). Light Years becomes a satire of modern-day England also by its juxtaposition of London and Paris. Both Lottie and Harold leave for Paris, separately, which gives them the chance to reflect on their life in England. Feeling ‘a little envious’, Lottie concludes that as Londoners, they are stuck in a consumer culture and resonating the remark supposedly made by Napoleon, ‘England is a nation of shopkeepers’, she thinks: ‘Paris was the city of private lives. London was shops and offices’ (169). Similarly, Harold’s route back to London on the train gives an arid image of his country, long departed from the state of ‘Merrie England’: Not easy to think on the London train, with the hangovers, and the overtired schoolkids, and an old man snoring, looking desperately ill, scalp frail and freckled when his head fell forwards. Outside the window, salmon-pink houses were eating the fields, which had yellowed in his absence. Stubble was burning, some already black. Everything was suddenly going too fast. (237)

Gee explores the divide between rich and poor as a significant element of her satire. As The Flood also implies, Light Years shows poverty and the wide gap between rich and poor, with its associated social problems. Not only fostering feelings of enmity, poverty is also the root cause of theft. Like Dirk in The Flood, who steals a Hopper painting from rich Lottie’s house, Smeggy envies his friend Davey’s life of luxury and breaks into their house to steal his mother Lottie’s jewellery. The detailed portrayal of Smeggy’s workingclass house juxtaposed with Davey’s reads like an article from Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1851). As Lottie resolves to find the flat to get back her jewellery, she witnesses the wretched living conditions of the poor. Even a very short walk in the suburb makes her feel that she has gone ‘back in time’ to ‘another century’. For a rich woman like Lottie who can afford 500 pounds’ worth of flowers to celebrate spring, this place does not feel real at all. So, she perceives the whole scene as fiction: It was not quite believable, a set from a film. Like Dickens, but changing the flavour of Dickens, as if Dickens meant to depress everyone when he did those wonderfully squalid descriptions. The windows were tiny eyes, set high, grilled with wood to stop them seeing. Some of the street lamps had not lit up. They couldn’t, they were useless stumps. (287)

Sardonically perceptive here, Lottie seems like a character in a condition-of-England novel written by Dickens, in the sense that the passage both portrays harsh living conditions and the cleft between the two nations, rich and poor, not in Dickens’ time but in contemporary Britain. Lottie’s depiction of the derelict quarter with families living in squalid conditions makes possible a critical commentary on the gap between the centre and the periphery. She becomes a typical Dickensian caricature when she sees, in surprise, that her

Telescopic View of England, England

59

‘A to Z London’ guide has no symbol for slums. This parodic Alice-in-Wonderland scene in which Lottie discovers the slums shows that poor districts in London are a complete terra incognita for the rich. The cooking she smells that is ‘like no food she knew’ adds to the alienation between the rich and poor (289). With the addition of a tall, thin, unsmiling man who spots her as a stranger, and his black dog barking furiously at Lottie, the scene almost portrays Dickens’ criminal trainer Fagin and his dogs (287). Lottie’s experience with the London map exposes the different ways the ‘two nations’ are perceived and represented in a sharply ironic way: And surely they had made [the slums] look small on purpose. They couldn’t have drawn it to scale. It’s vast. She imagined the centre of the A to Z entirely given over to grimy blackness. She was glad they had made it look small. Close-up, full-size, it was out of control. When she finally found where she was on the map, she knew she must penetrate further in. Into that vast brick block with its tiny, sometimes broken windows. (288)

So, the novel suggests that working-class culture is wiped out from the map of contemporary culture and rendered invisible. Further on in the novel, Lottie becomes a mouthpiece for the stereotypical view demonizing the working classes. Her rage against Davey’s wish to support the miners on strike testifies to the indifference of the rich to poverty. Davey shows her a list of the food that the strikers need, only to hear his mother’s hostile tirade: ‘What? Are you raiding my kitchen? To subsidize some mob? Are they making children do their dirty work? Do you realise what you are doing is stealing? You’ve been picking up tricks from your dirty little friends’ (304). This theme of a rich woman’s failure to empathize with the miners contributes to the social panorama, painted as realistically as Gaskell does in North and South or Dickens in Hard Times. Gee wonderfully intertwines the bigger scene, namely her panorama of British society, with the story of individual lives. Lottie’s son Davey’s comment about Harold reveals the rift not only between Lottie and Harold but also between the rich and poor in contemporary Britain: Harold would like the miners. He’s probably really depressed about the miners. Harold is on their side. You don’t take Harold seriously. You just want him to be like you. That’s probably why he walked out on you. But you haven’t changed a bit. You spend all that money on a fucking word processor. Harold doesn’t like machines, Harold even fused the electric kettle. You’re selfish . . . selfish . . . selfish . . . you think we all want whatever you want . . . I hope he doesn’t come back to you! You don’t deserve it! You don’t! (305)

Making Davey a sensitive and appealing figure who has sympathy with the miners on strike, the narrator encourages our identification with him and thus solidarity with workers. Like the scene of the demonstration against cuts in Lost Children, this reference to the 1984–85 miners’ strike adds to the realist and consciousness-raising tone of the novel. Light Years also criticizes the sense of superiority the moneyed have over the poor, through the character of Amanda, the cleaning lady, which can

60

Maggie Gee

be regarded as My Cleaner’s Mary Tendo in embryo. The tension between Lottie and Amanda, posed as economic opposites, provides a skilful portrayal of the master and slave dialectic in contemporary capitalist society. Amanda knows that however close they might be, no employer can ‘actually’ see her as ‘[a] person, not a- dogsbody’ (241). While Amanda is supposed to discern all the ‘little ways’ of the family members she serves, Lottie cannot remember Amanda’s distaste for Chinese food even after being told ‘fifty times’, which obliterates any idea of equality. Despite the generous help and solidarity she receives from Amanda, Lottie can instantly forget all that and scold her rudely: ‘Amanda, I’d rather you cleaned the sink than told me what my son means’ (73). In the critical texture of the novel, Amanda becomes a wiser voice articulating the deep-seated class instincts of the rich. Light Years’ critique extends to the growth of ignorance in society, and deals with it as one of the results of educational decline. As she also does through Angela’s comments in The Burning Book, Gee turns a critical eye on the schooling in contemporary Britain. For instance, the birthday card on the bunch of flowers that Hugo sends to Lottie testifies to declining literacy. As the narratorial comment puts it explicitly, the misspelt message on the card scribbled by the young florist shows that: ‘People didn’t care anymore’. To illustrate the loss of interest in print culture, the novel also presents Davey as the only avid reader at his school; naturally, to his friends, he is an odd boy, a ‘mutant’, an ‘extraterrestrial’ (89). Ted, Harold’s landlord in Boscombe, also offers a similar comment on reading; he thinks that today’s young people are products of such poor education that they are like ‘machines’: ‘Bloody silly things. Today’s teenagers. That’s what they are like. Won’t find one reading a book these days’ (97). Through the critical remarks of Harold and Ted in conversation, Gee also comments on how contemporary book culture is affected by ignorance; when Harold interprets a rising interest in porn as ‘the bond between lonely single men’ (97), Ted agrees and holds that real books are ‘Victorian books’ (98). The novel explores the widening gap between the educated and the ignorant through Harold and Lottie too. Their marriage displays conflicts between Harold, a ‘libertarian socialist’ (68) and Lottie, an ignorant neoliberal for whom the life of the unemployed in council flats is just ‘interesting’ and ‘exciting’ (93). Lottie is as far from understanding history as life itself; for her, it is just a series of dates. Similarly, she finds Harold’s handwriting ‘impossibly frustrating’ and calls it ‘scribbling, tiny ants of ink’(47). Moreover, justifying her lack of interest in his writing, she asserts that ‘Life’s too short to spend poring over writing as – well – idiosyncratic, as yours’, and sees Harold as a useless critic writing frightful textbooks only to teach ‘other people to criticize’ (48). Harold’s novel is ‘obscure’ writing that spreads ‘doubt and confusion’ in a ‘wicked’ way (48). Amanda, representing poor, uneducated, older women in Britain, also deems Harold’s job not a profession but ‘just playing about with books’ (50). Gee’s plot shows Harold from Amanda’s point of view as a weak man who scribbles in his study to make ‘a bob or two’ (50). As such, the novel presents Lottie and Amanda, both antagonistic to Harold the writer, as caricatures of increasing ignorance in Thatcherite Britain (22). Elaborating on another rift in society, between the educated and ignorant, Gee is also critical of the aloofness of the intelligentsia, and perhaps to that extent, she is sometimes

Telescopic View of England, England

61

on Lottie’s and Amanda’s side; in that sense, Harold is a prototype of the more fully developed writer characters such as Angela and Moira in The Flood, Thomas in The White Family and Vanessa Henman in both My Cleaner and My Driver. Marginalized by the decline in culture, these academics, intellectuals and writers are seen as aliens. Each a potential ‘Johnny Head-in-Air’, who ‘need a bit of organising’, they are odd people, by no means ‘awfully practical’ (55). To reinforce their isolation and obscurity, the novel presents Harold as a stranger in a small city, a ‘homeless’ person; when landlords are hibernating in the cold weather, he is hopelessly trying to find a place to sleep with a little sum of money (66). Recalling Orwell’s poor and lonely poet, Gordon Comstock in his Keep the Aspidistra Flying, Harold goes out to look for a room, in a cold climate. In his borrowed overcoat with white spots of toothpaste on it, Harold is ‘very far from the image of a desirable tenant’ (66). Constantly rejected by landlords, Harold becomes an embodiment of his own fall from grace. Finally, like most of the writer characters in Gee’s works, such as Lorna in Dying, in Other Words, Angela in The Burning Book and Mary Tendo in My Cleaner, he finds a room ‘upstairs’, which symbolizes his aloofness. It also provides him with the space to get a ‘personal god’s eye view of things’; ‘windows and balconies’, favourite parts of his new world, encourage his inherent desire to observe (96). But as a writer character in his attic, Harold starts to represent percep­ tiveness about others; even when he needs time alone to reconstruct himself and organize his new life, he can’t help but care about other people in this room upstairs right under the sky. He thinks to himself: ‘Other people’s lives still leaked upstairs, other people’s worries could seep through the floorboards’ (95). In a sense, he acknowledges that as a writer, it is impossible to be indifferent to other people’s worries; like Moira in Dying, in Other Words, Harold knows that as a writer he will ‘make sorrow speak’ (95). While the scene in which Harold desperately looks for a place to live can be seen as an implicit criticism of the housing policies of the liberal governments, a theme which is fully explored in Lost Children, it is definitely a satire on the conditions that Britain offers to its writers and scholars. Since it is impossible to find the time to write his novel as a full-time academic, Harold has to give up his teaching job; he gains time, but now it is impossible to live on the royalties from his textbooks. He feels himself a total failure, who has only ‘[f]ive A-level textbooks, a broken marriage, some yellowing notes and a handful of dust’ (234). He seeks consolation in comparing himself to Tolstoy, in vain: ‘Tolstoy started writing in his forties, didn’t he?’ (223). Gee’s satire on scholars’ conditions is layered and complex, because the academy is also portrayed as a world that imposes compulsory reading lists and allows no room for any other intellectual activity. Harold considers his PhD studies, which ‘sounds posh’ to April, as a painful process when he ‘divid[ed] the hours into quotes and footnotes’ (120). Gee concocts her plot in a skilful way so that Harold’s separation from Lottie and his retrospection on the life left behind parallel her critique of academia and highlight an alternative vision. In an attempt to begin a new life, Harold starts reading ‘like a boy’, avidly consuming ‘miraculous’ books on science. In tune with the novel’s interweaving of the personal and universal, Harold ‘dips’ and ‘plunges’ himself into these science books, exploring stars, nebulas and cosmos (81). Such reading helps him widen the limited horizon of his singular life and go beyond himself. Interestingly, Harold is presented developing this awareness as he reads The World of Wonders, which is the

62

Maggie Gee

very book from which Gee takes her first epigraph. This sort of intertextuality, which Gee exercises in Grace and The White Family too, functions as a device to turn reading into a real-life experience; confirming the way Harold’s vision widens through reading, the two separate worlds, the world of reading and the real world, become one. This can be seen as Light Years’ claim that books do have a transformative power with their potential to open a new vista for readers. What this new vista brings to Harold is the knowledge of others, not only of his kind; meditating about life on earth, he feels that: ‘Most of the world, after all, wasn’t human’ (81). To suggest a sense of a new beginning, Gee renders Harold like an Adam figure starting a new life in spring, naming flowers in Boscombe Gardens, the earthly paradise of his new life: ‘Tulips, daffodils, gorse, cherry trees? Things he could name with simple pride. There were far more things he couldn’t name. Once he’d got the stars more under control, he would buy some guides to trees and flowers’ (106). Gee’s text equates peace and restored order with love of nature and a sense of oneness with it. Having made his move from academia to nature, Harold now reads about nature at night and spends the day ‘researching the sunshine’ (107). This newly gained awareness of nature and animals underpins Gee’s critique of anthropocentrism, which considers human beings to be the most important unit in space. In a way, presenting the condition of Britain, Gee also draws an intellectual panorama of British people at this time; with this picture, Gee plants the seeds of an ecocentric thread in her writing, most widely explored in her dystopic novels that depict climate change, The Flood and The Ice People. That the ecocentric consciousness is central to the novel is evident in its plot device; Harold decides to leave home because Lottie is insensitive not only to the poor but also to animals. Gee portrays Lottie as a person who defines power in terms of money; naturally, she sees animals, at best, as objects to be bought and sold, and purchases a tamarin, ‘so little, so delicate’, to feed in a cage at home. She even considers buying a bear for a present but gives up the idea just because ‘her house was a little too small for a bear’ (25). Feeling infuriated because he thinks treating ‘a living thing’ as a sport is a shame, Harold comments on her possessive behaviour and says: ‘We’re a horrible species’ (21). Unlike Harold who delights in understanding that we are not the only beings on earth, Lottie enjoys the illusion of mankind being in total control of nature, despite the fact that she could not control or preserve the life of the little tamarin she illegally purchases: Most of the world was human, of course, so you never got time to think about the rest. When you did think, it was both astonishing and not quite comfortable. (Naturally, animals could let you down. The orang-utans, ignoring her [. . .] something worse she could not forget. The quivering horror which died in her house. She’d never try to help an animal again.) (87)

Thus, the novel ends with a scene of reconciliation between Harold and Lottie only when Lottie develops the consciousness to see life outside the bounds of her own selfish desires, and learns to appreciate nature and animals, as well as herself. Gee’s critique of our human-centredness is also supported by Amanda’s remarks which indicate a rigid hierarchy regulating our relationship with animals (50). Amanda feels pity for ‘innocent’ animals, but shares the commonly held belief that monkeys are ‘dirty creatures. Filthy. Disgusting.’ . To justify her revulsion, she adds ‘Everyone

Telescopic View of England, England

63

knew that’ (294). As in the case of class consciousness, Gee portrays Davey already in possession of an ecological consciousness. Suggesting a more optimistic view, it is once again a young character who is wise and mature enough to offer a warning; at 16, Davey is worried about animal skins and complains that his mother is one of those women in furs, ‘draped in dead animal skins’ (90). Juxtaposed with Davey, Lottie becomes a cartoon figure imposing human terms on animals. She vaguely thinks ‘the snakes might be sexy’ (87), and finds animals beautiful only when depicted by famous artists: ‘Bright as Mondrian, bizarre as an Ernst, complete and extreme as Ibo sculpture’ (86). Light Years offers an alternative vision both by revealing the characters’ process of gaining awareness and by the images and motifs that represent animals and nature. To facilitate a holistic view that includes all beings as indispensible to the universe, it even represents the perspective of the tamarin: Gee portrays the caged tamarin dreaming of a ‘forest, great trees’ in ‘his’ dream; the tamarin flings himself towards a tree, but in reality he just ‘scratches and tears at the painted-over rust of the barred cage’ (27). Encouraging empathy, the novel depicts the little monkey missing the tropical forest he came from; the narrator focuses on his consciousness and reports that ‘The world for him has become very cold. Time should have been for hunting insects, seeds, fruit. But he cannot hunt’ (26). Gee’s criticism of a human-centred view culminates in the epiphanic scene in which Harold reads passages about the ‘stuffed animals’ in the British Museum from The World of Wonders. The passage demonstrates the cruelty that humankind has practised on animals to discover nature and acquire bits of it as ‘fine specimen[s]’; this text also mentions the process of collecting data, questions whether it is better to transmit the specimen dead or alive and quotes a superintendent: ‘It might be more advantageous to science if the animal were killed by chloroform, and properly preserved’ (314). The dry, matter-of-fact tone of the book itself becomes a specimen of meaningless brutality exercised on animals: ‘In that state the specimen reached the Museum, where its stuffed skin, its skeleton, its brain, and some other parts in spirits, are evidence of the use made of the opportunity’ (314). As an antidote to this cruel practice, the narrator offers images of nature in abundance; as if to restore justice, this bird’s-eye view shows urban people as captives ‘sitting in  suits in small offices worrying, as usual, about money’ (88). Attempting a reversal of the hierarchy in the anthropocentric view, the all-seeing narrator attaches liveliness to the animal world rather than the human: ‘Looked at from very far out in space, complex patterns of brown and green and blue gleam through the planet’s whiteness’ (88). Gee’s narrator comments in a similar fashion to The Burning Book, revealing an ecocentric view merged with pacifism, another important strand in Gee’s writing: ‘Actually it seems that only humans spoil a fertile planet with war’ (89). Gee does not leave her reader with this dark truth and juxtaposes a passage that celebrates nature; the text enlists moments in the colourful everyday life of dormice, hedgehogs, blackbirds, yellowhammers, ravens, squirrels, rabbits and butterflies among human beings. And the novel comes to a close with the surprise meeting of Harold and Lottie at the zoo. This happy ending also shows Gee’s comic, parodic touch, making the couple meet just behind the ‘PAVILION FOR SMALL MAMMALS’, and literally levelling down the difference between human beings and animals (342). Once again, Gee proposes the view that we are all interconnected and our happiness relies on the integrity of human beings and nature.

64

Maggie Gee

In a similar vein, Light Years looks at the beauty myth and ageing, themes that Where Are the Snows develop, in terms of the divide between nurture and nature. Under existing conditions, old age, to Harold, is ‘hell’ (40). Musing about the passing of time, he ironically projects a self-image: ‘bald, balder, baldest’ (17). Like Alex in Where Are the Snows, Lottie also refuses to accept ageing as natural and feels very proud because, ‘Everyone said she was beautiful, everyone said she was “incredible” for thirty-five’ (26). She refuses coffee because it could give her ‘broken veins’ (47). Light Years deals with this obsession with staying young and beautiful not only to discuss ageing in a consumer culture, but also to explore women’s self-image and feminism in contemporary British culture. By representing different female figures, Gee discusses feminism in a wider context too. As in The Ice People, Gee shows feminism in decline as part of the overall decay in Britain; both through characters who misunderstand feminism as only a confidence trick for weak, ugly and underprivileged women, and through those who misinterpret it as a form of fanaticism. To put it simply, the novel shows the failure of feminist practice to establish a ground for women coming from different walks of life. Through Lottie, Gee shows how confused women can be about feminism. As she assumes it is men’s responsibility to look after women, feminism ‘bores [Lottie] to tears’. Defining power in terms of money, and being ‘extremely rich’, Lottie sees no point in feminism; so she tells Harold: I don’t need to, darling. I have everything the feminists ever wanted, and more. I don’t have to go round in hideous woolly hats hating men and secretly longing for them. I do whatever I like- always have one- so of course I don’t whinge about being frustrated and dominated and castrated and whatever it is they all create about. [. . .] I’m sure the feminists don’t mean men to go round lecturing their wives on how to be one. (20–1)

Having never worked herself, she believes that women lose their freedom and independence when they work for others. Thus, she argues that a woman should not work unless she is as ‘poor as a rat’, for instance, like her friend Claudia (155). In her view, feminism is ‘all invention; you ought to have a job, you oughtn’t to get married, you oughtn’t to like men. You shouldn’t ever listen to oughts. You should listen to the voice inside your own head’ (157). Parodying Lottie’s assertive tone, the text suggests the idea that in this society based on capitalism, it is mostly by money, rather than by their gender or sex, that people define themselves. Harold’s mother Sylvia seems to share Lottie’s view about feminism since she also sees power in material terms; then naturally – because she is rich – Lottie is ‘more a man than [Harold] is’ (193). Similarly, Amanda’s idea of a normal man always involves a ‘proper job to go to’; she articulates the widely adopted view that ‘A woman couldn’t respect a man’ without such a job (50). The novel also employs male characters to portray patriarchal gender roles that reduce feminism to complaining from the poor and ugly. Lottie’s boyfriend Hugo, like Amanda, thinks that ‘a woman must want a chap to have a bit of an income’ (113). When Lottie hesitates to agree, since Harold is not the ‘chap’ he describes, Hugo takes this as Lottie ‘going feminist’. To him, only stupid women become feminist and Lottie is ‘too clever for that’. To reinforce the portrayal of how traditional patriarchal views survive in contemporary Britain, Gee adds another male character articulating the same view; Lottie’s ex-husband Carl cannot understand

Telescopic View of England, England

65

why they should work, although he likes ‘equal women’ (217). Seeing feminism as mere grumbling by unlucky women, he thinks that beautiful women should not work. Among all these voices that denigrate feminism, the text offers a comment by Claudia, not a rich woman, which provides an alternative view of feminism. Thinking to herself, she tells the reader that feminism has grown one-dimensional: ‘Feminism left some things out. There are women just as obsessed with power’ (123). I think that Gee’s female character April, Harold’s girlfriend, represents how some women miss the point of feminism altogether and just want to be treated like ladies by gentlemen. Aspiring to a life of luxury, April thinks that Harold, a writer with a PhD, can be her way of achieving this. In their short vacation in Paris, she unconsciously plays the rich wife going shopping and eating out in posh places (179). Interpreting independence as freedom from bills, she becomes a symbol of young women who think men should serve women in return for the colour they add to life. Overall, it is obvious that all these characters are devices that help Gee take a critical stance about the changing face of feminism in Britain; in her panorama, as an identitybased political stance, feminism fails to unite women in forming and supporting a non-exclusive framework. Gee implies that divorced from the general problems of the country, feminism has failed to situate women’s problems in their socio-economic and cultural contexts and has failed to reach young women like April. Davey, who voices Gee’s critique of anthropocentrism and neo-liberal indifference to the problems of the working class, now reminds Lottie that she is ‘out of touch’ with what is happening in contemporary Britain. When Lottie thinks women work because that is a good way of meeting men, Davey explodes and says that ‘nearly everyone does jobs except Lottie and Harold’ (146). Contributing to the realistic portrayal of the novel, Davey comments on the condition of Britain: ‘With what this country’s like’ everybody has to work long hours, if they are lucky enough to find jobs at all. Gee’s depiction of feminist thought as misinterpreted in a money-centred culture is similar to her critique of the state of art. As she also does in her later novels, Gee employs art as intertext; so Bonnard’s paintings help Gee make a critical comment on how art has become an object of exchange in contemporary Britain. For Hugo, an art mogul, Bonnard only recalls the claim he has on Lottie, since he bought a Bonnard as a present for her. The commercialization of art becomes one of the themes in the novel, also explored through April, a young art student. Implying the expansion of consumerist thinking to the field of art, April dreams of purchasing paintings by famous artists and making a collection. Instead of imagining herself as an innovative artist, she muses with passion: ‘I shall buy myself a Bonnard. I’ll lend it to exhibitions and they’ll have my name on the label by it, Collection Miss April Green’ (212). What really excites her is the idea that via purchasing a Bonnard, she will be recognized at the Pompidou Centre. The self-image she concocts in her mind’s eye reflects more a connoisseur who sees art as business than a creative practitioner. She dreams of ‘swanning into the Ritz’, because she has a ‘really important appointment’ (213). Like the Hopper painting in The Flood, the mention of Bonnard’s paintings also contributes to the unifying vision that the novel offers. French painter Pierre Bonnard, famous for his ‘Intimiste’ peaceful domestic scenes, functions in the novel’s thematic network to imply the characters’ need for intimacy. Bonnard’s work, which ‘in general

66

Maggie Gee

radiates a sense of warmth and well-being’ (Chilvers, 1), is most closely linked to Lottie, and thus becomes a symbol both of the absence of intimacy and of her need, first to be in touch with her own soul and then to reach out to other people to experience love. Like the similar scene in Where Are the Snows in which Alex gains insight into herself through a Munch painting in a museum in Paris, Bonnard introduces agape as an antidote to many problems. Wittily, Gee uses art to suggest a call to action: in Light Years, the Bonnard painting, portraying intimacies between people, punctuates the gap that the characters suffer in their relations with each other and offers relief and enlightenment. When Harold leaves April after becoming aware of how important Lottie is to him, April heads towards the Pompidou Centre in Paris to find warmth and well-being in ‘those intimate, intimistes Bonnards’ (203). Lottie also comes to a realization about the world outside herself, which she voices in the novel’s epilogue: ‘I have decided the world is very interesting’ (347). A typical Gee ending, resisting an end, the epilogue brings the text into an infinite space and highlights the theme of eternity set against the minutiae of everyday life. By the end of the novel, we have thus seen Britain and its problems set in a cosmic perspective. Cultivating an ethical stance that suggests love and empathy as fundamental tools to solve problems, Light Years encourages fresh ways of seeing ourselves, others and the hidden links that unite the two. As the use of Bonnard’s ‘intimiste’ painting suggests, the novel proposes an interpersonal understanding as a key to improve life. In the novel’s plane of reality, the awareness of love as a way of bridging gaps works miracles, and even brings synchronicity of thoughts to remind us of how deeply the parted lovers are interconnected: Harold and Lottie, away from each other, think the same thought, right at the same time: I know I shall ring her today- Boscombe, 9 a.m., November 2. I know he will ring me today- Camden, 9 a.m., November 2. (299)

It is mostly this ethical stance that marks the significant contribution that Gee’s writing makes to contemporary fiction. Depicting a scene of universal connection in which dead and alive, stars and human beings, butterflies and shells, rich and poor, strangers and relatives, all ‘beat like a heart’, the novel offers an image of Britain and the littleness of everyday life at one with the cosmos (350). This recurrent motif in Gee’s writing signifies a strong belief in the potential of literary texts to convey a meaningful message about human life, and to encourage a willingness to solve our problems.

4

Hard Times: Grace (1988) and Where Are the Snows (1991)

‘Meddling with the very building-blocks of the universe.’ Grace Grace derives its main inspiration from a real-life murder of an anti-nuclear activist Hilda Murrell in  1986, aged 78, in Shrewsbury, and fictionalizes the case through the attempted murder of the novel’s titular character Grace, aged 85, in Seabourne, a seaside town in England. ‘Hilda Murrell (1906 – 84), a rose grower, naturalist, diarist and campaigner against nuclear energy and weapons, was abducted in her own car and found murdered five miles from her home in Shropshire’. (‘Hilda Murrell’) Murrell’s death troubled Maggie Gee, and, to pay tribute to a peace lover who died in a mysterious way, she took on the responsibility of writing a novel with strong undertones of sympathy for Hilda’s cause (Conversation with the author, 2011). Thus, the novel is, in some senses, a project to inform the public about both the dangers of nuclear power and the risk that anti-nuclear power activists take while protesting against global militarist policies. Gee subverts the main detective thread inherent in the murder story because the novel also raises consciousness about the dangers of nuclear energy and the attitude of states towards its use; it also investigates the controversial case of Hilda Murrell through a parallel, fictional story, that of her character Grace, set against the backdrop of contemporary British society. Thus, as in Pat Barker’s Liza’s England (published in America as The Century’s Daughter), the murder, attempted in Grace committed in Liza’s England, of an octogenarian stands as a catalyst to the novel’s representation of decay in contemporary British society. The last of Gee’s books in the 1980s, Grace has many common elements with her former books. The thematic and structural features of the text render it a representative work in Gee’s oeuvre. With an urban setting threatened by nuclear waste after the explosion in Chernobyl, Grace is like a sequel to The Burning Book. Facts about Chernobyl and potential nuclear threats inserted into the text to raise consciousness are reminiscent of the environmental awareness of Light Years. This omnipresent awareness, also cultivated in The Ice People and The Flood, frames a realistic portrayal of British society as the novel zooms into the minutiae of everyday life and ordinary London characters; for example, the very first scene of the narrative centres attention on a morning in a green urban garden: ‘ordinary life in a dirty city, blowing apple-blossom, scraps of paper’ (1). Since

68

Maggie Gee

the text contains images from London, Seabourne, Chernobyl and some news from Norway, Sweden and Czechoslovakia, Gee stretches the bounds of the novel’s narrative space to provide a universal perspective. Like T. S. Eliot’s vision of falling towers in ‘The Waste Land’ with ‘Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria/Vienna London/Unreal’ (V, 373–4). Grace relies on a modern-day urban setting to evoke an image of a worldwide apocalypse. In other words, looking through a wide-angle lens, the reader is positioned to regard the text as an investigative act into nuclear threat and conspiracies not just for Britain or Russia, but also for the entire world. The novel’s polysemic title supports the deeper commentary about contemporary Britain as a society fallen from grace. That the text is a response to the conditions of Britain in the 1980s is evident in the acknowledgement page, which helps us contextualize the story that will follow. It cites two non-fiction books both published a year after Hilda Murrell died in  1985. Gee refers to these texts – Judith Cook’s Who Killed Hilda Murrell? and Rosalie Bertell’s No Immediate Danger: Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth – both to shed light on the murder and to inform her reader about the dangers of splitting the atom and ‘meddling with the very building-blocks of the universe’. The epigraph also informs our reading because the novel is dedicated to two important events for Maggie Gee during the writing of the novel. One of them is the death of a friend in 1986, and the second is the birth of her daughter Rosa in the same year. Through a parallelism between these real-life events and her fictional world, Gee implicitly cultivates an alternative stance to interrogate the policies of the states about nuclear power. Gee fictionalizes the murder with the help of a metafictional device that both generates technical richness and enables Gee to subvert the detective story genre: she places a writer character Paula, Grace’s 37-year-old niece, who is ‘trying to write a novel about a brave old woman’, Hilda Murrell (3). Like Moira in Dying, in Other Words and Angela in The Burning Book, Paula both becomes a mouthpiece for Maggie Gee and serves as a novelistic device helping the reader acquire a critical perspective. Paula also becomes an active agent, collecting information about her aunt Grace’s death, which sheds light on Hilda Murrell’s. Paula’s questions about how to structure her novel are also Gee’s commentary on her own process of writing Grace. Not to make a puppet from a real person, ‘someone dead, who couldn’t answer back’, Paula, like Gee, decides to base her story on an invented character; thus, she can ‘neaten and shorten’, exclude the ‘zigzags’ and ‘draw in a norm’ (69). The critical voice of her writer character offers Gee the flexibility to mould her text as a commentary on political and cultural conditions as well. Wanting to know and struggle against the causes of Grace’s death, Paula becomes a voice of idealism, a significant motif in Gee’s writing, and sets out to collect the squalid details of the murder for her novel. A responsive writer in a modernist vein, like Moira in Dying, in Other Words and Angela in The Burning Book, she fails to enjoy herself when ‘the world isn’t well’ (3). Nuclear threat and the murder of an anti-nuclear activist keep Paula awake. Set against the metaphorical image of ‘sleeping houses’, the novel she is writing claims to be a project of waking people up. As such, Paula, like the other writer characters in Gee’s novels in the 1980s, represents the politics and poetics of Gee’s fiction. In other words, Grace becomes another Gee novel that maintains the fine balance between being a self-reflective tool based on fiction and a text giving a momentum for action in context, and reads like a contemporary version of the condition-of-England novel.

Hard Times

69

The novel represents Britain as a dirty place, dangerous to live in. Opening the text with Chernobyl, a symbol of large-scale violence and hostility that culminates in murder, the novel’s omniscient narrator declares: ‘[. . .] the world grew dirtier’ (1). The self-reflective thread is employed not in this instance as a postmodern textual device that produces a playful commentary on the text itself, but to reinforce the novel’s elegiac tone. So, Grace, who is portrayed reading from Judith Cook’s real-life non-fiction book Who Killed Hilda Murrell?, pronounces that ‘If Hilda Murrell was murdered because she thought, and wrote, and argued, then no one is safe [. . .] No one is safe any more in England’ (100). And Gee gives a sense of entrapment through the image of radiation leaks: there is no way of escaping the poisonous air. Paula reports that: ‘There was nowhere, really, to hide. Because air is everywhere and goes everywhere. Air from the inner city, air from the chemical plants, air from Russia, that spring’ (2). While describing a country as a place ‘getting dirtier’, the novel also raises environmental awareness through images of pollution both in the urban and rural landscape (10). It represents London as a ‘load of garbage’ (115), a ‘waste land’ where one hears the ‘hopelessly jammed’ traffic and ‘an atonal nightmare of angry horns’ (77). ‘An awesome quantity of steel and engineering’ regularly carrying nuclear waste through the heart of London, like dustbins with revolting things smelling and crawling in them, is part and parcel of a life in the city (57). Complaining about the nuclear waste brought to England in containers, Paula implies that not only London but also the whole of England is becoming a ‘dustbin’ (6). Informing the motif of London as an urban centre in decay, images of filth have strong undertones of Dante’s ‘Inferno’ as in Eliot’s description of the unreal city: ‘Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, / A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many/I had not thought death had undone so many’. (I, 60–3). Trying to move among its chaotic streets, roaring traffic, diesel fumes and stumbling people, Paula articulates the image of a country in distress: ‘London is hell.’ and ‘England is hell. It really is.’ (95). Characters from different walks of life voice the same idea to strengthen the chorus-like narrative trait of the novel; Susy, a prostitute, who ironically notes that she is in a ‘service sector’, comments on the country and bluntly says ‘If you ask me, this country is fucked. It’s not just me, love. It’s the whole country’ (82). Minor characters Ian and Judy are also among those who ‘hate’ London (114–15). As an insightful writer figure with a satirical perspective, Paula reflects on this ‘hell’ish Britain. Recording the contradictions intrinsic to it, she observes a pervading sense of discontent in the country. Meanwhile, elderly Grace’s longing for tranquillity and fresh air evokes a sense of nostalgia for long-lost beauty and nature within the urban landscape (8). Gee makes this loss manifest through a panoramic view of the country failing to keep peace and order. For instance, the novel shows how the English constantly blame the migrants for the decay and disorder in the country. Like the fictional Albion Park in The White Family, Regent’s Park, a microcosm of England, helps Gee give that panoramic view in Grace. Divided by differences, the country cannot hold; luxury and poverty reside side by side as if in a country of two nations: Underneath the city’s shining surface of plate-glass windows, Porsches, computers, essential structures are rotting away. [.  .  .] In Regent’s Park, Arab women are walking slowly through the rose garden, their black robes humming cone of heat,

70

Maggie Gee tired eyes caged in sweaty bird-masks. Behind them, bodyguards pant in  suits. This isn’t what they meant by England. A trembling desire can be felt in the heat haze through which the sun finally starts to sink; caught in the maze of mirrored towers, trains, rats, telephone lines, everyone wants to escape. (10)

Grace does not elaborate on racism as densely as Gee’s other novels do, but a brief representation of the English as ‘bodyguards’ resisting the multicultural mould of the contemporary British culture reinforces the image of hell. ‘Bodyguards’ in the park, a symptom of ethnocentrism, recall the leader of the New Empire Party and Guy in The Burning Book, and Alfred the park keeper and his son Dirk in The White Family who feel that they are on a mission to clean up the ‘rose garden’ currently spoiled by the growing black-immigrant population. Paula’s experience with the Criminal Investigation Department – the CID, which is the plain-clothes detective branch of the British Police – also testifies to similar prejudices against black British citizens. Like Angela in The Burning Book, Paula is judged by the CID just because she has black friends; the police believe that she is sheltering a wanted man, ‘a black fellow’, and rudely ask: ‘You like black men, don’t you? Heh-heh’. Most clearly, racist and ethnocentric attitudes in contemporary Britain are embodied in Bruno, the insane private detective who thinks his ideal of England could be achieved by careful dissection, cutting off the corrupt parts. His ideal England, a free and strong country ‘where things are under control’ and ‘where people are free to make money’, does not contain any black pigment. He imagines his fellow citizens like ‘a wall of gleaming chalk, [. . .] white blondes, powerful redheads [. . .]’ (17). Sharply defining Englishness in terms of whiteness, Bruno calls any black person ‘African’ and denies him/her the right to citizenship. Gee’s critique of ethnocentrism in this novel is also reinforced by an Irish character, Faith. Thinking her pregnancy would embarrass her parents, she escapes Ireland and works as a cleaning lady at a hotel in Seabourne. She is hated in Catholic Ireland because she is going to have a baby out of wedlock, but now in England she is hated as Irish; Grace represents English society as a prejudiced one where Faith can only become a ‘dirty’ worker ‘supposed to be invisible’ (88). Thus, the novel’s portrayal of 1980s London shows an urban centre enveloped in a racism that equates multiculturalism with ‘pollution’ on a cultural scale. This dark portrayal of England that Maggie Gee meticulously weaves with the theme of ageing and decay stands in sharp contrast to the myth of ‘Merrie England’. Through a recurring image of England falling from grace, Gee visibly extends the condition-ofEngland vein in her writing previously exemplified by the image of the theme park in Light Years. Thus, the image of London and England contaminated by nuclear waste and poisoned by racism go hand in hand with the portrayal of Britain as a wasted country. It is now a filthy place with despondent people who are alienated from each other. Faith, Gee’s embryonic cleaning lady who later evolves into Mary Tendo of My Cleaner, affirms this hopeless view: ‘This dirty country England is’ (62). In this decadent England, so many people are saying ‘Let’s get out of England’ (179), and ‘Everybody’s selling their little bit of England’ (185). Paula’s boyfriend Arthur, a modern-day King Arthur, broods over the loss of pride in being a part of this country: ‘If people had a little bit of pride in England’ (189). And yet, Arthur exists, the modern-day, gentle equivalent of the old chivalric king

Hard Times

71

of medieval legend and literature: there is still hope in England, and at the end, Arthur will step forward and show a new kind of strength. Grace’s observations of Seabourne obliterate the traditional identification of the countryside with an escape from pollution and crowds. That a ‘return’ to the countryside will no longer promise an idyllic pastoral life is already foreshadowed by the train journey (8). Gee’s description of the afternoon train to Seabourne, full of ‘trippers’, recalls the allegorical image of the ‘ship of fools’. This parodic representation of the passengers makes them an emblem of folly. Juxtaposed with Grace’s beauty and her natural inclination towards a Higher Good, the crowded train with its ignorant and boisterous passengers contributes to the light-hearted vein of Gee’s satire on the condition of Britain: ‘The men were drinking beer from the can and belching, the women were shouting to their children or else stuffing them full of food. Grace watched it disappear with fascination. Crisps, peanuts, chocolate, chewing-gum, popcorn, chocolate, peanuts, crisps’ (20). But later, Grace contemplates the times that seem ‘so very bad’ to her. Grace observes ‘rudeness, carelessness, wickedness’ everywhere (22), and Faith’s comment confirms this observation. She reports that ‘Sometimes dirt and mess is all [she] can see, stretching on into the future’ (63). The novel constantly challenges the traditional image of England as a peaceful place. Infected by worries about money, the brief conversation between Grace and the taxidriver in Seabourne is a further proof that decay does not exclude the countryside, which reflects the fall at every pore. For instance, as soon as she gets off the train, Grace sadly observes a big change in Seabourne, her childhood home. It has become a standard holiday resort infested by ‘apartments, tourist restaurants with neutral names, the Beefeater, the Golfing Bar, skyscrapers, motels, marinas’ (59). She also observes the consumerist American culture sneaking into the town; spotting a crowd of ‘monstrous, cartoon muscle men’ in ‘Prince’s Park’ who play American football, ‘some monstrous warlike game’, she cites another marker of an end to ‘Merrie England’ (144). An alarming sense of England coming to a close is also hinted at by the urgency in shopping promotions; Grace comments on the ubiquitous consumer culture and bitterly concludes: ‘All we needed was spending money, and that should be spent today?’ (145). The shop windows and prices she sees all show a ‘country being knocked down’ (145). Hinting at the role of money to divide the nation, Gee wittily portrays a taxi-driver treating Grace a bit less politely because he thinks the tip is a ‘joke’. The taxi-driver’s vision of the town as an ‘Old Folks’ Home’ with a mass of old people is identical with the image of the country growing old: ‘As if they were waiting for the nurse to come and inject them. Give him a chance and he’d do it himself. They are like a disease. It’s everywhere now. [. . .] It has all grown old, the whole country’ (23). The aptly named Empire Hotel where Grace stays during her ‘escape’ also becomes a symbol of a country, once an omnipotent Empire, in moral decline with little hope of improvement. Gee intensifies the theme as she presents Grace looking back on her child self who once treasured a song sheet with an image of the Union Jack and an eight-verse version of the National Anthem. Reading it now, she thinks that it is a ‘mis-stressed farrago, rambling down the yellowing page’. The lines make her ponder over the fall of the Empire: ‘[T]oday the colonies were lost, the King was dead, and the Empire was the name of a second-rate hotel [. . .]’ (90).

72

Maggie Gee

This revisionary outlook is employed throughout the novel; as the novel delineates Grace and Paula brooding over the deterioration of their country, it also employs an ironic tone when it comments on the traditional image of England as a safe place where ‘Nothing ever happens’, while the story is in fact about a violence and the nuclear threat. So this belief contradicts both the fictional and factual context of her novel. As she underscores the irony by the increasing tension and the likelihood that an old woman will be killed in Seabourne ‘where nothing ever happens, they say, except holidays and death’ (19), the novel also becomes a serious critique of the Hilda Murrell murder. The murder of a pacifist 5 miles from her home in Shropshire, promoted as a fine medieval market town, ‘unspoilt countryside, Britain at its Best!’, negates the motto: ‘Nothing ever happens in England’. Gee’s satirical tone also informs Paula’s condemnation of public indifference regarding the dangers of nuclear energy; complaining about the government’s irresponsible remarks, she ironically quotes their assumption: ‘That this is England, for goodness’ sake, and nothing ever happens in England. She would like to believe that, but she doesn’t. She thinks a great deal is happening in England. She thinks a lot of it is bad’ (13). This sardonic statement is reinforced by the juxtaposition of nuclear waste trains running close to the sleeping backs of houses; the country is contaminated by radiation, yet ‘All down the line the houses sleep’ (13). Gee’s ironic remark about indifference recalls George Orwell’s satirical account of England as ‘probably the sleekest landscape in the world’ and the English as ‘all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake until we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs (1968, 232). Gee employs this ironic image of England as a stable country to critique the contradictions in contemporary British culture. Parodying the so-called Saturday night fever, Gee focalizes on Grace’s consciousness and gives an imaginary invitation: ‘Come to Seabourne, where nothing ever happens, except on Saturday nights’ (41). Like the image of the Model Great Britain pub in Light Years, the euphoric Saturday night in the Seabourne disco juxtaposed with the ‘overcrowded and underfunded’ London hospitals ‘busy, dealing with Saturday’s births and deaths’ lays bare Gee’s satirical vision of the entertainment culture in contemporary society. The disco scene shows that in a country where, at bottom, people are estranged from each other, ritual drinking and dancing can easily turn into violence and crime. The third-person narrator’s account of the atmosphere in the disco from the viewpoint of a British youth exposes the flimsy nature of ‘fun’ in a crumbling community: ‘It’s Saturday night, after all, and it’s summer, so there hasn’t been a football match, which means nothing has happened all fucking day, and something’s got to happen right here and now or how will they get through another blank week’ (41). If the failure of the country to offer its youth any satisfying means of recreation is one aspect of the scene, more important is the alienation portrayed. A meaningless fight explodes out of boredom and the unemployed youth channel their anger and resentment at the luxurious restaurant that is denied to them. Reminiscent of the August riots in London 2011, the scene delineates young boys throwing stones and aiming at ‘the sherried glow of the great hotels, the becalmed glass world that they can’t get into’ (41). An examination of the view that Grace gets from her room at the Empire Hotel  reintroduces Gee’s satirical comment on the state of Britain. As the lines from Who Killed Hilda Murrell?

Hard Times

73

reverberate in Grace’s mind, the novel suggests the idea that ‘Nothing ever happens’ is an outdated story and nothing good remains the same: ‘Many of these very dangerous elements would never have existed at all but for man’s meddling with the very building blocks of the universe’ (43). This emphasis on humankind’s interference with the ‘building blocks of the universe’ suggests both experiments with nuclear power and alienation  from nature and people. In that sense, Gee’s wider warning about the nuclear threat is intricately articulated on the micro level by a note on the traditional image of England as a peacefully stable place where nothing ever happens. Critiquing the indifference of governments to the dangers of nuclear power, Gee’s narrator poses the question of whether England can survive such threats and remain the same: A Chernobyl every seven years, they say, in the current world of nuclear power. What miracle keeps things stable for six, as the little links break, as entropy gathers, as everything moves to the snapping point, and we all start to feel what we long to feel, that nothing will happen, we’ll always be safe? (140)

The question of whether we shall ever be safe again overwhelms Paula as Gee’s satire extends to the government’s policies on nuclear power. As she investigates Hilda Murrell’s murder, she also problematizes the policies of the Home Office. Inserting a lengthy passage about the ‘Probable Health Effects Resulting from Exposure to Ionising Radiation’, from Bertell’s book, Gee begins by criticizing the Soviet Government: ‘The health effects from Chernobyl in other countries were described by the Soviet Government as “insignificant”  ’ (4). Then Paula looks into the policies of the Home Office regarding ‘subversive activities’, which includes campaigning against nuclear energy, and shows how risky it is to do so: But you needn’t actually do something illegal, because, as one Home Secretary noted, it is all too easy to use tactics which are not in themselves illegal for subversive ends. If you are “subversive”, you may legally be watched. The definition can be stretched to fit. Unless you are an expert in surveillance techniques, there is no way you can tell if your phone is tapped. (5)

After listing places in England where ‘thousands of phonecalls are monitored’, Paula describes these places as Dickensian bastions of bureaucracy ‘full of wasted time, obscure initials, dandruff, boredom’, implying her stance on both monitoring and the meaningless red tape (6). It is not only via its officers but also via private agents that the British state monitors ‘subversive’ people. Gee draws the picture of a state in which dangerous people like Bruno, a medley of ignorance, racism, sexism, fascism, misogyny and homophobia, can make money out of following some people. Paula’s investigation of the murder goes hand in hand with her critical remarks about the British Intelligence Service. Trying to figure out who might have killed Hilda Murrell, she makes a list of potential sources ‘interested in, among other people, feminists, pacifists, and Trotskyists’, and addresses the reader: ‘There’s quite a lot of choice in England, you see’ (16). While such critical views on political and cultural conditions serve to punctuate the detective form of the text, they draw a picture of England failing to unite its members in any egalitarian way.

74

Maggie Gee

In her characterization of Grace as the opposite of Bruno, a communist for decades, a feminist and a pacifist, Gee proposes a serious critique of the political conditions of England. His business card defines Bruno as a ‘Private Inquiry Agent, Matrimonial, Security, Internal Fraud/Your Every Requirement Discreetly Met/Confidentiality Guaranteed’ (9). Bruno plans to kill Grace partly because she speaks too much about nuclear energy; he wants to ‘teach her a lesson’ and make his name, since he has a longstanding desire to work for the Home Office and believes this will please them (71). He takes ‘action’; an agent of a new version of jingoism, he believes that by killing he can serve ‘Queen and Country’. Seeing himself a hero in a country where no one is ‘loyal to England now’ (117), he declares that: ‘They can count, count, count on me’ (10). Thus, the motto, ‘Nothing happens in England’ is annihilated as we understand that Bruno regularly kicks, stabs and beats those he sees as subversives (71). Reminiscent of Guy in The Burning Book, Bruno’s violence is aimed at black people too. Like his later incarnation in The Flood, who proposes his brainchild, ‘One Religion’, Bruno is a psychopath delighted to employ his power to threaten people, and plans not only to ‘correct’ the country but also to make himself famous. Warning her reader here about racism in the country, Gee showcases Bruno as a symptom: He needs ‘followers’ (131). Unfortunately, The Flood, published 16 years after Grace, portrays Bruno as a leader with many supporters. Bruno and his relations, however tenuous, with the British Intelligence Service evoke an Orwellian state surveillance, which is also implied by Grace’s ‘fierce’ admiration of Orwell (30). In a sense, in Bruno, Gee employs an image of Orwell’s ‘Big Brother’, this time not watching but listening to us. The narrator describes how easy it is to put people under surveillance; in this country, phone calls can be listened to with an ‘incredibly cheap bug’, implying that one must lock all doors and windows, for unlocked houses are an invitation to spies like Bruno. So, Bruno ‘pays a little visit’ to such houses. Paula, who is confused, like many people, by different versions of the truth about nuclear power, bitterly cites some things that are certain: ‘The State is in love with nuclear power. Those who object to nuclear power are of interest to the security forces. The security forces are out of control’ (72). As Gee shows Paula’s complaints about the state, the novel also becomes a critical commentary on the political landscape of the 1980s. For instance, Paula criticizes the poor conditions of the Health Service, which ‘Healthy People avoided’. Gee’s portrayal of Paula at the centre functions as a critique of cuts in public spending during the Thatcher years; the health centre is a place full of sneezing people, coughing kids, weeping and dribbling babies, toddlers and lunatics of any age. It does not matter why you go, the rule is: ‘You always waited hours’ (90). And the rule that ‘the rubbish would lie on the beach forever’ until the service is ‘privatised’ also reads as a critique of Thatcher’s policies of privatization and how that will impact on public services. The social and political awareness of the novel extends to cultural conditions in Britain as Paula satirizes the ‘Adopt-A-Book’ policy of the British Museum; Gee reminds us that it is the responsibility of the state to protect the country’s cultural heritage and foster it, and suggests that promoting private policies to protect books would mean ‘begging’, ‘as if books were so many unwanted children’ (145). Twenty-three years after the publication of the novel, the problem of underfunded

Hard Times

75

libraries that it raises for the reader has been further publicized through its author’s activism to save libraries risking closure due to dramatic government funding cuts.1 Gee’s satirical comments on the political conditions of England get broader when the novel gives an image of a Labour MP distorting facts about radiation leaks as part of the party’s future politics; it is a grim portrait of the British political scene. The novel’s reference to one particular bleak event makes Gee’s criticism even sharper. Gee uses the real-life Labour MP Tam Dalyell (‘Tam Dalyell’) in her text and Paula cites Tam Dalyell telling parliament that persons in Westminster and Whitehall know ‘about the violent death of Miss Hilda Murrell’ (71). Making a comment on the number of branches of the British Intelligence Service, Paula sardonically states: ‘You’d think there were enough of them to stop things going wrong’ (71). The novel aims to raise the reader’s political awareness through its commentary about real facts and figures, but it also employs images of pollution and decay to convey mistrust in the state. For instance, Paula ‘feels sick every day, as if all Chernobyl had blown inside her’ (47). However, ‘men with braying voices’ appear on television ‘telling people that all food was safe’ (47). With an image of a minister’s breakfast table shown on British television (similar examples of this were seen in Turkey following the 1986 Chernobyl explosion, and after the radiation leaks at Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan following the devastating earthquake in 2011), the novel also shows how the secret policies of the government add to the pollution at an ethical level. The narrator’s ironic voice reports what the government said after the 1957 uranium fire at the Windscale power plant: There was no need to worry; cows from an area two hundred miles square had their milk tipped into the Irish Sea, waves and waves of dirty milk, but still there was nothing to worry about [. . .] there were babies themselves, unborn babies, foetuses curled in their own mothers’ wombs, protected as well as flesh could protect them but not well enough to protect their egg-cells, not well enough to protect them from their futures. (135)

Inserting some scientific data from Rosalie Bertell’s book No Immediate Danger, Gee also adds to the text a tone of warning about an environmental crisis that is more evident in her later dystopic works The Ice People and The Flood. The novel’s cautionary tone points out the risk of ignoring present dangers: ‘The danger was always at one remove, sometime in the future or the past, in another country or another country. People felt glad they were safe for the present, and hoped the present would go on forever. Surely it would never actually happen, the imagined apocalyptic disaster [. . .]’ (55). Through Paula’s voice, the text offers a critical vision for the reader. Her nightmarish thoughts about climate change, ‘terrible droughts, encroaching deserts, desperate floods’, melting ice caps and ozone depletion (and her comment that most of it is the fault of human beings) function as a serious warning about the ‘tender, formless future’, which culminates in Gee’s later novels The Ice People and The Flood. What makes Gee’s writing unique is the way that she carefully interweaves various strands of criticism into an organic form. Environmental awareness, for instance, becomes an indispensible part of her vision as the novel connects the roots of fascism and racism with a radical departure from nature in contemporary urban culture. Bruno’s admiration for nature only when forcibly placed under control indicates a

76

Maggie Gee

mind that is the product of a culture divorced from nature. Signalling his fanaticism, his own love of nature can only be triggered by nationalist overtones. He likes trees and fields because they are ‘English trees, English fields’ (104). He sees pure nature as ‘chaos, mud, darkness, creeping roots, rot, mould’; and, absurdly, his revulsion of nature is alleviated by thoughts of reason, propriety, pesticide, hygiene and control. What Grace sees as meddling with the basis of natural life is, for Bruno, an admirable stage of civilization. It is clear that their opposing attitudes towards the urban landscape also enrich the antagonism between them. Bruno’s London is not a departure from nature but a sign of humankind’s control of it. He holds that: ‘[. . .] humans had fought a long battle with nature. In London, victory was almost complete. Acres of bricks and concrete and steel with only the tamest sprouts of green. In London, a man could really feel he was “master of all creation” ’ (57). Such intermingling of seemingly different problems and themes is also evident in the representation of England as a country in decline. Gee sets the motif of ageing together with the theme of the fall by depicting Paula’s and Grace’s worries about growing old. Overall, Gee’s portrayal of Grace in Seabourne reads like an elegy on the decline of the country. But the novel gains an enhanced elegiac tone when the country’s poor conditions are presented as part of the wider human condition through Grace’s recollections. The lament on ageing that starts with Paula’s questioning if she will ever be a mother is brought to a climax by Grace’s retrospection on her life. Her ‘return’ to Seabourne where she was a baby 85 years ago brings the theme of the timeless human condition over the more specific one of the historical conditions of Britain. As if in a Beckett play staged on a platform covered with filth and detritus, Grace emphasizes the absurdity of human experience; once a baby in Seabourne, now she is an old woman there, only to observe how swiftly time flew. ‘I believed that later I’d fly; first you crawled, then you walked, then surely . . . . . . First you crawled, then you walked, then you crawled again’ (29). One example of Gee’s interconnection of different thematic threads is Paula’s flight from her dark and lonely flat to her boyfriend Arthur’s house. Enlightened by the presence of a child and a garden, Arthur’s home alleviates her pessimism. With his ‘gigantic’ head and ‘a thick bush of hair like the fur on a bear’, he stands like a saviour, a modern-day King Arthur; ‘hairy, massive, always warm, the blood pulsing in every part’, he is like a symbol of liveliness (25). His love of children and cooking also renders him a nurturer, thus Paula thinks ‘Arthur, Mother’; he is presented as a pleasant ‘New Man’, who is washing her clothes, drying them, feeding and looking after children (150). As such, Arthur is another male character in Gee’s writing who is not identified in terms of old paradigms of masculine power. Yet, while Paula perceives him as a confident, big and hungry lover, Grace’s judgement, coming as it does from an older generation with different expectations, categorizes him as too ‘fat and shambling’ to be a boyfriend. Gee’s juxtaposition of the opposite views of two women belonging to different generations also informs the resemblance, only partly ironized, of Arthur to the legendary King Arthur. Similar to Alfred of The White Family, the old park keeper who becomes a parodic representation of the historical King Alfred, in modern-day multicultural London, Arthur, though he has similar heroic functions, at first seems not to have much to offer to a society enmeshed in its own problems. The novel asks

Hard Times

77

whether, as a member of a failing society, Arthur holds any promise of heroic deeds (31). Unlike the protection that King Arthur could provide his people, Arthur today seems unable to protect either himself or his family from the poisoned land caused by ‘plumes of radiation’ after the ‘massive uranium fire’ at the Windscale power plant. Not rich enough to stay with Paula when she needs him, he has to be away working when Paula feels alone and unprotected (135). As such, Arthur initially features as a victim rather than a saviour. Gee’s presentation of Arthur also reflects the overall decay in the country; his transition from the ‘hippy phase’ during which he cooked for the commune to being a part-time chef, a part-time hotel manager and a parttime journalist, all at once, contributes to the theme of fall both by suggesting a shift in values from the hopes of hippy egalitarianism in the 1960s to the consumer society of the liberal 1980s, and by implying high rates of unemployment in the country that can only offer part-time jobs. Enveloped by a rich texture of suggestions, Grace’s comment evidences her contempt for Arthur who she deems not masculine enough and comments on unemployment in the new Britain: ‘No one had a proper career, these days’ (32). But Grace has missed something essential: Arthur has learnt to love in the way that  Grace’s artist boyfriend could not. It is his very tenderness and ability to care for people that will make him, at the end of the novel, come looking for Grace at just the right moment: it is his patience and his understanding that brings Arthur to the crisis where his potential for heroism and his manhood will really be tested, and then he shows what he is made of. He is coming, too, to tell her that her niece is pregnant; he, Sally and Paula are a family, and they will soon be a larger one, not an orthodox family but a loving one. The finale is not a male confrontation: two women, one old, a young child and an unborn child are all there. Unafraid, Arthur pulls Bruno away from Grace before he can kill her and holds him off the ground like the fatherless boy he really is. That embrace is the end of the novel, a climactic scene that subverts the conventional crisis of a thriller where there would be a ‘shoot-out’ between the hero and the villain. Gee seems to be saying that only if Britain can use the best of itself, the tolerance and gentleness that Arthur displays, and value new models of manhood, will it be able to escape the stranglehold of the secret state and outdated military ambitions. Bruno cannot be beaten by repression and exclusion: the state has to learn to value and use the talents of all its members; it has to solve its social problems, of which Bruno is the result. Thus, despite all the sordid images depicting decay in England, Grace ultimately turns its face to the future and cultivates optimism in the reader, one of the underlying traits of Gee’s writing. This is also evident in the final scene as Grace bravely resists falling when Bruno attacks her. As she is stabbed by Bruno, that ‘ordinary burglar, and ugly boy’, she falls on the stairs; refusing to die falling – as if to negate all the images of falling that her name anchors, right from the title with its echoes of the metaphor of ‘falling from grace’ – she clings on to life and repeats: ‘Climb. Don’t think. Climb, keep going’ (196). She regains her courage and strength to face Bruno, only starting to fail at the moment when Arthur, Paula and Sally enter to give the news of the baby, so she does not need it any more. The suggestion is that the old values are not enough on their own to resist fascism: Grace is literate, honest and brave, but she is also frail and

78

Maggie Gee

limited by her class and education, and she will need a new life to support her in the fight against Bruno. If the new English people like Arthur and Sally and their children are brave and vigilant enough, perhaps Grace will at last be able to die in peace, the final paragraph of the novel hints: ‘so the old could go, she would leave no shadow, and the child would live to see the world in the morning’ (197). Gee’s images of babies are another hope for the country falling from grace where, according to Paula’s analysis, ‘We don’t like children, in England’ (58). Grace’s rhetorical questions about the present call for a childish innocence like the poet William Blake’s: ‘Where have the children gone? Why is the world so old?’ (94). Even brutal Bruno feels peaceful at the thought of the Blessed Mary, when he concludes ‘So the baby was God’ (57). As is even more evident in My Cleaner and Where Are the Snows, babies and children always symbolize hope in Gee’s fiction, and Grace articulates this idea after the visit to Seabourne when she needs ‘something unspoiled, a hope for the future’ (59). So she ‘turns to the child’, to Sally, in order to recover from a sense of disillusionment that the decay in Seabourne gives her. The baby becomes a barometer of a sense of security; even the idea of the cause of sickness being pregnancy rather than poisoned food relieves Paula, having ‘a child inside [her]’ becomes a calming idea that beats her feeling of fear and discontent (96). As a woman who is writing a novel about a real-life murder, she finds the potential baby inside her life-affirming, so she wants ‘this baby’ (99). Faith, the Irish cleaning lady who rejects abortion and escapes her Catholic family also becomes a symbol of hope with her will to life, and despite the high chance that she will lose her job due to pregnancy, finally has the baby, with the help of childless Grace, who knows vicarious motherhood. Helping to build the optimistic tone of Gee’s writing, as her name suggests, Faith keeps faith against all odds and plans a better future for her baby than the one she had: ‘I’ll have one, and make her feel special. No, I’ll have two, so she has a friend [. . .] She doesn’t want the child to be lonely’ (77). In the tapestry of pollution and decay, the baby that Gee describes inside Faith features as eternal hope overriding Blake’s gloomy ‘Songs of Experience’: it is ‘tunnelling on towards the world with its tender, planetary skull; unaware the world contains anything bad; hazarding all, to have life in the light, unprotected but quite unafraid’ (152). Thus, calling for social responsibility, Paula, the voice of Gee in the novel, defines the future as the innocent child of us all, which must be protected (170). And a day out in nature after she helps Faith in labour allows Grace to feel a resurgence of joy and to think ‘The English could rise again’ (191). But the Hilda Murrell murder remains at the heart of Grace, presented as one of the dirtiest parts in the panoramic view of contemporary Britain.

‘What a waste of planet, what a waste of life!’: Where Are the Snows Light Years approaches the condition of contemporary society with the help of a telescopic perspective rendering a love story a document about our times; Where Are the Snows is a subverted shopping-and-fucking novel that places the story of a

Hard Times

79

married couple, Christopher and Alexandra, in the context of consumerism. As Gee stated in a conversation in June 2011, this novel is ‘like the condemnation of a whole decade’ which is made available through a realistic portrayal of contemporary British society. The novel, with its central theme of loss emphasized by the allusion to François Villon’s poem in the title, is like a variation on the theme of ubi sunt. The first epigraph Gee employs is the refrain of Villon’s ‘Ballad of the Dead Ladies’ (c. 1533), ‘Oh, where are the snows of yesteryear?’. Citing queens and ladies ‘whose beauty was more than human’ dying one by one, Villon’s ballad sheds light on the theme of ageing and loss of beauty illustrated by the novel’s central characters. But more importantly, this allusion to a poem that relies on an image of ‘the snows of yesteryear’ melting, leaving no marks behind, sets the melancholic tone of the novel, which has the identical theme of the transience of glory and the inevitability of death. As such, this first epigraph establishes the tone of the work and encourages a critical stance towards its main characters. The picaresque plot of the novel helps Gee elaborate on the second epigraph, suggesting that Alex and Chris travel only to confirm what Horace says in Epistles: exposing the futility of seeking truth elsewhere, Horace says: ‘They change their sky, not their soul, who/run across the sea [. . .] What you seek is here’ (6). Alex and Chris travel extensively to escape the emptiness that their life in London induces; they think that by freeing themselves from domestic duties, they can capture eternal bliss. Travel for them means ‘sex, love and freedom’ (102). The text describes their love of travelling as ‘perfect happiness’; a holiday in Portugal is a ‘kind of paradise’, ‘our Eden’ (102, 106). The pacy first half of the novel delineates Alex and Chris before their tragic downfall. Chris remembers this time and says: ‘We were Adam and Eve in God’s garden’ (106). He feels that ‘real life was grey’ (106). This ongoing search for an ‘unreal’ life as travellers signals the ceaselessly unsatisfied desire in the consumer society. Alexandra and Christopher’s desire to escape into another life and their frustration in the main storyline have strong undertones of decay in the home country too. In this sense, the novel presents a contemporary Britain enveloped by a story of failure and ageing in individual lives. The panoramic view of contemporary Britain as swallowed up by consumerism is reinforced by Alexandra’s reflection about her life in England: ‘We’d both lived in England since we were born, after all (what a penance, to spend so much time in England! What a waste of planet, what a waste of life!)’ (62). While drawing a portrait of Britain as a country technologically developed yet morally collapsed, the novel also discusses the nature of love and desire, family and marriage, motherhood and ageing. With its major and minor characters involved in the intellectual life of contemporary Britain, the novel also explores authorship and the academy as part of the scene. Again, the gulf between different members of this society leads to the motif of the ‘need to connect’ in the novel. The wide span of its thematic network renders this a new version of the conditionof-England novel, investigating various problems in British society. This is achieved by a richness of characters that helps Gee focus on minds fully occupied with different concerns. Where Are the Snows, with each of its chapters titled to reveal the owner of the voice speaking in it, is definitely the most polyphonic of all Gee novels; The White Family and The Flood are also very vivid narratives giving voice to a wide array of characters, yet the third-person narrator is obliterated in Where Are the Snows and the

80

Maggie Gee

author, in the idiom of Bakhtin, ‘speaks not about a character, but with him’ (63, original emphases). Since the stories are not in the mouth of a third-person narrator, there is no ‘secondhand truth’, the chorus-like quality of the narrative, with speakers opposing and diverging from each other, strengthens the realistic aspect of the novel. It also helps the reader internalize the common thread in Gee’s writing: interconnectedness and the need to understand. As the novel’s American title Christopher and Alexandra suggests, the story revolves around one couple. However, through other characters, Gee draws Chris and Alex not only as lovers, but also as parents, neighbours, customers, friends and strangers. Those in connection with them also enable Gee to elaborate on themes other than love. But Gee’s social commentary is conveyed mainly through Alexandra and Christopher. As the novel unfolds, we see Alex enjoying her married life of luxury. An author of shopping-and-fucking novels, Alex rises like mercury and departs from her workingclass roots forever. She feels that she has everything she wants: money, health and love, sex. All a woman like her could be thought to lack is a baby, but her ‘selfish’ness enables her at first not to feel any sense of bereavement. The presence of Chris’ daughter and son gives her the chance to feel like a mother, which she does not find very romantic. She focuses her attention on parties, outings, food and shopping. Gee arranges the narrative pace to reflect the superfluous sense of completion caused by material goods; as Alex is awakened to the fact of ageing and to the limits of material power to attain happiness, the pace slows down and the novel starts to read more like a saga than a romance. Her downfall begins with something that seems like an adventure, as Alex and Chris leave home – also leaving Chris’ children behind. Then, when Chris leaves Alex after her affair damages their untainted love, the tragic aspect of Alex’s past is revealed in order to shed light on the conflicts and contradictions in a money-oriented society. The novel zooms in and out, exposing her bildung more fully than those of other characters who share the centre stage. Gradually, Gee builds a picture of Alex’s luxurious life set against the poverty of her Irish family, as Alex is portrayed as a writer of a ‘blockbuster’ drawing on her ‘past self, a buried self ’. She can easily write bestselling shopping-and-fucking novels, novels ‘about lies and misery and pain and humiliation’, not because she is a very creative writer but because she has a first-hand experience of poverty (57). She calls this past after she dropped out of college ‘the lean years, the desperate years’ when she once sold a coat, and ‘sometimes sold more than coats’. Seeing her past self from the viewpoint of a more respectable present, she sounds as if she is slightly distorting the story and is expecting much-needed empathy from the reader when she declares: ‘[. . .] I was never quite a prostitute: too pretty, too arrogant, too ill-organised. But it was easy to meet rich men in Harrods, rich men who were eager to give me presents, and later, of course, it was hard to forget’ (53). An interest in luxury and an iron will to power are stimulated by the contagious nature of consumerism, made visible by young Alexandra’s ‘hunger for things’ her family never had (57). Like Madame Bovary’s first contact with luxury at a ball, a wedding party that Alex attends as an adolescent whets her young appetite for wealth: ‘I was quicker, thinner, more intelligent, they were stew and potatoes and sweet strong tea whereas I had been mad for prawns and champagne since I had them at a wedding when I was

Hard Times

81

fourteen’ (57). As Mario Vargas-Llosa comments in his The Perpetual Orgy, Emma is the prototype of the twentieth-century consumer; Flaubert presents ‘the first signs of the alienation’ that a consumer society imposes on its people: ‘consumption as an outlet for anxiety, the attempt to people with objects the emptiness that modern life has made a permanent feature of the existence of the individual’ (139). Through Alex’s move towards the pacy money-world that causes her tragic downfall, Gee seems to present the signs of a society consumed by its own habits of consumption. This downfall is signalled by a departure from her own roots: contact with money induces a change in her attitude towards her poor family; Alex formulates her revulsion as she says ‘I didn’t like them or talk like them or dress like them’ (57). The refrain-like ‘Take the money and run’, repeated while Alex’s story is revealed also alludes to Woody Allen’s mocking critique of the money-world in his 1969 film ‘Take the Money and Run’. Depicting the early life of Virgil Starkwell, a petty thief, the film ‘mockuments’ some remarkable events like Starkwell’s entry into a life of crime at a young age and his final capture by the FBI. To make money, Alex stoops; to conquer, she also writes a bestselling novel: then takes the money and runs as she quits writing after making enough money to keep her without doing anything. She also ‘runs’ as she leaves with Chris for a lifelong holiday without caring for Chris’ children, the young adolescents left behind. Making evident from the outset the contagious nature of consumerist behaviour, the repeated statement ‘Take the money and run’ also implies the idea that it is in the nature of the consumer society to induce a sense of emptiness that can only be alleviated by objects, and each fix only lasts for a short time, thus it tempts people to crime. Gee’s portrayal of Alex as a woman long departed from her self in her attraction to a life beyond the realm of her class at a young age, reads like a nostalgia for a simple life that is not contaminated by money. The ‘crime’ motif punctuates not only the way Gee narrates Alex’s materialism, but also the fact that her wealth is produced by bestselling novels based on her own poverty, a form of alienation. She confesses that having written bestselling family sagas, she made a fortune out of her ‘dreary family’. Subverting the shopping-and-fucking genre, Gee moves Alex into the tragic sphere, making her lose what she has. For instance, she portrays Alex as a rich woman who accepts that ‘[her family’s] absence left a tiny chill which even Christopher couldn’t stop growing’ (57). Thus, her fortune comes at the cost of losing her family and old self. We pity Alex when she asks ‘Why do I drink when I think of my family? I made my fortune, I made myself free’ (57). To the same effect, Gee portrays Alex having lost a daughter in her lean years, which further makes the Madame Bovary resemblance detectable. Recalling Emma’s lack of interest in her only child, Berthe, Alex feels estranged from the baby even before she is born, and arranges for it to be adopted. Of course, for poor Alex, this is more than just lack of interest; her brother calls her ‘a whore’ because she does not know the father of her baby, and she has no one to turn to; she had even innocently hoped that the family would come to the hospital to reclaim them both and shower love on their new little niece, but ‘She wasn’t their niece. She wasn’t mine, either, she was dark and minute with a face like any of the Arab men who might have been her father’ (56). This image of Alex as an unfulfilled dreamer, an abandoned lover, intensifies the critical tone of the novel.

82

Maggie Gee

The novel becomes a critique of the money-world also through the figure of Alex as an author of cheap romances. In sketching Alex as a writer of bestselling novels, Gee moves beyond the earlier self-conscious thread in her writing about authorship. Whereas writer figures in Dying, in Other Words, The Burning Book and Grace are mouthpieces of Maggie Gee, starting with Alex, Gee employs writer characters more to discuss the culture industry and its impact on authorship, namely authors as public figures and their relation to the market, rather than to speak through these characters. As a writer who sells, the publishers ‘beg’ and ‘chase’ Alex to write another book (51). Through a vivid portrayal of Alex as a ‘star author’, Gee makes her criticism of the publishing industry, which is more centrally discussed in The Flood, My Cleaner and My Driver. Alex cites the year she became famous as ‘[her] annus mirabilis’ and remembers it: ‘[.  .  .] my picture was featured in every magazine in Britain [.  .  .] I think people were amazed to see all writers weren’t ugly’ (51). Ironically, what tempts Alex out of her publishing job into writing is not the joy of writing, but her friend Poppy’s eyeopening remark about what they were doing then: ‘It’s mad to be an editor. Wrecking your eyesight over other people’s messes when you could be in their shoes earning lots of lovely lolly. And be famous to boot’ (52). Alex takes the plunge when she is assured by Poppy that she has ‘the looks’: ‘For publicity, I mean’ (52). Yes, Alex becomes a very famous writer and gets treated like a celebrity, and because ‘the camera loved her’, she gets more and more popular. Standing in contrast to her lover Stuart, the poor academic writer, a version of Harold in Light Years, Alex enables Gee to satirize the corporate publishers in contemporary consumer culture and their corrupt sales tricks: Red Gold sold ten thousand copies in hardback and a quarter of a million in paperback, helped by the hinted libel in reviews that the lesbian affairs were my own - affairs I’d dreamed up at Poppy’s suggestion. The viewing figures for the programme doubled. (54)

Showing that the simple rule ‘sex sells’ applies to the book market too, Gee notes the deterioration in aesthetic standards in Britain. Alex pities her ‘poor Chris’ who reads those serious books ‘about the state of the world’; she prefers ‘mainly novels, which don’t waste pages on tosh like that’ (213). Through showing a ‘silly’ journalist who makes a lot of money by creating a ‘cool on-line magazines’ named Karma Q and calls himself its ‘deputy editor’ (178), the novel once again satirizes the role that money plays in shaping the culture industry in contemporary Britain. The motif of the money-world with its sharp divide between rich and poor is also woven into the novel’s depiction of the gap between the high living standards of Europe, Britain and Bolivians, Mexicans. Reminiscent of a similar public event in The Flood, the millennial celebration organized by ‘The Millenium Society’ in Brazil becomes a visible form of the divide between the rich and poor. This celebration shows the inherent discriminatory nature of capitalism. And Alex’s account of the millennial celebration, which is tainted by her earlier experience of poverty, suggests the idea that this gap could never be bridged: The rich went mad over the millennium. The rich love parties; count me in. The mega-rich and mega-great competed to hold their parties in places the symbolised

Hard Times

83

richness and greatness, the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, the Pyramids, Ceausescu’s Palace - all of them had their parties planned. Millions of bottles of [champagne] were selling, far too many for them all to be real. I suppose the poor who knew no better must have bought inferior imitations. (228)

The marzipan mock-ups of famous buildings and the glazed bread baked into the form of twentieth-century immortals – ranging from Charlie Chaplin and Albert Einstein to Michelle Pfeiffer and Samuel Beckett – establish the allegorical tone of the scene in which Alex feels ‘left out’ of ‘all the earth’s people holding their breath’, standing together (231). The scene showcases the world as things are ‘now being broken up and swallowed in a giant orgy of consumption’ (234). This symbolic gesture of eating the slices of bread with images of celebrities, stars, rockets, the moon and a steam train soon becomes a sign of catastrophe for Alex who fails to ‘dance into the twenty-first century’ with Chris. She misses the moment, which becomes an ‘omen’, ‘a proof of something’ (235). This dark and bitter portrayal of the world is punctuated by a brief critique of Thatcher similar to that available in Gee’s earlier novels. That even a rich and carefree woman like Alex ‘who never had the slightest interest in politics’ finds Thatcher an unpleasant figure adds to Gee’s commentary: ‘her joylessness, her sexlessness’ make Thatcher a symbol of the Britain ‘left behind’. To extend the metaphor, the slice of bread covered by an image of Thatcher proves tasteless. The next slice with Beckett’s face brings the ‘inedible’ Britain to a universal plane to overshadow the festive mood with consumption (234). As such, this big millennial celebration, which is a precursor of the Gala Dinner in The Flood, gives an image of the human condition with all its conflicts. Unified to celebrate, though only temporarily, it offers a portrayal of peace and unity; lonely Alex wants to mingle with the crowd to experience oneness: ‘It was all the earth’s people holding their breath, laughing softly, sighing with excitement, standing together, chattering, dreaming; Chris said there were armistices in so many wars, they would end tomorrow but tonight there was peace, and this distant whisper was infinitely peaceful’ (231). As she enjoys a sense of unity among the ‘faceless masses’ (231), Alex feels strangely sad, which recalls a Wordsworthian grasp of the ‘still sad music of humanity’; but she proclaims: ‘Sadness was the merest moment. We were all together. It was beautiful’ (232). In other words, Gee brilliantly unites her critique of England and the world, with the theme of ‘the need to connect’. The theme is built first by her belated recognition of the presence of others at the Millennium party, a slow departure from selfishness. She starts to understand that what makes her feel special is just money, and she sees herself clearly as a rich outsider in Mexico City who ‘wanted everybody look at her’ and ‘never bothered to look at [people]; not unless they were beautiful or interesting’ (323). As she loses what she once had, youth, lovers and sex, she gradually moves beyond the limits of herself and sees others: They were always there, but I never saw them. Going down among them I am almost overwhelmed; now I’m old I’m invisible; the people swarm along the shining streets, alive with the sum of all their separate energies, pouring forward, pouring outwards, gathering speed as I run down. They are so many, we are so many. So many people I had never seen, so many people I had never felt part of. (323)

84

Maggie Gee

The shift from the third person to the first person plural signifies a development in Alex’s consciousness; she now deems herself a part of the whole and values solidarity over a life of self-importance. This awareness also becomes a plot device that aims to bring Alex and Chris together again in the final chapter. But before that final scene, Alex has to prepare the stage for the reader; thus, she meditates on their separation and resolves that being away from Chris is meaningless because they love each other: ‘[. . .] how can I extricate myself from him? How much was my fault, how much his? I suppose we’re in the dock together, except that we’re so far apart. We lived together. We should be together. We lived together, we should die together’ (325). The importance of the need to relate to others is also evident in Christopher’s experience of an existential void in Venice. That he has no one to relate to in a foreign land adds to his deep sorrow of separation from Alex; in the dark and cold days of winter, he feels lonely: ‘Everything dead and cold. No one in the world to care about me. No one to hold me in their arms’ (182). The novel wittily develops the theme by employing violence as a way of articulating the lack of solidarity. When Chris saves the life of a prostitute attacked by a man in a street, he feels as ‘grateful’ and ‘lucky’ as she does because this way he can feel that he exists (252). As in many other Gee novels, experience of sorrow and pain tie people together; Chris says ‘Violence linked us’ (251). This connection between people brings in the ethical concerns in Gee’s writing; it is only when he is of service that Chris can feel actualized. The help he offers to this girl called Elisa redeems Chris; the deep need to do something good for others turns this street girl into a close relative: ‘She was not a prostitute, she was my daughter’ (251). So, he walks back home as a ‘different man’ since he thinks: ‘I had done something good. There was some point to me. I had saved a life. I had saved myself ’ (252). Through the help he offers, Chris both experiences a feeling of intimacy again and becomes a Christ-like saviour. The novel ends on this theme of ‘connect’; Alex and Chris meet in Paris about two decades after their departure from their home in London. Chris now has a girlfriend, Madonna, much younger than him; but then he finds Alex in Paris all by herself, dying. Seeing her suffer, Chris acts beyond the dictum of his ego and feels that he has to forgive and forget what went wrong in the past and be at her side. He remembers what his father had told him when he was a child and resolves that when there is ‘One single person, one suffering person’, he should be there to offer help (398). Thus, he tells Madonna, who thinks that Alex is just a selfish monster to be punished, that he cannot leave her. By introducing Madonna as a version of the young Alex, who, like her, wants to escape England because she is ‘sick of it’ (390), Gee again implies how consumerism entraps people and causes a deep alienation. Yet, the novel’s final section shows Alexandra and Christopher back home in London, where Alexandra has grown wise enough to think in line with the epigraph from Horace to proclaim, ‘We travelled to escape from ourselves, I think. We travelled to escape our littleness’ (399). The sad finale in which Alexandra is dying despite ‘massive chemotherapy’ becomes a gesture towards a simple, natural life purged from the high-speed life of consumption. Chris and Alex feel the eternal bliss in their outings into the mountains, in a ‘hut’ where she feels she looks ‘into another world, a world in miniature’ (400). This recalls Bachelard’s discussion of the hut, in his The Poetics of Space, as a place, ‘a centre of legend’ ‘so simple that it no longer belongs to our memories— which at times are too full of imagery—but to legend; it is a centre of legend’ (31). An

Hard Times

85

image of a utopic space that wipes out the sad memories, it offers a fresh perspective both for Alex and Chris and for the reader. Like the huts in Jeanette Winterson fiction this final space Gee draws becomes a sign of transgression, a life beyond the consumer culture. (Özyurt Kılıç, xix), This image of union with nature in the mountains, where ‘you feel free’ like Marie of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, suggests purification from the sordid life of materialism. Thus, one cannot help but recall once again Bachelard’s elaboration on a hermit’s hut, as ‘a theme which needs no variations, for at the simplest mention of it, “phenomenological reverberation” obliterates all mediocre resonances’ (32). Ending her novel on a theme of union in light, Gee proposes that although the system will naturally generate new Madonnas to rely on, there is always an alternative way of life to go beyond this world of fetishized objects. Thus, Alex understands that satisfaction resides in the capacity to enjoy oneself in its simplest form, and now says that all she has to do is ‘see, feel’ (400). This epiphanic moment offers Alex’s death as a natural form of joining all humanity. Images of nature describing her final vision once again expose the novel’s critique of materialism. Outside the walls of the hut, Alex sees people coming towards her, ‘pouring up the mountainside like a river’. Described as a ‘great skein’, the image of people ‘no longer strangers’ falling and melting into a fluid chain brings to mind the image of ‘the cotton wool’ of daily life that Virginia Woolf uses in her Moments of Being, which strenghtens the theme of interconnectedness in the novel: Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings— are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. (72)

Alex finally mingles with the ‘faceless mass’ she felt estranged from in a previous scene of the millennial celebration in Mexico City; to become another ‘Dead Lady’ vanished like those influential and beautiful historical figures, Lady Flora, Hipparchia, Echo, Héloise, Queen Blanches and Joan of Arc in François Villon’s ballad, the refrain of which gives the novel its title. The ballad’s ending with a strong ubi sunt emphasis could well apply to the death of Alex and her once happy life with Christopher: Nay, never ask this week, fair lord, Where they are gone, nor yet this year, Save with this much for an overword,-But where are the snows of yester-year?

If not a typically optimistic Gee ending, the craft in creating such a suggestive image of death still lightens up the very sad finale by enabling Alex to join humanity in peace both with her loved ones here and all the others there: ‘here are all the faces I failed to see, all the lives I failed to notice, stretching back as far as my vision reaches- the snow is blinding;’ (400). Gee maintains this delicate balance between the tragic and comic, which is offered throughout the novel, by the presence of and frequent references to Edvard Munch’s painting ‘Dance of Life’. In this painting,

86

Maggie Gee

Munch expresses his awareness of the biological cycle of human existence and records the change from love to death through three female figures (Chiappini, 78). It can easily be suggested that Alex resembles the red-haired woman in the painting, a symbol of erotic temptation dancing at the centre. She says ‘I was no longer the woman with the flaming red hair, locked in an embrace with the thickset man’ (373). Therefore, the painting helps Gee both to show the change in Alex’s consciousness and reveal her thematic concerns. Alex sees the painting in the Louvre and muses how ‘faintly laughable’ she might have found its title, ‘The Dance of Life’; awakening to the change in her, she now finds her eyes filling with tears because she has learnt to enjoy life as it is. She loses everything, even her bodily health, but gains the joy of life, which gives her a brand new vision of life. Looking at the painting, she affirmatively says: ‘Life was a dance, I agreed with that, I wanted to stay part of it, I wanted so much to go on dancing, I still loved life, although I’d lost everything’ (373). Like the woman dressed in the black of mourning at the far right in Munch’s painting, Alex gradually leaves the dance in the hall, but only to mingle with the dance of life. This wisdom that Alex gains as she gets older becomes one of the strongest threads in the thematic network of the novel; with its critical undertones about the beauty myth in consumer culture, the novel treats the theme of ageing from a perspective that sees it as a flaw in our contemporary culture. Favouring youth over the aged, as Naomi Wolf puts in her The Beauty Myth, the consumer culture employs images of beauty as a way of manipulating people into consumption. Gee’s satirical remarks about our obsession with youth and beauty are evident in the contrast between Alex’s old days ‘when people stopped talking when (she) walked into a room’ (70) and her last days in which she is just one of the invisible old women – because ‘age makes everyone ordinary’ (373). Exhausted by the side effects of chemotherapy, Alex still ‘wastes hours over the last two days’ getting herself ready to face the camera: she dyes her hair to look younger, buys some lipsticks and some new clothes (374). The mystique of beauty in contemporary urban culture also leads to a discussion of the gap between young and old where Gee makes resonant criticisms of the younger characters. Alex finds Benjamin’s failure to empathize with her tactless and extends her criticism to all the young people: ‘But there you are, the young haven’t suffered, they can’t understand what they haven’t lived’ (213). Equating beauty with youth, Mary Brown also articulates the restrictive view that Gee condemns; growing old means being ‘featureless’ (27). To comply with the role cast for her, Mary thinks she is ‘too old to have long straight hair’ (27). A ‘new chapter’ in life at its best, old age severs the poor from the mainstream much more harshly. Mary describes her sick husband Matthew on his deathbed as a poor man who ‘has been dying for ages’ in a poor London house with a leaking basement: ‘it’s painful and messy and unglamorous’ (174). Despite nuances in its degree of mediocrity, ageing equally renders people ordinary because ‘[A]ge is ordinary’ (210); thus, Gee’s satire is made obvious by the image of ageing as a bifurcation of the self. Alex feels that as an old woman, she is estranged from her own being, as if she has grown a ‘second self ’ (227). Thus, ageing in Gee’s writing becomes a dividing factor like race, gender and class, which results in a society much worse than that of Disraeli’s ‘two nations’.

Hard Times

87

When articulated by a character representing the educated, Gee’s critique of consumerism implies the role that money plays in shaping consciousness as well. With the voice of Jean-Claude, the Marxist anthropologist and philosopher Alex meets in Paris, Gee’s narrative reads, similar to Angela Carter’s ars poetica, like ‘an argument stated in fictional terms’. (Haffenden, 76) Jean-Claude speaks in tune with the quotation from Horace in the epigraph and gives a bitter critique of the life that Alex and Chris led as travellers. He interprets their escape from home as a mere desire for tourism; anticipating that what Alex and Chris did was just staying in identical hotel rooms and having a taste of this and that culture while avoiding real contact with the ‘local’ people, he expresses disapproval: ‘Window-dressing. It’s not the real world. You floated about in a fantasy space invented to please you foreigners. . .’ (316). Needing to defend herself, Alex helplessly says ‘but’ she wanted to know the names of birds and trees, which she could only do when they are in English. Alex’s difficulty in learning these names reveals Gee’s critique of a Eurocentric and imperial outlook, a theme dealt with more extensively in her later novels, The White Family, My Cleaner and My Driver. Alex’s reluctance to live and experience life like the native people do is evident in her insistence on English nomenclature; like Robinson Crusoe, our ‘true prototype of the British colonist’ (Joyce, 24-5), she points to a big palm tree and stubbornly asks the Hindu islander its ‘real name, the American name’ (191). A sign also recalling a scientific endeavour in 1921 that discloses a colonial attitude towards nature (documented by A.D. Dubois’ in ‘Our English Nomenclature’ in 1922), Gee’s novel naturally reads like a satire on our times, not much different from the old days of colonialism. Jean-Claude’s critical remarks prove right since Chris also has a similar sense of dislocation, even at the heart of Europe; in Venice, he misses his English home and middle-class comfort. As with Gee’s later character Vanessa in Uganda in My Driver, he misses his a copy of The Independent, eggs for breakfast and Earl Grey tea (168). Jean-Claude condemns not only this aloofness but also the conspicuous consumption of Alex and Chris. However, his critical tone gives him the upper hand only until Gee inserts Alex’s resentful voice. To her, Jean-Claude is just a ‘spoiled and aggressive’ youngster who is, unlike Alex, ‘rich from birth’ (317), whereas she is a selfmade woman; so she finally makes herself feel better by acknowledging his lack of experience in love. Alex uses her age and sex as a weapon to defend herself; thus, she ponders, ‘I don’t think he knew he was a very poor lover; for most men ignorance is bliss’ (319). Gee cleverly replicates class difference in an ironic fashion by assigning Alex and Jean-Claude different areas of strength: Jean-Claude is rhetorically superior whereas Alex has a rich repertoire of emotional and bodily experience. A subverted shopping-and-fucking novel, the narrative relies on its female characters to develop themes of family, marriage and motherhood in contemporary British society. As in Munch’s ‘Dance of Life’, the novel presents women of different ages and roles, as foil characters. For instance, Alex and Mary stand in sharp contrast to each other, just as the Marquis de Sade’s classic femme fatale Juliette is set against the meek and mild Justine. Mary is described as ‘a good mother’ and ‘a good wife’ (25), whereas Alex is by no means ‘a home-maker’ like other women (274). Chris’ sullen daughter Suzy, who feels empowered only when she becomes a mother, is another character who contributes to the novel’s representation of women in

88

Maggie Gee

contemporary British society. Through depicting them as equally victimized, Gee refers to the double-bind in our male-dominant culture. On the one hand, there is Alex who constantly feels guilty because she is ‘selfish’, does not ‘make people happy’ and ‘cannot encourage them’ (273); on the other hand, there is selfless Mary whose life is dedicated to duties and domesticity. The novel shows marriage for women simply as a set of domestic chores and assertions of second-wave feminism resonate in Alex’s complaint about these tasks: ‘You see how hard it is to talk about love without all the other shit breaking in; wifehood, motherhood, responsibility, notions that turn me rigid with boredom’ (69). While drawing women’s conditions, Gee also gives a panorama of contemporary family life. Like the female version of Orwell’s George Bowling in Coming up for Air satirizing middle-class home, Alex thinks ‘houses and families are deadly’ (62); she is a woman desperately needing to come up for air, feeling marriage is ‘a battle for survival’ in which you have to ‘be strong and win’ (196). To her, ‘home-owning is a monumental bore’ because one has to offer children ‘time and love and money, [.  .  .] advice on acne, help with calculus, admiring responses to their thoughts on life’ (63). Though she also does this, to some extent, in her previous novels The Burning Book and Light Years, here Gee presents the contemporary family as a unit becoming increasingly dysfunctional; more importantly, she paves the way for a broader discussion of family and motherhood in Lost Children. Through a representation of stepmothers and teenage mothers, the novel discusses issues like abortion as a debilitating experience (167), the medicalization of motherhood (192–3) and what it means to be a good mother in this culture. This novel makes a strong claim about motherhood and suggests that any woman who can truly give love can be seen as a mother when it draws the formerly ‘selfish’ Alex as a version of Mother Mary, holding in her arms Chris’ 33-year-old son Isaac. In this contemporary pieta, it is not blood or familial responsibilities but love that ties the HIV sufferer Isaac, a Christ-like figure, to his stepmother Alex (182). As Gee’s first novel of the 1990s, Where Are the Snows starts a new phase in her writing not only in terms of the themes but also in the way she treats them. This new phase offers the reader a much richer portrayal of the condition of Britain.

Note 1 You can find information about ‘Save Kensal Rise Library’ campaign at ‘www.savekensalriselibrary.org.’

5

Are Such Things Done on Albion’s Shore?: Lost Children (1994)

Although not the most elegiac (as Michèle Roberts suggests), Lost Children is the most prophetic of Gee’s novels. With the disappearance of Zoe, the little girl lost, the novel can be read as a variation on the theme of loss; an allusion to William Blake’s songs about lost children, its title offers a reading framed by a romantic consciousness, in its critique of life in modern-day urban and rural Britain. By drawing on the metaphorical use of the term ‘lost children’, thus referring to various categories of loss, Gee establishes a thematic network that is rich and suggestive. First of all, the plot is centred on the tragedy of a family dismantled by the loss of their 16-year-old daughter Zoe. Through the family’s search for Zoe, which Michèle Roberts analogizes to the myth of Demeter searching for her lost daughter Persephone in the darkness of Hades, Gee can both create suspense and elaborate on the problems of a family in contemporary Britain. Behind the family saga with its central story of separation and reunion, Gee gives another panorama of contemporary British society, just as she does in Light Years and Where Are the Snows. The text is semi-autobiographical in the sense that Gee writes this novel shortly after giving birth to her daughter Rosa. In conversation with Angela Neustatter, Gee made this clear when she stated that what the novel’s title suggests is not only one’s ‘lost childhood’, but also the miscarriage she had a few years before she wrote the novel. Thus, the theme of loss and being reunited are pivotal, and Zoe’s abortion and Sheilah’s miscarriage can be considered as fictional versions of Gee’s own experience of loss. To enlarge the theme to include three generations of women, she fictionalizes another experience of the loss of a baby, this time by Zoe’s grandmother Gwen, which Alma, her daughter, describes as ‘horrible’. Alma misses this lost sister, ‘the missing ally’, ‘the lost child’ (41). The central voice in the novel, Alma, thinks about her childhood and feels that there is ‘something lost’ as if someone ‘stole something’ from her (51). With such evocations, the image of lost children becomes a metaphor not only for absence, grief, unhappiness and loss of innocence, but also for an entry into a life of adulthood filled with worries, heavy duties and problems. Alma muses about the lives that people would potentially lead in the empty houses she tries to sell as a real-estate agent and sees ‘lost children’ in her mind’s eye: ‘Inside the neat boxes there could be mayhem, beatings, murder, quiet abuse [.  .  .] Things never made known, things that won’t be remembered. Lost children. Lost people’ (68).

90

Maggie Gee

The title ‘Lost Children’ also denotes lost adults, as Alma tries to imagine her father Jack who died when she was a little girl. She comes to an awareness that all fathers and mothers were once little girls and little boys, and have now lost their childhood (239). Finally, the novel interprets the loss of childhood not only as an experience of growing up to be less innocent, but also parents’ sense of being less of a help to children as they grow up to be more and more independent. Expressing grief, Alma broods over the fact that babies grow up and leave, and says: ‘We all lose them. We all lose our babies. They have to grow up and go away . . . They need us less,’ (176). With its strong emphasis on the presence and loss of children in our lives, Lost Children contributes to the theme of children as life-affirming forces in Gee’s writing. Babies here, as in many of Gee’s novels, are the bringers of hope. Thus, the news of her pregnancy, though it is terminated at an early stage, cheers Sheilah up; she feels ‘a rush of warm emotion, a river of life, the upsurge of sweet unreasoning hope that came so rarely as she grew older’ (153). Children also signify wisdom, which we lose as we get older; equating youth with insight, Eileen declares herself young enough to know better (37). Like Nietzsche in Thus Spoke Zarasthustra, Gee describes children as essential for the cultivation of values that could redeem us: ‘The child is innocence and forgetting, a new beginning, a game, a self-propelled wheel, a first movement, a sacred “Yes”  ’ (139). In the idiom of Blake, they are the very markers of innocence; they symbolize the future, and losing them, Alma believes, we lose our future (200). In that sense, Lost Children is a book of praise to innocence, a eulogy on childhood. This is also evident in the image of Alma’s husband Paul as he offers an important message to the reader. Like the voice of the bard introducing his ‘Songs of Experience’, ‘Hear the voice of the Bard/Who present, past, and future, sees’ (49), Paul sagely asks: [H]ow can parents abuse their children, when the children give us so much power? [. . .] Just by loving us, trusting us. And they are sexual, without knowing it. We can see that. We have to protect them. (251)

In due course, Gee is critical of precarious modern living conditions that do not support a life with children (67). Kevin, Alma’s colleague at Portico and Sheen summarizes these conditions as he observes: ‘But everyone does. Want houses. Not have children’ (67). It is clear that the novel does not explore issues such as abortion and childcare in vacuo; as in many of her other novels, Gee deals with them with a view to different class positions as well. For instance, just like Alex in Where Are the Snows, Sheila has to get her baby adopted at 21 since the ‘terrible poverty’ did not enable her to look after the baby (152). The novel’s critique of such inequality is enriched by Alma’s thoughts, which go beyond the bounds of Britain. As her childless friends Verity and Sheilah talk about adoption and fostering, Alma thinks about the two worlds, the developing and the developed, standing in sharp opposition: Wherever people are rich and infertile, the women are having these conversations. And all over the developing, the withering, world, where people are fertile and horribly poor, and the children huddle and steal and starve, grow up without parents, or food or love. But the two things can never match. They seem to match, but they don’t, they can’t. The torture is that they seem to match. (279)

Are Such Things Done on Albion’s Shore?

91

In its subversion of the family saga into a bitter satire on the state of Britain, Lost Children, like Where Are the Snows, The Burning Book and Light Years, derives its strength from a generous exposition of conflicts inherent in the post-industrial society and its emphasis on business and money making. To reveal the harsh contradictions of contemporary British society, Gee features a group of homeless people who are camping just across from the office of a big real-estate chain, Portico and Sheen. They are described as the opposing ‘side’, ‘dossers, derelicts, down-and-outs’, living beyond the established rules for the ‘normal’ (131). Gee focalizes on Alma’s consciousness and exposes how different life is for the homeless and the normal. First of all, the past, present and future cease to exist as different categories for these homeless people: ‘There aren’t any boundaries for them, are there? Every day the same. More or less. Waking and sleeping. Everything blurred. A kind of endless present, I suppose, since they don’t have a future to plan for- do they?’ (184). As Neustatter rightly observes, ‘it is that Alma’s tale is interlaced with a scathing comment on the state of a society that has children living on the streets- another category of lost children’ (2, my emphasis). Gee’s portrayal of these lost children, ‘weather-beaten people’, residing by the Royal College of Surgeons, reveals the contrast between the homeless and the ‘clean-shaven’ barristers and lawyers walking past (118). Comparing the tents and sleeping bags of the homeless to ‘coffins’ rather than houses, Paul offers a bitter satire on the British state and its failure to provide its people with shelter: ‘The terrible humility of those poor shelters, abasing themselves at the feet of lawyers. You couldn’t see what bodies slept inside. [. . .] They were too nearly alive, like dirty chrysalises from which living things might crawl, injured’ (118). By juxtaposing them with the representatives of justice and the real-estate agents, Gee deftly displays the ailing nature of justice and welfare in contemporary capitalist society. The telling metaphor of a window of a smart estate agent outside which the homeless sit like a frieze becomes a panorama of contemporary Britain; seen from the window of the real-estate agency, ‘The heads of the homeless could be glimpsed like a frieze, all along the bottom of the window’ (271). Similarly, London Bridge is represented as if it were the very crown of this ailing body. The view from the bridge features the grey figures of these estranged and ostracized people; ‘with no hope of relief ’, they are like the suffering dead in Dante’s Inferno: All across the bridge, at intervals, the grey figures suffered, the hunched figures, standing or sitting while the world walked past them, ignoring them as if they were statues. Made life like, though, by a trick of the light. Almost lifelike, half alive. Alma too walked past, averting her eyes. There were too many of them, too horribly many. (99)

Through Alma’s perspective, we understand that the Kemble Hill homeless who reside by her office are, in fact, ‘part of the same unlovely family, surely, the same sour tribe of the dispossessed’ (268). Underscoring the unfair conditions that divide people into ‘dossers’ (124) and ‘normal’, the novel problematizes their invisibility despite their ubiquitousness; they are ignored by the people ‘who passed, busily, hastily, people shopping or hurrying home, normal people who didn’t lie on pavements, normal people who lived inside’ (130). In that sense, the novel raises awareness about both the

92

Maggie Gee

homeless and homelessness. Wittily, a defence of the homeless is offered by Zoe, the lost child, who says: ‘They are not any different; they are human beings like us’ (247). With her growing awareness as the search for her lost daughter proceeds, Alma’s voice also raises consciousness about the homeless. She sees that they look and talk in a ‘normal’ way (268). Through her friend Sheilah, whose boyfriend is shooting a film about the homeless, Alma learns that ‘There are supposed to be over three thousand children sleeping on the streets of London’ (149). Strengthening the novel’s social realist thread, Alma sees them not just as part of the ‘sour tribe of the dispossessed’, but also as one of the grim facts of ‘the whole wounded world’ (269). Gee enlarges the scope of her satire by employing a real-estate agency as part of her setting. Through Portico and Sheen, the novel also critiques housing policies and represents another antagonism in contemporary British society; while middle-class people are encouraged to buy houses and achieve a sense of safety, lower-class people get unsettled through the process of forced repossession. Those who cannot afford a house are doomed to leave when a rich person comes and claims ownership. Gee draws a vivid picture of a couple whose house is being repossessed. Both ‘upset’ – the man ‘half-mad, on the edge of violence’ and the wife ‘silent, utterly depressed, lugging a sleeping two-year-old’ (267) – they are among the hundreds of unsettled people who ‘naturally resented the estate agents who were selling the roofs above their heads on behalf of the hated mortgage company’ (81). Of course, the estate agent’s unpleasant observations also add to the critique; he catalogues the clients as ‘time wasters’, ‘refugees’ and ‘timids’ (130). Tired of their whims, even the virtuous Alma starts playing tricks, and to make the Gurneys take a decision, tells a lie. Manipulating the pregnant wife and her emotions about the future with a baby, she points to a nearly leafless tree in the garden and asks: Does your husband realise that’s an apple tree? Almost certainly a James Grieve, I think. It’s one of the nicest apples. Very English. Old-fashioned. A bit special [. . .] Imagine your child in the apple tree, biting into a beautiful juicy apple. (181)

Feeling encouraged by her own performance, she tells another lie to incite them: ‘There’s no hurry at all. Though there is one other person very interested’ (181). Through similar examples, the novel points to the fact that agents are the victims of capitalist housing policies. Private sales, for instance, are ‘nightmares’ for them since ‘the vendor and purchaser conspired together to cut the estate agent out of the deal’ (103). In other words, the policies of contemporary British society do not offer estate agents immunity from the recession: ‘The housing market was dropping all the time; each drop in price meant a drop in commission, and the lower prices weren’t landing the punters. Half the photos in the windows had price reduction stickers’ (267). In this sense, by juxtaposing the real-estate agent and the homeless living by their very office, Gee gives us a clue that the source of these two crises is the same1. Mr Portico’s explanation for the closure becomes a realistic portrayal of the downward economy in contemporary Britain: ‘The figures for the last three months were a disaster’ (273). Thus, leaving Alma, Ashley and Kevin unemployed, he closes the branch. As Kevin grumbles a reference to the

Are Such Things Done on Albion’s Shore?

93

Christian Nativity story and the homelessness of the mother of Jesus, ‘No room at the fucking inn’, the novel’s critique of the post-industrial society with its emphasis on business and money making grows sharper (273). Lost Children also represents the downturn in the economy by portraying unemployed youth. Inserting a brief portrayal of an unemployed girl who she compares to Zoe, Gee suggests that the unemployed are among the lost children of Britain. As she tries to sell small items to Alma, this ‘thin dark girl’ reveals the wide gap between the moneyed and the unemployed: Zoe’s age. Not much older. Alma looked again; far too thin. The near-skull of the anorexic, smiling too hard, too painfully. Older than Zoe. Wearing sandals, in November. [. . .] Alma looked at the girl’s own gloves, holed wool. [. . .] (All her clothes were old. Her coat didn’t fit. Skinny as she was, it strained at the buttons.) (63–4)

Showing how hard it is to sell even to women like Alma who can see that the job of a door-to-door seller serves a social function, Gee gives a brief picture of the life of the jobless. Alma even gets irritated when the girl mumbles: ‘It’s giving employment to the unemployed. It’s very cheap’ (62). Feeling impatient as she thinks she does not need any of these things – soap, bath salts, gloves and sponges – Alma is reluctant to talk with her. Lost Children can be considered prophetic since it gave in  1994 a picture of the state of Britain today (2012), confronting, to quote Sir Mervyn King,2 the governor of the Bank of England, ‘enormous challenges’, which Larry Elliott lists as fast-rising homelessness, falling employment, thus longer dole queues, a squeeze on family budgets, a rise in energy and food prices, and government spending cuts (1–3). The novel also represents the state of Britain through an image of a protest against ‘the massive’ cuts to the education budget (193). Although not as centrally placed as the strike scenes in those Victorian social problems novels like Gaskell’s North and South, Brontë’s Shirley and Dickens’ Hard Times, Lost Children also gives a vivid representation of the economic recession by portraying a ‘crowd of hundreds; maybe thousands’ protesting (197). When an amount of 20,000 pounds is cut from the Brent schools’ budget, the teachers hold an emergency meeting (162). With sentiments anticipating the ‘Initial Statement’ of the ‘Occupy the London Stock Exchange’ group (‘Occupy London’), parents and teachers do not accept the cuts ‘either as necessary or inevitable’, so standing up for their rights to education and a welfare society, parents get ‘united’ to make a ‘protest to the deaf ’, shouting: ‘SAVE OUR SCHOOLS/STOP PUNISHING OUR CHILDREN/KIDS NEED SCHOOLS/SAVE OUR TEACHERS’ (195). Through this protest of the parents of all Brent schools, Gee gives a picture of the heavy impact that cuts make on children’s lives: The schools were losing millions; they already had insufficient books, a bare minimum of staff, leaky buildings, no money for swimming lessons, no money, no money. These cuts would bear right into the bone. [Paul] would no longer be deciding whether to buy new maths books or get the boys’ toilets repaired; now he would know that he could do neither. (193)

94

Maggie Gee

Alma’s husband Paul, who is the head of the school, also marches with the parents. He feels resentful and bitter as he sees that ‘They think it’s easy to take money away from children. Candy from babies, they think it is’ (194). He knows that shoved away into dark damp buildings without enough books and computers, these children will one day burst out of the darkness, look for the adults who neglected them and want their revenge. At this point, Gee’s political satire centres on these potentially lost children; and through Paul’s observations, it offers a sociological analysis of violence and considers crime as the direct result of a sense of bereavement and neglect: When these politicians are old and weak, the kids they’ve short-changed will be big and tough. The only power they have will be the power of their bodies, but they’ll use that strength to make us take notice. They’ll do to the weak what was done to them when they were helpless, when they were weak. (194)

Seeing ‘the left-wing splinter groups’ handing out their placards signed by the Communist Party treated with contempt by parents, Paul thinks: ‘They’re part of it [. . .] We all are’ (197). And when an angry parent ironically asks: ‘This is England, isn’t it? We always had free schools in England’ (198–9), the novel also touches on the sense of nostalgia that is a running motif in Gee’s writing. Paul’s meditation also intensifies this feeling of loss pervading contemporary Britain: What was the point? Nothing these days seemed to have a lot of point. Why have buses without any passengers? Why have schools without any funds? Why be a father if you never see your kids? People these days can’t communicate. None of us manage to talk to each other. Nobody cares about anyone else. We’re all on our own, every one of us. (299)

By establishing the link between individual tragedies and the larger picture, the demonstration scene adds to the dark and gloomy image of the country. As the marchers disperse, an air of hopelessness fills the wet and silent streets, ‘under English skies, the narrow skies of more modest hopes, the narrow skies of disappointment’ (199). Rendering its people homeless and unemployed, contemporary Britain is described as an unfriendly place, a world both ‘wounded’ (269) and ‘hostile’ (17). Gee’s portrayal of London recalls Blake’s ‘London’ and its faces with ‘marks of weakness, marks of woe’; its people are also hostile to each other, as if judged and divided by ‘the mind-forg’d manacles’ (56). This is by no means a safe place; for instance, Zoe mentions ‘many attacks on the tube these days’ (11). And Alma hears a 5-year-old girl mentioning someone around the playground who ‘bullies’ her sister. Once again suggesting the lost children that Blake portrays in his songs, this girl reveals the unfriendly feel of London: ‘When it gets dark, I’ve got to go home. [. . .] One day I got lost, and my dad whopped me’ (20). As it resonates in the voice of the novel’s oldest and most pleasant character Eileen, Alma’s aunt, with no space for them to play, ‘Cities aren’t good places for children’ (230). The novel gains its elegiac tone partly from the feelings of indifference and dryness that abound in it. For Adam, Alma and Paul’s son, London is the ‘place of humiliation’ and meant ‘panic, and stress, and failure’ (240). In his small room, ‘this miserable

Are Such Things Done on Albion’s Shore?

95

box’ (302), Adam compares it to Wales to conclude: ‘The sky over London was never really dark, not like the wonderful skies in Wales, velvet black, free, enormous skies, carelessly draped in veils of stars’ (241). London does not give him a sense of being sheltered and protected; it severs him from nature: ‘This sky was faintly orange, electric, the stars almost invisible. This was a wakeful, urban sky’ (241). What he feels in this big city is a looming indifference and lack of love; he thinks that no one would care if he died and asks, ‘Why doesn’t anyone love anyone else?’ (241). Apparently bereft of a ‘pattern’ in its beauty, London is a city that does not welcome its children and leave them ‘mysteriously aged’: Hard to believe that there wasn’t a pattern, that the beauty of the scene didn’t mean something, that the city, from this distance a child’s world of palaces, wouldn’t open up as the sun went down, as the grey men shivered back into life; that the shining porticos wouldn’t yield, that the empty halls wouldn’t take them in. (99)

An encompassing sense of nostalgia for the beauty of nature and a sense of unity in the countryside also situates Lost Children in the romantic tradition. Remembering a day on Lavender Hill years ago, Alma describes the image of Zoe at seven in terms of nature, and compares the beauty of Zoe to that of Lavender Hill. A day out spent in nature with loved ones, free from her domestic and editorial responsibilities stands in sharp contrast to the gloom in London. In so doing, she also defines the loss of her daughter in terms of a departure from nature: Her hair in those days was golden brown, harvest gold, thickly plaited, the generous gold of plaited bread. In the photograph she was jumping towards the camera and the plaits flew up like great ears of corn, edged with sun against a dark blue sky. Below the hill was all bluebells; green and blue and blue and green, those drenching youthful blues of April. (24)

As a motif in Gee’s writing, the journey back to the country functions as a plot device that offers Alma an opportunity to rediscover herself. Accordingly, Alma describes the country in terms of a sense of protection and belonging; this is the very place where she can feel the signs of change in herself and test this new self against the sources that made her the person she is. She feels that ‘Travelling to Wales was like being reborn, a long cool birth in a kind country’ (201). Like a lost girl herself, she demands help from the Welsh landscape: ‘I’m your child. Take me back.’ (204). This journey back into her hometown also acts as a tool for satire; Gee develops her critique of the decay in the urban landscape by putting the beauty of the country next to sordid images of London: The green, the grey, the clouded country glided by, round then hollow, reassuringly the same, still unspoiled, limpidly maternal, the sheep nestled on their solid little hillsides, the small stone farms in the curve of the valleys, the road winding like beaded ribbon around the gentle limbs of land. (204)

However, the country is not free from the problems of recession either. Like Light Years and Grace, Lost Children delineates recession and crisis in the countryside too. Alma’s observations in the village show that it no longer offers relief. While enjoying

96

Maggie Gee

the tranquillity of the landscape, Alma soon notices the signs of recession and thinks: ‘Not many beads; not many cars. Were there any people left in Wales?’ (204). Through Alma’s perspective, Gee represents the fact that ‘it’s all over the country, the recession. No one’s got any money to spend’ (210). To emphasize the theme of decline and old age, the downturn is also narrated from the perspective of the old, Alma’s mother Gwen and her sister Eileen. As Gwen witnesses the process of shop closures, she gets angry about the people who leave for London (211). Unlike Alma, a Londoner, she has to wait for ‘the cheap rate’ to make phone calls (207). She cannot accept the fact that while the villagers ‘starve up here’ in a life without food, toys and newspapers, Londoners enjoy themselves. Describing her mother’s feelings about these people, Alma’s narrative voice sheds light on the severed connection between the country and the city: ‘Gwen wasn’t remotely political. “They” meant the enemy, the townies, the Londoners, the young and lucky ones, the faceless Others. Rich and careless. Hasty and nasty.’ (211). Eileen describes the emptiness more calmly than Gwen does: ‘There isn’t any work here out of season, so the young parents move to the cities’ (230). Not only illustrating the change from a productive to a consumer society, Alma’s remark also implies a decay in the social life of the country. Imprisoned at home behind the walls that divide them, people are no longer hospitable. For instance, the taxi driver who has known the family for ages does not show any sign of affection on seeing Alma; he is neither patient nor understanding when he has to stop suddenly and wait because Eileen wants to welcome her. As for entertainment, the only source seems to be television. Although Alma first sneers at the idea of her mother’s watching situation comedies regularly, she soon understands that the village does not offer any alternative. Ironically, what replaces the lost communal laughter of the village is the background laughter of these situation comedies: [T]here was a kind of comfort in sitting there together in the womb of the overheated living-room, united by the flickering light of the screen and the gusts of laughter from the studio audience, and no one ever died, in these comedies, [. . .] (214–15)

Left behind by their youth, the old people can also be seen as the ‘lost’ people that Britain is producing every day: ‘The weak, the old, the ill, the lost ones. The abandoned ones. The forgotten people.’ (139). As such, the image of recession and emptiness in the village also helps Gee refer to the problem of ageing and old age in contemporary Britain. The theme of civilization in crisis culminates as the novel gives images of the world in conflict and war. Connecting the condition of Britain to that of the world, Gee implies that crisis is not peculiar to Britain only. Through television sets in domestic interiors, the novel opens windows to outer worlds. As previously placed in The Burning Book, television becomes a device that juxtaposes terror, violence and disorder at home and outside. To illustrate, as Alma prepares the dinner in the kitchen, her friend Verity watches the news showing others’ pain: Buildings were burning in Sarajevo. Masonry fell from an orange sky. The cameramen were dodging bullets. Panicking children ran at the lens as if they

Are Such Things Done on Albion’s Shore?

97

could escape into their living-room. No aid planes had got through that day. After the break, it was Somalia. (276)

Via the television screen, the big ‘lost children’ family is extended to include ‘the abandoned children of Ethiopia, Somalia, Romania, Sarajevo, the Sudan’ (279). The screen in the living room disseminates violent images of ‘burning tower blocks, [. . .] heavy as death, engulfing the small running bodies who screamed and waved their arms without making a sound, terrified stick men running towards her [. . .]’ (311). Implying that having a house of one’s own does not guarantee a release from the problems of our world, this background also underlines the motif of interconnectedness. It is at this point of intersection that the novel offers empathy and love as potentially redemptive powers and suggests that unless everyone is free from pain and poverty, the world cannot be a blissful garden where we can feel ourselves physically and emotionally safe (276). Gee constantly emphasizes the motif of interconnectedness through a skilful zoom in and out on human relations. In tune with the satire on social and economic conditions, the novel shows human competition, self-centredness, lack of communication and loss of empathy as the source of disconnection. It is implied that disenchantment is part and parcel of life in this hostile world. Focalizing on Alma who pushed Zoe to learn to swim at a very early age, the narrator offers a Swiftian satire about the competitive nature of life in the city: ‘She was three when they started, not so young for London, where parents start competing when their babies leave hospital’ (14). Even when she is 5 minutes late for the course, Alma feels anxious, fearing ‘that Zoe would lose out, that the race of life had already started, that the vanished minutes could never be caught up’ (17). Accordingly, the young bodies of children at the swimming pool, running around and eating chips ‘like wild animals’, ‘a flock of homing pigeons’, become almost an allegory for the rat race, which reinforces Gee’s critique of capitalist practices. In this framework, Gee shows Alma and Paul not only as loving parents suffering the loss of their child, but also as ordinary people who selfishly put themselves first. They are one of those couples who neglect both themselves and their loved ones as they try to make ends meet. In this process, Alma also heals the marks of woe made by the patriarchal society. Although gender issues are not central to the novel, they become part of the panorama. Thus, the narrative questions gender roles through Alma’s process of ‘reinventing herself ’; this plot device, following on from Zoe’s running away from home, delineates Alma as a woman contesting the roles she has had to play and trying to ‘find her voice’ (86). To delineate Alma as a woman trying to assert her identity in a male-dominated culture, Gee employs many foil characters as in Where Are the Snows, My Cleaner and My Driver. Pairs of opposites like the childless and unmarried novelist Verity and Alma; or the childless, unmarried, funny aunt Eileen and the strict mother, grandmother and stiff widow, Gwen, are ‘chalk and cheese’ (226), ‘mirror images’ (219, 237) that enable Gee to explore the lives of women from different perspectives. Revealing a feminist consciousness, Alma says that as a woman, she has been ‘brainwashed’ (146), supposed to be a ‘good girl’, ‘a saint’, ‘an angel’ (12), ‘a good wife’ (116), to be ‘kind’ and ‘say yes’ (79). Moreover, being a feminist in this patriarchal society is synonymous with being ‘terrorists,

98

Maggie Gee

homebreakers’ (91). Thus, in addition to all her other problems and responsibilities, Alma is trying to free herself from prescribed roles. When her daughter leaves home, she wants to be alone and away from Paul. Depicting Alma and Paul in the waiting room at a therapy centre trying to reconnect, Gee shows them, too, as ‘victims’; preys to prevailing conditions, the one-time lovers here turn into ‘unconnected’ couples (258). But ultimately, through images of reconnecting couples, children and parents coming to terms with each other, and past wounds being healed by present awareness, the novel proposes love and understanding as a remedy to loss. Although the novel mainly revolves around a nuclear family, Maggie Gee again extends the boundaries of this small world and celebrates less conventional bonds based on love. The generous love that Eileen offers not only to her niece Alma and her family but also to all the children and neighbours in the village, suggests that love is not limited to kinship; as an unmarried and childless octogenarian, Aunt Eileen feels that she has ‘thousands of babies’. Proud that children visit her just for love, she says: ‘They don’t come here because they have to, like real children do. They don’t come here because they’re afraid. It was all very different from having real children.’ (38). Thus, Eileen’s wise and brave voice adds to the novel a serious critique of the self-centred, middle-class family whose interest and generosity is often limited to its own members. To emphasize the ‘epic quality’ (227) of this untraditional figure and to cultivate a similar ethical stance in her reader, Gee resorts to a fantastic image that deconstructs and transgresses the boundaries of traditional roles. Alma remembers the time when Eileen came to stay with them; wearing ‘crimson corduroy trousers’ and a ‘twist of crimson ribbon’ to tie her hair exactly like her friends at school, Eileen destabilizes the orderly and dull life at home. So, as Alma hugs her, she feels that ‘she was swung in the air, round and round till her heart pounded, and the wind blew, and the apple trees shook, and the blue-green hills snaked silently past them’ (39). This air of fantasy gives a clue to the society that Gee envisions. In this place, recognition of a deeper unity breeds love and care. Articulating this frame of mind, Alma becomes the mouthpiece of Maggie Gee, saying ‘That everyone suffered, in the house of childhood. Perhaps there were further, terrible rooms, but they were interconnected, they were not separate’ (315). Much more explicitly than the other Gee novels, Lost Children offers love as the solution to disconnection. This concept of love embodies an understanding that makes people go beyond the limits of their selves and reach out to their fellows. In other words, this love unites and allows us to see the world beyond the ordinary. To this end, various narrative voices in the text recite the phrase, ‘Love allows’ like a healing mantra, and love becomes a leitmotif: ‘Love allows things. Love allows (78).’ For instance, when she finally understands why her parents could not offer her more love, Alma forgives them and thinks: ‘love allows us to be ourselves’ (78). Here, love is not only defined as a source of transgression and it denotes a transformative power that can: ‘Fade the past into a different future’ (315). As Alma rests at last in the presence of Paul and Adam at home and happily thinks, ‘Love allows. It was liquid as music’ (78), this time love equals a feeling of safety and joy. One of the strongest achievements of Lost Children is to unite different realms of discussion like social criticism, family issues and art in an organic fashion. A common

Are Such Things Done on Albion’s Shore?

99

feature in Gee’s writing, the presence of art, is employed this time to highlight love and connectedness as essential to our well-being. First of all, Gee depicts a gallery as a safe haven from the chaos and disorder outside. Gee shows Alma making her very first visit to a gallery when she leaves home (93). In tune with the theme of homelessness, galleries offer ‘shelter’ for people who also look for emotional well-being and spiritual contact (97). Alma believes that pictures ‘keep the light on the wall’; as the sun diminishes and darkness pervades, pictures offer a helping hand for us to survive the darkness of the soul (100). Proposing art as a source of light, Gee reveals her ars poetica. Moreover, as Alma recites the phrase ‘Love allows’, the healing power of art is implied. As she describes art as a liberating medium that helps people go beyond their limited selves and meet the other, Gee suggests that the function of art is not only about liberating the artist, but that art should also create a space for interaction between the artist, picture and the onlooker. Alma’s definition of pictures in terms of love describes art as an experience of communication as well: Love somehow lets you into the picture. Allows you to enter. Love allows. So if I look, I can move through time. I can leave my body, the prison of my body. Escape at last from the knot of my flesh. [. . .] She could slip inside those golden, childlike bodies. Walk through the gardens. Lie in the fields. Lie still and naked in the wonderful light. All would be explained, redeemed, forgiven. They would all be there (for the faces weren’t specific; Bonnard’s rune-like faces allowed any names); all Alma’s loved ones. All that she loved. All the lost children would be free and found. (97)

Describing Alma’s excitement at the three floors full of Bonnards at the Hayward Gallery (77), the novel recalls Light Years and the thematic importance of the intimistes’ minute observation of human relations. This time, Gee features Bonnard’s pieces about children to establish a similar thematic link between the images of children in Bonnard pictures and those in the novel. Contrasted with the lack of pattern in London, these pictures reconnect the onlooker to the idea of a better world being possible: There was something childlike and archetypal about [Bonnard’s] figures that was infinitely moving. He had kept his child-self; it spoke to her, whereas Vuillard’s people had already grown up, with the neat small heads of respectable adults, living in a world of immaculate pattern. (95–6)

Through Alma’s consciousness, Gee suggests that art opens up a new window with a fresh vision that can remind us of our connection to others. Employing an image of French windows both at the very beginning and end of her novel, Gee seems to be recalling Bonnard’s famous ‘The French Window’, also known as ‘Morning at Le Cannet’. Playing a similar role to that of Edward Hopper’s ‘The Morning Sun’ in The Flood, this Bonnard piece implies the politics of Gee’s writing. Seen in this light, the image of the French windows that Gee employs suggests that Lost Children, as a work of art itself, is meant to inculcate thoughts that can help its reader see beyond his/her ‘miserable box’ and gain a refreshed outlook.

100

Maggie Gee

Highlighting the construction of her work, Gee, a novelist of our postmodern times, but greatly influenced by the structural ideas of modernism, frames her text by repeating the question, ‘What if nothing is lost?’, at the very beginning and end. As such, the novel also playfully communicates the idea that so long as we love and listen to each other, nothing will be lost here. So, it leaves us in this vast landscape by the French windows ‘stretching away in every direction, perspectiveless, dazzling, unbounded, peopled’ (320). Establishing a firm ground for communication and imagining ‘millions of ’ children, ‘the uncountable lost ones’ in this landscape, Lost Children also embraces its reader with radiating love as the narrator sees from the French window: ‘Myself, yourself, my mother, my father. Still young, still potential. All the lost children’ (320).

Notes 1 The well-known organization ‘Shelter England’ which represents the interests of the homeless lists unemployment, poverty, lack of affordable houses and housing policies among the structural causes of homelessness that are social and economic in nature. 2 In his 28 November 2011 article, Larry Elliott reports OECD’s warning that ‘Britain will be back in recession this winter’.

6

Environmental Crisis, from Fact to Fiction: The Ice People (1998) and The Flood (2004)

‘Of the best of days, and the end of days’: The Ice People In this novel, Gee enlarges the scope of her writing in terms of both content and form to present environmental problems as an essential part of the panorama of contemporary Britain. As in her next title The Flood, Gee portrays the prevailing conditions through the generic features of a near-future dystopia, which enables her to investigate the social crisis in tandem with the environmental one. Through the retrospective narrative of Saul, a Londoner who happens to be a climate refugee escaping the imminent Ice Age resulting from global warming, the novel displays a future Britain, its story mostly set between the 2020s and 2060s. This is a dystopia as described by Firchow in his Modern Utopian Fictions, ‘a vehicle for satire of existing social conditions’ (5). Unlike the estranged fantasy worlds in many utopias, the realistic, ‘day-after-tomorrow’ setting of London makes the novel more relevant to Gee’s own London. To put it in Moylan’s terms, this is not a ‘traveller in a foreign culture’ type of science fiction novel in which Saul, the narrator, would comment on an alien society as a mere observer; instead, with Saul meditating on the gradual change bringing catastrophe to the very culture he belongs to, Gee’s is a ‘progressive and participatory utopia’ which generates conditions for political change (87). Saul gives an account of his life, documented in a journal that survives many adversities: ‘my long strange life in the twenty-first century’ (173). In this new world, he works as a technoteacher and, as in classical examples of utopia like Zamyatin’s We or Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, he is not called by his name Saul but ‘Officer 102’. He is an odd man, an outsider, which enables Gee to satirize a world that mirrors not only contemporary Britain but also Europe. Unlike his fellows, almost turned into automatons, he still uses his mind. While fellow teachers think he is joking, he seriously interrogates the ‘boundary between living and non-living’ by responding to the voice-tone welcoming him into a De-stress room, ‘Good morning!’ (13). Set in a city threatened by global warming, the novel showcases Saul and his world on the verge of an environmental crisis. Representing the environmental crisis in its social and cultural context, the novel, importantly, suggests that global warming and its likely effects result from social problems, and that disaster comes as a result of people’s lack of responsibility for other beings and for nature: ‘The nightmare end of our technodreams. Shimmering, stinking, sucking us down. We knew so much, understood so little, we

102

Maggie Gee

ran when we could hardly stand- leaving the mess, the shit behind us. Then in the end it followed us’ (186). Thus, Gee’s earlier discussions of pollution, consumerism, poverty and unemployment in the context of the corruption and disintegration of society, now culminate in this novel in the merging of social and environmental problems. In that sense, The Ice People as a dystopia is not just a warning about environmental disasters to come, it is also about the lifestyle and habits of thought leading up to that disaster. This is why Saul’s tone at the beginning of the book is that of a wise and prophetic social critic: ‘I, Saul, Teller of Tales, Keeper of Doves, Slayer of Wolves, shall tell the story of my times. Of the best of days, and the end of days’ (3). As an imaginative fiction, the book helps us imagine what might happen and, potentially, to make adjustments and take preventive measures. The text suggests that unless we adopt an ecological awareness, what we leave to the next generation will just be what Saul thinks his son Luke can read in his face: ‘Cults and castes and loneliness. The ravenous need of a world grown old’ (186). To illustrate how an environmental disaster can sever us from the hope of a new generation, children, Saul describes the ice world as a wasteland, saying: ‘The escape of the children, all over the world, was the strangest thing about the coming of the ice’ (172). As in Gee’s previous novels, principally Lost Children, The Ice People employs the theme of a widening gap between the old generation and the youth as one of the indicators of a society disconnecting. Here, the gap is presented both as one of the causes and the symptom of the crisis; children do not want to live by the standards of the old paradigm based on differences and divisions. They do not want to live in ‘houses’, ‘nests’, ‘communes’ or ‘cocoons’, all of which symbolize a bourgeois notion of ‘home’, a bastion of the system (172). In due course, like the alienated wild children in the finale of Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor, the children in The Ice People act as antagonists to the existing order: The wild boys and girls. The breakaways. Some of them the children of Outsiders and Wanderers who didn’t know who their parents were, but many more of them Insider children whose parents couldn’t admit they were gone. (172)

This image of the break in the established sequence embodied in the portrayal of runaway children points to the degree of failure in the social order. As the children leave, Saul, the old man among them, ponders how he failed to stop things going wrong either in his small circle or at a larger level. This demise and its connotations are not so different from the theme of ubi sunt that Gee explores in her previous writing. Yet, here the underlining tone is more sharply dystopic and satirical; it is no longer the earlier elegiac tone that simply understands and recognizes. The picture that Saul refers to at the end of the book (the use of art is by now a typical narrative device in Gee’s writing) as he meets his old love Sarah, also reinforces the theme of not only England, but also the whole of human civilization, at crisis point. Saul and Sarah meet in the National Gallery/Museum after so many calamities; the year now is 2064; they stand by the famous piece ‘The End of the Age of Silver’, which is clearly a fictional version of ‘The Close of the Silver Age’ by Lucas Cranach the Elder, which depicts humankind on the edge of a collapse as they move from the Silver Age to the Bronze Age. Ovid and Hesiod describe the four Ages of the World in terms of gold, silver, bronze and iron, to illustrate lessening degrees of peace and abundance. The first

Environmental Crisis, from Fact to Fiction

103

age denotes an Edenic bliss whereas the following ages bring increasing problems for human beings. Ovid’s mention of the Silver Age gives an image of everlasting spring that, according to Hesiod, comes to a halt because of the ‘terrible and strong’ Bronze Age men. Similarly, Gee’s novel describes the Ice Age bringing famine and darkness; Saul, the narrator, is a lonely old man who misses the old times when natural order had not yet been destroyed. An old image of nourishing nature and its warmth stands in contrast to the now ice-cold weather: ‘How well I remember the tropical fruit. How Sarah loved mangoes and yams and pawpaws, custard apples, peaches, grapes. The fruit that fell from the breasts of the heat. Now it seems like a dream, all that amazing ripeness’ (77). As we read Saul’s description of a nature rich with frogs, birds and cats before the disaster, we cannot help but think that the novel is a fictional version of Cranach’s painting: ‘This is their Eden, it is spring, “frogs’ mating time” ’ (171). Read against the violent image of an ending brought about by barbarous strangers in Cranach, the downfall in Gee’s version, wrought by the Silver People’s own offspring, the wild children, rather than by aliens, reads more hopefully than the harsh classical ending enacted by outsiders. In a sense, Gee suggests that if we manage to stay in connection with our children, we might still enjoy an eternal springtime together with them. That Saul eventually finds peace, not in an imaginary comfort zone outside the country-in-crisis, but in the company of these wild boys and keeps his journal among them, also underlines the significance he attaches to remaining in contact with the young. Like a catcher in the rye, Saul asks them to wait since he wants to tell ‘the whole damn story behind the life they escape’ (143). We do not learn if the wild children actually listen, though Saul says they hunger for his stories, but as readers we ourselves hear his whole ‘damn’ story, which describes the conditions of his society and the alienated, like notes from the underground; in a Dostoyevskian tone he says: ‘And here I crouch with my stub of a pencil in a windowless cupboard that smells of piss, penned in the dark like a dirty beast, trying to scribble my story’ (165). Though a lot of the experience is authentic, Saul actually edits what he has done, especially in relation to Sarah and Luke. In fact, he often loses his temper, and skates over some terrible rows: without meaning to be, Saul is, about his own personal behaviour, unreliable, even though he is intellectually and philosophically a good man. Like Scheherazade of The Arabian Nights or Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Saul tells his story on the brink of personal disaster (10). He keeps his diary ‘as if it would save [his] life’ (45). While the dystopic tropes function as a verframdungs effect necessary for critical distance, the confessional and intimate tone of Saul, the narrator who survives and salvages his story from the approaching Ice Age, establishes the authenticity of the narration, though only up to a point. Anxious about time passing, he feels that he must ‘write it now or never, so it won’t be lost’ (56). In something similar to what Maggie Gee herself said in the April 2010, Istanbul interview, that she felt in relation to her next novel The Flood, which functions as a Noah’s ark to save her previous characters and stories from both the fictional and real-life flood, Saul wants to save ‘all that different life, so bright, sometimes, and lucky, and sunny [. . .] And the people. All the people I loved’ (56). In that way, Saul, as the novel’s main narrative voice, fosters a sense of connection and intimacy that underpins Gee’s ethical views about caring for others and interconnectedness. In its vivid

104

Maggie Gee

representation of climate change in a dystopia, the novel has the potential to cultivate ethical and social obligations; by paying attention to Saul’s story and hearing about the problems in his society, we witness the interdependence of things and become aware of similar conditions that could lead to a crisis in our civilization. Through fiction, Gee asks her readers to imagine themselves in the midst of a crisis already; as if to summon the complacent to a more careful consideration of our own times, Saul demands: (You tell me - now that the ice has come, now it’s getting dark, and the cities are ruined, and most of the galleries have been abandoned, and the theatres are full of snow, now the ice lies white along the plastic letters that used to blaze the names of actresses in orange light across navy skies, now hardly anyone reads or writes, now the churches have bonfires on the altars and plastic sheeting in their stainedglass windows, now Buckingham Palace is a burnt-out wreck, its cellars swarming with secret police, now the old are dead, and the young know nothing - you tell me what’s the point of us? What was ever the point of us, our struggling, quarrelling, suffering species, getting and spending, wasting, grieving?) (165)

His statement that ‘staying alive mattered more than anything, staying alive to protect [his] son’ serves as one answer (159). Thus, posing crucial questions to the reader who is likely to suffer, but has not yet suffered a similar disaster, Saul offers a vision gained through painful experience. His statement about our ignorance poses sardonic questions about our culture: ‘I suppose you never know who you are until your life is over’ (158). Pointing to the way that we concentrate on getting, spending and wasting, he implies that unless we review our habits of production and the consumption and distribution of wealth, and thus our ethical and political values, we will witness a similar crisis. This lays the groundwork for Gee to weave her text as a dystopia satirizing present-day social conditions. She questions the point of our attachment to objects and condemns consumerism, also one of the main targets of Gee’s satire in Where Are the Snows; as the Ice Age approaches, just like all the other people, Saul leaves behind many of his possessions: ‘Useful ones, like stoves and foodstores. And precious ones, like my few books and pictures and family letters and photographs- things I had not been able to leave’ (190). That the novel offers a critique of the post-industrial economy in the Western world is also evident in the reductive name it uses to refer to Europe as the centre of crisis; an escape from the environmental crisis is possible by getting out of ‘Euro’ (145). For this reason, Saul, like many of ‘Euro’’s people, tries to escape to Africa. By portraying Africa as more desirable than Europe, Gee implies a criticism of Eurocentric and racist practices that divide contemporary British society into two as if it were made of two nations, the native inhabitants and the migrants. Through its speculative narrative, the novel turns the world order completely upside down, valuing Africa over Europe. Saul informs us that equilibrium is lost not only in England but also across Europe: ‘Order in France had completely broken down, but things were still peaceful in Iberia’ (13). He reads about hundreds of people in Portugal living in caves as in the Stone Age (13). But Africa, by contrast, offers him ‘a highly-paid job’ (25). In other words, the novel fictionalizes the process of climate migration from Europe to Africa and ironically portrays a simultaneous migration of power. It is the African

Environmental Crisis, from Fact to Fiction

105

governments this time, not the European or Western ones, who introduce a series of visa requirements to qualify the ‘ice people’ from abroad as potential residents. African countries like Ghana, Sierra Leone and Cameroon are portrayed as taking measures to close their borders to this flux of climate refugees: ‘One couldn’t fly to Africa without a visa’ (127); ‘One great-grandparent was the minimum requirement’ (123). Like many migrants from Africa who enter the Eurozone and Britain in search of better living conditions, Saul and his son Luke, who qualify to enter Africa, ‘could have a life, be free, survive’ (123). Adding to the satire, although Saul secures his son an African visa, Luke refuses to go there because, he says, ‘Africans hate white people’ (141). His fear that Africans will not let them in is an ironic mirroring of the ethnocentric attitudes of the white people of Europe who do not want to let black people in. As Saul sees white people on the screens fighting to get past a barrier held back by black soldiers, he remembers that he had a similar experience of viewing ‘hordes of black people pouring into Britain’. Fearing that they were ‘coming to take away all [they] had’, ‘the brave white soldiers’ were holding them back. Saul interprets this as the ‘Black man’s turn!’, ‘the negative image of the long-forgotten photo. This time the desperate people were white. This time the people with the power were black’ (121). While centring on the social impact of climate change through environmental migration, the novel suggests that the safer land of Africa, where nature has not yet been destroyed, offers a refuge from culture. It also investigates the problems that black people face in contemporary Britain. Recalling Hanif Kureishi’s mixed-race teenager, Karim Amir, in The Buddha of Suburbia, Saul reveals the discriminatory attitudes he encountered when he moved as a child with his family to London: ‘We were mostly third or fourth generation British, all with more white in us than black. Yet I think I longed to be recognized. That hidden part of me was waiting to be seen’ (9). Gee makes her criticism of the veiled segregation in society through the dislike Saul has for the word ‘ethnicity’; it sounds to him like someone cleaning his/her teeth (16). Gee also ridicules Sarah’s academic and artificial interest in Saul’s black origins after she first makes love with him. Sarah starts feeling romantic about Saul’s mixed background, she eagerly watches videos about black history and feels exhilarated thinking that Saul is ‘the first beek’ (dated European slang for a mixed-race man) she has ever slept with (19). Satirizing this reductive multicultural discourse, Gee depicts Saul disdaining the essays Sarah wrote for the diploma course called ‘Ethnicities’. Sarah’s thoughtless exoticizing of Saul reveals its falsity as it shows how difficult it is, even in this futuristic world, to go beyond the colour bar and see one’s lover just as a human being. Saul’s complaint gives depth to Gee’s satire about racism; he wants Sarah to love him only for himself: ‘I didn’t want to be a part of black history, I needed to be myself, her man’ (20). Another ironic remark about migrants also reinforces the novel’s critique of racism. On his way to Africa, Saul meets a Frenchman who thinks that ‘All thieves are refugees now’ (181). The conversation this man has with his like-minded friend illustrates a fascist discourse manifesting the sense of superiority that ‘native’ people claim over the newcomers. Seeing himself as part of high culture, like Hitler listening to Wagner, this Frenchman talks in a condemnatory way about a ‘so-called refugee’ who stole two of his violins, ‘not to play’, ‘but to sell on somewhere for a fraction of their price, to an idiot’ (181).

106

Maggie Gee

But Gee makes a really sardonic joke when Saul, the British citizen, finds a way of surviving the ice only because his origins go back to Africa. In an ironic reversal, racist thinkers in Africa use the phrase ‘ice people’ to categorize white climate migrants. In this near-future dystopic world, African people speak very much like the white ethnocentric Europeans of our time: ‘We cannot take in  all these ice people [.  .  .]’, ‘The ice people are coming here in ever greater numbers’ (122). Now all the African people talk about these unwanted European refugees; Saul hears the phrase ‘ice people’ repeated over and over again in the news about the limits that African governments set on immigration. These limits recall not only the current rigid visa requirements of European countries, but also their prevailing discriminatory practices in determining quotas about the intake of climate refugees. In Gee’s fictional world, it is now Africa that regards non-native people as ‘others’. Saul hears that ‘Sierra Leone would accept no one with any mixture of European blood’ (122). As a result, white European people, who need black people to welcome them if they are to escape disaster, find instead a mirror of their old fear that ‘[they] shall all be swamped [. . .]’. Ironically, it is mainly the high-tech societies in Europe and their ever-increasing carbon emission rates that accelerate global warming. Thus, Gee’s reversal works like a cautionary tale showing that unless a set of ethical values are adopted to preserve the natural world for all, environmental problems will be a form of divine justice. Framing racist discourse and its critique within an environmental discourse, Maggie Gee enables her reader both to experience climate change scenarios and to think more deeply about unfair immigration policies in the international context. In her next titles The Flood and The White Family, Gee deals with the antagonism between black and white people more centrally. My Cleaner and My Driver are also products of an imagination that reverses the narrative norm to reveal racism from black characters as well as white, and elaborates on the confrontation of black and white people on an individual basis to ask how it would feel to be in someone else’s shoes. In a way, while inviting her reader to think independently, Gee is rehearsing ways of representing and criticizing racism in contemporary British society, which is a very important thematic feature of her writing, starting with The Ice People. With England suffering the effects of global warming as the setting of the first part of the book, Gee can also exercise criticism of corruption and political bias in the news and data shared with the public. Although in the novel there is scientific evidence that unless serious measures are taken, there will be ‘thousands, maybe millions of ice people’ (122), there is ‘a flurry of denials from scientists and politicians all over the world’ (25). A critique of people’s lack of concern is accompanied by a criticism of the mass media using global warming news to manipulate the public. In order to sell more copies, papers produce ‘a sudden flood of stories, only some of them authentic’ (105). That it is only employed as a sales device is obvious because soon after being disseminated, such news is forgotten: ‘The screens forgot the savaged baby, forgot the Ice Age, forgot all the horrors to concentrate on the big Tunnel Run that took place every autumn’ (106). Unresponsiveness to news about environmental problems doubles when catastrophes take place outside Euro. Revealing the Eurocentric mindset of the government, Saul comments on the one-sidedness of environmental consciousness; while preventive measures are immediately taken in Euro to control food production,

Environmental Crisis, from Fact to Fiction

107

‘to switch their crops to frost-resistant kinds’ and build computers ‘to withstand low temperatures’ (120), the world does not take much notice of the Indonesian volcano explosion, ‘because everyone had so many worries of their own’ (120). Gee’s satire of this indifference and discrimination goes beyond the domestic issues when Saul concludes: ‘so Sumatra got very little international aid, though half its population stifled or starved’ (120). Criticizing our short-sightedness and lack of concern about environmental problems, Gee problematizes the anthropocentric worldview that is at the heart of these problems. When Saul mentions the first signs of civil order breaking down, he still has an optimism rooted in his own anthropocentric view. Complacently confident, this view suggests that being at the centre of the world, Saul has a right to everything at the cost of nature: ‘I felt on the brink of owning the world. I was a man, and human beings ran the planet. [. . .] I was tall, and strong, and a technograd, which qualified me for a lifetime’s good money’ (12). Ironically, he sees in the end that none of these attributes can save him from the response of the planet to carbon emission. As he suffers, he understands that he is just a part of the ecosystem and asks: ‘[W]e’re all too frightened of freezing to death. Animals have no politics, do they? When did we stop being animals?’ (88). In discussing the human tendency to ‘speciesism’, also explored in Light Years in the context of consumerism, The Ice People suggests the need to escape human selfenclosure and alienation. In that respect, the novel fosters an ethical view based on an intrinsic desire to care for others; once again, Gee places emphasis on the importance of interconnectedness. In a key theme of Gee’s writing, Saul’s voice proposes that it is in solidarity, not only with all people regardless of their colour, rank and sex, but also with plants and animals, that the potential for a sustainable, peaceful life lies. The usual motif in Gee’s writing of showing how suffering brings people together is not highlighted in The Ice People; the implication is that when even the ecosystem loses its interconnectedness and nature starts to suffer, there remains no hope for healing the gaps between humans and the gap between humans and the natural world under social conditions like our own. When nature is bitten, it begins to bite; Saul observes this in awe: It was the first time I had really noticed what the cold was doing to our woodlands. Some of the trees were brown and dead, others becoming bare in patches. It looked as if something were eating them. I thought, the cold is beginning to bite. (129)

Saul sees that nothing is ‘natural’ any longer; flowers are ‘selectively bred to make them bigger and longer lasting’, and even the hills are ‘covered with genetically modified crops’ (79). Noting Saul and Sarah’s initial desire to live out in nature in Edenic bliss together with their children running barefoot and singing, this image of decay inevitably evokes a sense of fall from grace. Metaphorically, this environmental disaster is a punishment sent on them for not bothering to keep things in peace. What is left of nature now is just a set of artificial replicas like ‘Regent’s Theme Park’ and ‘the Rose Garden Museum’ (87). They are so divorced from nature that Saul and Sarah can only glimpse the hills from their fourth-floor window. The ultimate result of this ‘metabolic rift’, to use Marx’s term to denote the departure of the industrial world from nature, is hunger and complete anarchy: a ‘regiment of abandoned babies’ (76) and cats start eating babies (77). As the natural cycle gets broken, disorder in society follows

108

Maggie Gee

in the form of alienation between people; the reluctance of the cook to speak to Saul when he is in the camp built after the disaster, implies that the crisis in nature and the crisis in human relations have the same cause. Saul understands why the cook does not respond: ‘He has gone beyond things like language and friendship in whatever great suffering brought him here. Now he is dumb’ (78). Thus, Gee shows alienation from nature as the cause of an environmental crisis and a simultaneous crisis in culture. Gee also employs global warming as a natural force, making cultural mores like consumerism and conventional life expectation null and void. Obliterating the youth and beauty myth, the approaching Ice Age challenges established notions about age. When comparing herself to Saul’s father, Sarah comments on the way that their perception of age has changed and declares: ‘Ridiculous, now I think about it: that ninety wasn’t old to us. Now people die at forty or fifty, if they survive the cold that long. . .’ (57). As the ‘Emperor of Old Age, at sixty’, she becomes a parody of the modern-day obsession for staying young (57). Having a compulsion to control everything prevents Sarah from enjoying the here and now; since she is hyperactive and high functioning all the time, she fails to ‘feel the air’. She is a typical modern person alienated from herself so profoundly that even a few minutes after crying, she can be herself again, ‘abstracted, planning, chattering, restless, screenwatching, cleaning, talking on the phone, preparing to go away for the night, changing her plans, then again, then again-’ (82). Parodying Sarah’s functional view of life, Gee denounces the distortion that the rat race makes of individual lives; busily performing outside the home, people fail to communicate even with their partners. Saul remembers what life with Sarah was like and pities the energy spent arguing over trivial things: ‘We argued so much, but does anything matter? Except whether you and your seed survive? It’s as if the game were extremely simple, yet we kept on attempting impossible moves, stupidly intelligent, frowning in the mirror’ (59). Such loss of contact between Saul and Sarah in their small living unit is one side effect of a social practice that Gee calls ‘segging’, which is a sign of disintegration in society. As young women start living with women and men with men, gender segging becomes the norm. Using it as a device to expand the theme of a ‘need to connect’, Gee also portrays the practice as a limited reaction to the old discriminatory gender roles. ‘Boys feel safe with boys, girls with girls’ (23). But segging, as Saul observes, simply means a society more and more radically divided: ‘Colonies of men took apartment blocks together. [.  .  .] For many the choice was homosexual, but others liked the camaraderie, which made them less lonely than before’ (47). There is also the female counterpart of this: ‘sheroes’ who resort to masculine ways, which sounds like a soft satire on some real-life Third Wave feminists, the Powerrr Girls (47). Sarah’s observation also shows segging to be a mark of disintegration: ‘we moved further and further apart, and turned into parodies of ourselves’ (103). Saul articulates his worries about the segregated society: Is this the future for men and women? Are we going to live apart forever, in endless, wanking loneliness? Surely not, because I loved her. [. . .] “Sarah,” I said, “don’t go back there, please. I want Luke to live with men and women. I want him to know who his father is. How is he homing to grow up into a man if he doesn’t see what men are like?” (70-1)

Environmental Crisis, from Fact to Fiction

109

Confused about the point of segging, Saul poses his question, which strengthens the cautionary tone in the novel: ‘But secretly we were afraid. I was afraid. Was this the future?’ (47). While describing segging as a social phenomenon in the fictional future of Europe, Gee both criticizes a one-dimensional exclusive feminism that isolates itself from men and exposes the male-dominant culture that provokes women to develop such an extreme urge to protect themselves. To make the novel’s discourse on gender roles more multifaceted, Gee characterizes Saul as a tender and understanding person, whose love for Sarah is not reciprocated due to her feminist-separatist biases. The critique of feminism that Gee offers in her previous title Light Years becomes a parody of our times in the dystopic frame of this later novel. Thus, Saul announces that the fashion of the Tropical Time was androgyny; so hair was suspect since it signalled gender (11). To follow the ‘fashion’, successful and self-confident women see no point in marrying (32). Marriage is so ‘oldfashioned’ (31) that ‘Only godlovers got married, plus a few old slows afraid of the future’ (31), and women are programmed to refuse any help from men lest it debilitate them; similarly women de-romanticize sex and as Sarah does, call it ‘have a go’. This recalls the mechanical order of Huxley’s Brave New World in which: ‘Love no longer connotes an emotional bond, only sexual activity; conventionality equals promiscuity; calling a woman pneumatic is a compliment rather than an insult’ (Sisk, 26, original emphases). But as if defying all regulatory practices, like the dissenting protagonists Winston Smith and Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four, D-503 and I-330 in We, Sarah and Saul fall in love and dream of an escape from the new rigid order. Through their dream, unusual for their time, of having children the natural way, Gee depicts the alarming increase in the rate of infertility. We hear Saul sharing with us scientific data: hyperactivity and stress can make human beings infertile (30, original emphases). Thus, Saul calls the achievement of their dream ‘an epic of conception’ (29). In their case, the result is success: after ‘a ten-year marathon [they] ran to conception’, they have their baby boy, Luke, whose name, with its biblical evocation of an apostle, suggests a hope for a new time and climate that will be kind to its people (38). Sarah’s punning on ‘lukewarm’, in a similar vein, implies a reconciliation between the warring extremes. Saul seems to agree on this: ‘The kids had been the glue that held us together’ (102). The depiction of Saul and Sarah trying to have a baby against all odds also facilitates Gee’s commentary on the contemporary medical practices that reveal the crisis in culture, and on the discriminatory policies in what has become a birth industry. Saul and Sarah go through a process called ‘techfix’, under the supervision of a godlike Dr Zeuss who tells them when to eat, when to make love and when to abstain from it (34). Obviously, only rich and successful people can benefit from the techfix service he offers. Gee’s criticism is observable in the depiction of Saul and Sarah submissively attending to the commands of Dr Zeuss. Despite the stories about mix-ups of sperms or eggs or fetuses, high rates of deformity, and the big piles of money he demands, they obey; Saul sees techfix as a defeat of the individual by science: ‘yielding our bodies completely, our private parts, our selves, our money’ (34). On the other hand, he feels proud of the fact that ‘men are still in command of things, masters of a friendly universe’ (35). Thus, thanks to the techfix process, Sarah becomes a mother, and Saul a father.

110

Maggie Gee

One part of the rich panoramic picture of the novel is Gee’s critique of medicalized labour. Through images from the maternity ward and Sarah’s post-partum state at the hospital, Gee shows birth as a medical event handled by the professionals. Saul describes the labour as ‘a team of athletes [. . .] trying to pull something long and dark from inside her’ (39). Reduced from the ‘proud expectant father’ (40) to a mere outsider, Saul feels like a ‘demented god watching the creation of the world’ (38). No wonder he fails to understand Sarah and the process she has gone through; when Sarah reacts negatively to the idea of Luke being kept elsewhere and wants to leave the ‘stinking hospital’, Saul naively tries to persuade her to follow what the doctors suggest. Their complete loss of authority in the hands of professionals recalls the problematization of motherhood as an institutionalized experience by writers like Adrienne Rich and Angela Carter. Having to work all day, Saul cannot provide any meaningful support to Sarah whose energy is sapped by Luke. However, he wants to be a nourishing adult, holds the bottle and imagines that ‘as Luke sucked the milk [his] strength went into him, and [his] love’ (50). Therefore, when Sarah turns to her friend Sylvie for help, he feels isolated. Only allowed to follow their instructions to heat the bottles or bring a fresh nappy (41), he loses his initiative about baby care. Ironically, Saul can enjoy his role as a nurturer only when Sarah leaves home for the clinic that treats her depression caused by long hours of baby care. Thus, the novel suggests that when performed by women only, baby care becomes an exclusionary practice whereby men and women are further estranged from each other. As Sarah’s post-natal state illustrates, women tend to interpret this process in favour of segging; so, Sarah believes that only women can fully understand and empathize with her and she soon leaves Saul to live with Sylvie. In the same vein, she joins the ‘Children’s Commune’, a group of mothers united under the leadership of Juno. Bearing her name as an emblem of protest against the father of all the gods, and her husband, Zeus, Juno does not allow any man to enter their commune, which suggests the power struggle between Zeus and Juno in Greek mythology. This womenonly group, which propagates hatred of men in a militant fashion, cultivates enmity in children about men. With the aim of erasing manhood, they turn boys into ‘poor little castrati’ with the help of chemicals, namely ‘high-dosage oestrogen and other, subtler, more complex drugs’ (164). After Sarah joins the commune, they give Luke pills ‘to protect’ his ‘thrilling soprano voice’ (164). To make men totally redundant, they keep ‘sperm on ice’ (162). They remind one of Doris Lessing’s The Cleft, which offers a critique of an all-female vein of feminism. With her critique of medicalization, Gee employs a trope used in dystopias such as Zamyatin’s We, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Huxley’s Brave New World too; in the context of The Ice People, scientific knowledge is utilized as an ideology in social engineering, helping Gee further satirize regulatory practices on gender roles in contemporary British society. As a measure against the decreasing fertility caused by segging, the state appoints ‘Role Support Officers’ ‘all over the country to teach boys and girls to get on together’ (15). Through Sarah’s experience as a Role Support Officer, Saul observes that: ‘[Boys] saw great advantages in the old roles, in having women to love and support them. The girls, on the other hand, were not at all excited about developing their nurturing sides’ (22). Gee’s skilful use of double entendre in her depiction of segging reveals a critique of both patriarchy and feminism’s rebuttal of it.

Environmental Crisis, from Fact to Fiction

111

Teaching girls how to ‘get on’, Sarah wittily smiles and confirms that ‘she looks twentieth century, sexy, which they used to call feminine’ (15). Both looking a bit ‘antique’ for the new age, Saul and Sarah at first feature as Adam and Eve in search of their Paradise lost; they imagine themselves living in a country by the sea, with forests, fields, clean bright water, with children running and shouting towards them. They seek conditions that will redeem them from their fall into ‘the life in a high poky room in London’ (21). But theirs becomes a far from blissful union. Despite all their good intentions, cohabiting, they fall into the domestic trap of the patriarchal order and start quarrelling. Saul’s description of their routine reveals the everyday practice of the majority in the contemporary society: She made the food; I ate it, gratefully. She washed the clothes; I put them on. I never really noticed that she was doing more (but she could have spoken; she could have complained) until one day we had our first quarrel. (24)

Avoiding similar quarrels, men and women start to live apart; men meet in gay clubs, women in  all-female groups like ‘Children’s Commune’ and ‘Wicca’. Both parties feel empowered by feelings of hatred and enmity towards the other. Saul describes Wicca women with ‘cruel, identical, sexless faces’ (139). Women deem men ‘a ring of “pederasts and child-molesters”  ’ (139). They even have their ‘Weapon’s Officer’, a ‘beautiful blonde’, Briony (86). On the other hand, Saul’s friend repeats the misogynistic views adopted by all men in the ‘Gay Science Club’: ‘Women and babies make a mess everywhere’ (47). ‘Men should stick with their own kind, actually. No trouble that way’ (48). This trend reaches its peak when Saul and his friends speak their hatred about women on their way to rescue Luke from the hands of the overprotective Wicca women. Associating manliness with violence, they drink beer and swear and yell: ‘Die, you witches’ (130). On the other hand, Wicca’s ways of taking children from their fathers are not friendly or peaceful either. Saul describes the bodyguards he has to fight against to get his Luke out: The guards were big women carrying starguns, dressed in greatcoats of violent green. They looked harassed, and moved the children in quickly; they were massive doors, which made the people look small. It was like a military operation. The kids were subdued and obedient. (131)

Just as Gee reveals the constructedness of gender roles and critiques the automatic responses people unthinkingly give to the opposite sex, she denounces the opposite trend, a reliance on communal identity that is shared by both the men in the Gay Science Club and the women in Wicca. Hatred in and of the opposite sex is so internalized that Saul thinks it ‘surprising’ to find love in a woman when he observes Briony, one of the Wicca guards, emotionally attached to Luke; but Saul also thinks that even though she helps him kidnap Luke, in the final instance, she is ‘a woman, for godsake! One of the enemy!’ (143), a ‘demonic witch’ (144) who is on a mission to cultivate hatred of men in children (136). Both Saul and Sarah feel some discomfort in their strict adherence to segging, but they do not, in the end, feel strong enough to go beyond the established norms and live together as lovers. Once again, Gee describes the process

112

Maggie Gee

of disintegration in society caused by enmity, a sign and symptom of the ecological crisis, which suggests that enmity, like the environmental disaster, results from an accumulation of mistakes, something learnt that can be unlearnt: ‘The country teetered on a knife-edge for days as the two sides wrangled tensely for power, while behind the scenes they marshalled their forces’ (146). At the very same time, the ‘Eurotunnel’, the country’s ‘link to Euro’, collapses, due to the sea flooding in thousands of tons of black sand and mud, and ‘the screaming died, and the screens went blank’ (147). Similarly, the emotional trauma that Saul suffers in the aftermath of the divorce is interwoven with images of the approaching disaster: ‘The creaking ice crawled on towards us’ (119). Freezing lakes, whitening orchards, power cuts and failed food crops parallel the image of Saul suffering from loneliness in a cold and barren house. He explains ‘I was getting colder at a rate of one or two degrees a year’ (120). Later, Saul describes Wicca’s systematic attempts to castrate Luke in terms of emotional coldness: ‘We were all getting cold’ (165). The novel shows the crisis between men and women as part of a panorama of gender roles in contemporary British society. As Gee’s mouthpiece, Saul says ‘[I]t is still a mystery to me’. Thus, Saul’s sad notes as the narrator become a satirical comment on the human condition in contemporary Britain: ‘How can I explain it to these crazy kids, who live for food and fire, and sex? [. . .] How humans had everything, and valued nothing’ (43). Although it looks more like a novel about global warming, this is in fact one of Gee’s strongest panoramas of gender roles in society; in that sense, The Ice People can be seen as a project that studies disorder on the smallest scale along with the much larger one. Put simply, her discussion of gender roles regarding housework, reproduction and childcare is enveloped by the planetary disorder resulting in global warming. This discussion shows the problems of both women and men in actualizing a peaceful, egalitarian and non-discriminatory domestic and public space that would respect and support all individuals. The two most important motifs in the novel’s discussion of gender in the domestic context are housework and motherhood. Gee caricatures the way that domestic labour is mostly performed by women by showing the new craze for purchasing ‘mobots’, robot cleaners. Saul’s description of this reveals a major social phenomenon: ‘The whole developed world wanted them. Everyone in our apartment block had them’ (79). Ironically, in this technologically developed society, these robots, designed to do the domestic chores, are seen in gender terms and defined as ‘desperate housewives’, a parody of our civilization which fails to find ways of establishing a social order that would respect both men and women. The generic name given to them, ‘Doves’, like the dove in the flood myth, ironically heralds salvation, this time for women and from housework. Through a process that is called ‘Dovemania’, Gee gives a panorama of gender roles in this high-tech society. Sarah has to remind Saul and Luke that a robot cleaner will also liberate them, not only her, because ‘Cleaning is as much your work as mine’ (65). Saul’s ironic comment about Sarah’s lack of interest in Dove when it needs care also underscores the fact that roles have long been internalized. Saul bitterly complains that it is always men who have to fix things when they are broken ‘since women hadn’t rushed to claim that profession, sticking their heads down stinking drains’ (85).

Environmental Crisis, from Fact to Fiction

113

That patriarchal gender roles have been internalized is evidenced also by Gee’s brief portrayal of Saul as the contemporary version of Noah. As a father taking responsibility for his son by plotting an escape to Africa, he immediately feels like a hero. Since he also takes Briony and Dora on his small boat, he delights in seeing himself as the head of the team. Like Robinson Crusoe on his island, Saul enjoys this new position of power and says: ‘I loved the way my crew obeyed me’ (150). After the dangerous and tiring journey to reach France, he thinks that he now deserves to feel victorious: ‘I could feel like a god or a happy hero relaxing after an epic battle’ (156). Funnily, when intoxicated, he easily sees himself in an archetypal role, as ‘a man, Esau, Moses, leading his tribe to the promised land, David fighting the Goliath of the ice’ (166). The novel also seems to satirize gender roles through a joke that offers Saul’s robot as a kind of case study. His naming of the Dove ‘Dora’ recalls Sigmund Freud’s Dora (an 18-year-old girl, named Ida Bauer), on whose depression Freud based his analysis of female hysteria. By comparing Sarah, his partner, to Dora, the robot, Saul sounds very much like Freud, describing Sarah in terms of a hysteric: ‘Once again, it was so different from living with Sarah, who hardly listened to me anymore, because, she said, conversation caused quarrels’ (90). He can spend ‘quality time with Dora’ (92). Of course, Saul’s comment that talking to a robot is more rewarding than conversing with a real human being adds to the satirical tone of the novel about the alienation that contemporary people suffer in their relationships; Saul decides that ‘[robots] were better than us’. A further comparison of robots and human beings reveals Gee’s thoughts about the over-sophisticated process of reproduction in our culture. Simply by a click on the ‘Replicate panel’, a Dove can reproduce. However, Saul warns his reader that there are certain side effects to this process, like ‘some long-term lessening of function, change in appearance etc. ’ , and Doves ‘suspend normal functions for the duration of the replication process’ (91). This highly sophisticated satire here sounds like a message to men who fail to understand that pregnancy, labour and early stages of childcare necessitate extra support, and women are not offered enough institutional support. Dora becomes a device for Gee also to reveal the repeated patterns and assumed roles in romantic relations between men and women. Saul starts feeling anxious about Dora when he leaves for work, and feels wonderful when Dora recites ‘Are you leaving? Must you go?’ (92). Funnily, the comfort that Dora provides Saul induces jealousy in Sarah, who gives an automatic response; she dyes her hair red and banishes Dora to a corner of the screenroom. But the analogy culminates in Gee’s pure biting wit when Saul is portrayed as tempted to ‘use the Replicate function’ as if to mimic clichés in romantic love (92). It is evident that the reason why Saul likes Dora is that the relationship is designed to keep him as the sole authority, always served and cared for by an ever-submissive figure. Picturing women who have genuine control neither over their bodies nor their lives, Dora’s programme dutifully asks, ‘Do you want me to replicate?’1 (94). Saul delights in Dora’s passive obedience, one of whose ornaments is the active (but usefully restricted) language programme. However, the news of a Dove in Scotland that ‘had torn off the leg of a newborn baby’ induces fear in Saul, who promptly takes out the replicator module; Gee’s meticulous portrayal of Saul in panic seems to be designed to suggest a Freudian analysis of hysteria (106). No matter how sure he is that it can only be a ‘human error’,

114

Maggie Gee

he hastily acts to terminate Dora’s reproductive function; ‘like a fake gynaecologist’, he ‘plunges’ his hand ‘into her cold parts’, ‘drags’ the module out and breaks it up with a hammer so that it could no longer reproduce (106). And, pathologically, he tries to erase all his positive attachment to his Dove and calls it ‘just a wrongly-set machine’ (145), though when he finally says goodbye to Dora, he cannot help feeling real sadness and loss. As an antidote to the dystopic world in crisis, the novel offers a motif of reconnection both on a social and a physical level through the image of Saul trying to save his son from the Ice Age. An important trait in Gee’s fiction, faith in humankind and optimism ultimately suggests a possible utopic vision, supported by the motif of interconnectedness. Saul comes to believe that if we insist on defining ourselves in terms of sameness and separation, the inevitable results are conflict, contradiction and chaos. Saul’s diatribe against segging reveals that happiness is possible only through relating to people around us, regardless of their difference. Calling himself, Luke, Briony and Dora a family, he argues that: The members of a team are all alike, men with men, women with women. Our family was not like that. Difference was the point. We were complementary. Everyone had something different to give. Human beings weren’t meant to be segged. We were never intended to be solitary. The links stretched back through the generations, gifts of memory, gifts of genes. My father’s gift was concealed in my pack, sheathed in xylon, our most precious possession, the birth certificates, the documents. (157)

Gee offers a simultaneous image of escape from Euro and the affirmation of family as a supportive unit, because what makes escape possible is Saul’s own family background. When Luke has finally proved eligible for a visa thanks to his grandfather Samuel, Saul says: ‘Now Samuel’s blood was going to save Luke’s life. Opening the gates of Africa’ (157). The positive tone in this life-affirming scene is also repeated in the finale, despite the decision Luke eventually makes to stay in Euro: ‘Everything that lives is good. Everything that freely lives’ (239). Departed from anthropocentrism, Saul can see ‘even the wolves’ as part of these good things that freely live (239). At 60, having lost his Sarah to her absurd beliefs and his own obstinacy, having experienced hard times and knowing he has nothing to lose, Saul surrenders himself to the wild children in death, and calls it his ‘entry to this brave new world’ (241). The ritual of celebration, though never spelt out, seems to mean that Saul will be killed and used as food, but that is also a symbol of the past offering itself up for use by the future, and the old feeding the young when their time is over, something similar to the end of Grace. The narrative makes a full circle to its beginning with Saul offering his story as the panorama of his time. Merging the ending of the story with its beginning in the voice of its teller Saul, Gee suggests a sense of organic unity that finishes the novel on a note of connectedness. And this becomes the precise place where Gee’s intention meets Saul’s: to present his story as the panorama of our times. With a quick allusion to Dickensian tradition, the teller ends the story: ‘I, Saul, Teller of Tales, Keeper of Doves, Slayer of Wolves, tell you the story of my times. Of the best of days, and the last of days. For whoever may read it. Whoever can read’ (244).

Environmental Crisis, from Fact to Fiction

115

From Noah’s ark to Blair’s helicopters: Dystopian future in Maggie Gee’s The Flood One of my earliest, and recurring, dreams is about a huge tidal wave [. . .] It grows faster and faster - I am frozen to the spot, staring [. . .] Its shadow overtakes me the second before the icy water sweeps me away. Where did my childhood dream come from? An analyst might say it showed my fear of being overwhelmed by emotion. I was born in Poole, Dorset, so my first memory is of running with my brother across the long, flat white sands of Pearl Bay, with the sea reduced to a dark blue line very far away; but always growing. [. . .] perhaps my dream comes from the prehistoric past, or the future.2

Maggie Gee published The Flood nine months before the Indonesian tsunami of 2004, in which her earliest dream comes true: a tidal wave overwhelms a city. Emotions surfacing, Noah’s flood residing in our collective unconscious, images of some recent tsunamis or the desire to turn scientific data into literary production; whatever the reason, a flooded capital is a favourite scenario of science fiction writers, satirists and dystopians. Another British writer, a ‘hard’ science fiction novelist, Stephen Baxter, who wrote his novel with the identical title Flood in 2008, 4 years later, reasons about the creative impulse behind his work and says in his article ‘The Flooding of London’ that: This modern watery anxiety may be a result of the very real threat flooding has always posed to London, whose rivers have been constrained and overbuilt since Roman times. The Thames Barrier was built in response to catastrophic flooding in 1953. Since then climate-change predictions of sea level rises have invalidated some of the Barrier’s design assumptions, and after decades of development some one and a quarter million people now live on the capital’s flood plain.

In his survey of flooded-city novels, Stephen Baxter cites Richard Jefferies’ After London, or, Wild England (1885) as the ur-text of London latherings and gives a long list of such novels: Garrett P. Serviss’ 1912 The Second Deluge, S. Fowler Wright’s Deluge (1928) (not only London), John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes (1953), J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) a riposte to Wyndham, Brian Aldiss’s Greybeard (1964) – nuclear tests have sterilized mankind and civilization breaks down, Blue Mars (1996) – volcanism melts significant chunks, Richard Doyle’s Flood (2002), Chris Ryan’s version of a similar scenario in Flash Flood (2006), David Maine’s The Preservationist (2004; in Britain as The Flood), Will Self ’s The Book of Dave: A Revelation of the Recent Past and the Distant Future (2006) and Ben Elton’s Blind Faith (2007), all propose a disastrous future. Stephen Baxter, who made this list, also added his own novels to it: His 2008 Flood describes a ‘near future world where deep submarine seismic activity leads to fragmentation, and the opening of deep reservoirs of water’. In his version of the flooded city, human civilization is destroyed by the rising inundation, which even covers Mount Everest in 2052, but the human species survive. He even wrote a sequel, titled Ark, in 2009, the year in which Margaret Atwood published her post apocalyptic The Year of the Flood.

116

Maggie Gee

Maggie Gee’s The Flood is a dystopia with a contemporary urban setting and presents the effects of a modern-day flood. Considering the social criticism the novel makes, it can be suggested that the post-apocalyptic urban setting offers Gee a vehicle to represent and satirize a range of characters and social problems in a fictitious metropolis a little like London. The panoramic view of society and the critique of the publishing world, of politics, the colour bar, the class divide and the new age craze, and the representation of people and everyday life in Britain, give the book a strong satirical turn. In other words, by delineating corruption, burglars, thieves, poverty, the decadent rich, political demonstrations and a decaying urban landscape, the novel reads like the novels of social consciousness of the 1840s, especially when one of the characters declares: ‘If you’ve got no money or looks, you’re a zero. I’m afraid you’ll have to get used to it’ (73). The dystopian energy in The Flood generated by environmental disaster, put to work in many scenes reminiscent of contemporary British life, functions as a metaphor facilitating Gee’s social criticism. At a primary level, the novel functions as an environmental warning. It practically says, to use Gee’s words about the real-life drowned worlds that have followed recent flooding in Europe and the Indian subcontinent: ‘the current melting of polar ice-sheets brings the life we have grown used to into jeopardy’ (2007, 1). But as a dystopia with a strong satirical tone, the novel does not only tell about environmental jeopardy, but also about the normal life we have grown into. Elaborating on the nature of dystopian literature, M. Keith Booker contends that it is ‘a critique of existing social conditions or political systems, either through the critical examination of the utopian premises upon which those conditions and systems are based or through the imaginative extension of those conditions and systems into different contexts that more clearly reveal their flaws and contradictions’ (1994b, 3). The apocalyptic setting helps Maggie Gee explore the faults of the current state of British society, thus the novel also becomes a warning about the social and political conditions. While revealing the ‘flaws and contradictions’ in British society, the novel also offers some clues about how to make it better. With a wide range of problems from different fields, Gee’s novel illustrates the strong link between dystopia and satire. In his Transformations of Language in Modern Dystopias, Sisk states that satire forms the clearest and strongest strain of literary fiction leading to the development of dystopia, primarily because it, too, is aimed at pointing out problems with the writer’s contemporary world (7). One of the targets for Gee’s satire, for instance, is the money-oriented world of capitalism. The third-person narrator focuses on two teenagers, Lola and Gracie, who call themselves anti-capitalists, yet exposes the irony in their self-definition, since what they care about is simply music and shopping. Living in dysfunctional families, these teenagers take political demonstrations as a chance for socializing and entertainment. The narrator portrays these young girls’ clumsy attempts at meaningful action in the context of the novel’s depiction of how climate change threatens life: They sat together over Lola’s lap-top. Nothing much happening this weekend. All the exciting stuff was in other cities. Protests in Varna where a massive new dam was said to be threatening the whole coastline. A chunk of the island as big as a city could apparently fall into the sea. Eco-protestors envisaged tidal waves, global disaster, millions drowned. (57)

Environmental Crisis, from Fact to Fiction

117

Reinforcing the novel’s satirical vein, these privileged young girls with a spectator’s interest in environmental and political issues are set against young Kilda, who works in Lola’s house and has to babysit to support her family. The supposedly anti-capitalist Lola blames Kilda for stealing anytime she fails to find her possessions: ‘She stole them, she takes my things’ (69). Davey, a scientist who is in the service of media, is another target for satire; he accepts an offer to produce popular television science programmes from a company which cares for publicity rather than accuracy (82). The narrator reveals the irony of Davey’s position in a nutshell; his love of astronomy makes him a television astronomer who would be more popular if he spoke on astrology (90). Along with so-called activists who do not care about the imminent flood, scientists who talk nonsense, and art experts failing to appreciate natural beauty, the ironic voice of the narrator also targets publishing houses that assume the authority to determine ‘what is good literature?’ While openly satirizing the commodified stance of the book world, Gee is equally critical of the aloofness and the myopic vision of contemporary writers. The Flood brings in this critique through writer characters like Moira from Dying, in Other Words, Angela from The Burning Book and Thomas from Gee’s previous novel The White Family, an alienated writer ‘trapped in the coils of hermeneutic hell’, as well as editors, lecturers and students of art and literature (2002, 196). In the offices of ‘Headstone Publisher’, obviously a pun on Waterstones, Britain’s leading bookseller, a novel about breast cancer is accepted because the marketing department believes that with a nice cover featuring ‘tits’ the book will hit the shelves. No matter how much the serious editor, who has a Master’s degree in English, insists on the absurdity of the idea, she is rejected and the company decides to publish the saga with a weird title, ‘A Breast in Winter’, targeting sales of half a million copies. The overall criticism of the culture industry is evident in the defeated editor’s musings about the future of this boring and unoriginal cancer saga: She wondered, grimly, what they’d think of Emma Dale. If all those copies of A Breast in Winter were spread out across the square, they would cover it completely. Half a million copies would spill over the side-streets, infect the libraries, infest the bookshops. The city published thousands of books every year, spewing them out then pulping them. (35)

Theories of dystopia consider defamiliarization, as evident in, for example, Gee’s parodic modification of the publisher’s name, to be one of dystopia’s generic features; in The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism, Booker suggests that ‘by focusing their critiques of society on imaginatively distant settings, dystopian fictions provide fresh perspectives on problematic social and political practices that might otherwise be taken for granted or considered natural and inevitable’ (1994a, 3–4). Gee employs the technique of defamiliarizing as a tool, yet The Flood does not require a great suspension of disbelief as many dystopian stories do. We are not in Oceania as in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, or Eden-Olympia as in J. G. Ballard’s Super-Cannes. The story is set in a familiar place, in a slightly distorted London. And it is set in the future, but not in a very distant one, as in Huxley’s Brave New World, set in AD 2540, or Zamyatin’s We, set in the thirty-second century. But still, we are meant to be estranged with the help of such techniques as the distortion of place names: Hesperica stands

118

Maggie Gee

for America, Victory Square for Victoria Station and grinning Mr Bliss is Tony Blair, famous for his smile. With its increasing female workforce, female academics teaching women’s writing, with its big shopping malls, anti-capitalist demonstrations and clear foreshadowings of the 2004 attacks of Britain on Iraq, we may rest assured that this is really contemporary Britain. Following Feinberg’s definition of the norms of satire, one can hold that this is a satire, a ‘playfully critical distortion of the familiar’ (19). Although the distortion is playful, Gee’s satire is dark, complex and far-reaching in its ambition to target contemporary militarization, racism and homophobia as well as the lowering of standards in the publishing world and consumerism. Describing Gee’s portrayal of the familiar, Valentine Cunningham sheds light on the allegorical potential of the novel’s representation: Maggie Gee’s The Flood (featuring watery bad-times for a city and culture oppressed not least by its untruthful warfaring Prime Minister Mr Bliss: guess who he’s meant to be). (“Blair’s Britain”: it’s taken over now almost completely, as our novel’s preferred site and sign of the real and the ordinary gone plightful, from the “Thatcher’s Britain” which preoccupied so much fiction of her time, and which survives now only in consciously retro corners like David Peace’s large angry documentary about the “Great Miners’ Strike” of 1984, GB 84.)

Unlike utopias aiming to criticize the present by comparing it to an ideal state, dystopias create an unpleasant society, which is, in fact, a depiction of the present time and its potential end. Many contemporary dystopias warn the reader about global climate change and aim to raise awareness about it. Evidently, like The Ice People, The Flood, then, is a warning, not just about climate change, but also about the problems that lead up to this global environmental crisis. Although the plots of these two novels centre on environmental disasters, they are equally strong responses to the social and political conditions they diagnose. Booker’s remark on the critical potential of dystopias sheds further light on Gee’s representation of contemporary society in The Flood: In general dystopian fiction differs from science fiction in the specificity of its attention to social and political critique. Indeed, the turn toward dystopian modes in modern literature parallels the rather dark turn taken by a great deal of modern cultural criticism (1994b, 4).

Thus to make its specific social and political critique, Gee’s The Flood portrays many familiar characters in an only slightly distorted London. The use of free indirect discourse in narration that shows things from the characters’ perspective establishes objectivity, and sudden shifts between paragraph-long episodes divided only by line spacing recalls the Brechtian epic stage where there is no room for identification and emotional involvement. As readers, we become critical observers and take the portrayal of life offered to us as a case to be pondered and diagnosed. It is clear that the main strategy of dystopian literature, defamiliarization, is also employed via characterization. As if with her camera, the omniscient narrator of the novel, and acting like a stage director in an epic drama, features a myriad of characters each bringing in a certain social problem and focuses on each of them with equal interest.

Environmental Crisis, from Fact to Fiction

119

In this sense, The Flood can also be called an ensemble in which the characters ‘are assigned roughly equal amounts of importance’ so that they can work well together with no one outshining the others. This allows flexibility for Gee to focus on various characters without aligning with them, and to maintain objectivity. In other words, The Flood as a contemporary version of the condition-of-England novel achieves a sense of unity not only with the shift from the third person omniscient marking the desired change in the perspective, the God-like omniscient voice replaced by the prophetic tone of the ‘we’, but also with the voice of many different characters coming from different ethnic, social and cultural backgrounds. The Flood’s egalitarian, democratic, all inclusive and overarching perspective stands on the new ground that Maggie Gee suggests in place of the old one for the happy few, the elect who were salvaged from the older versions of floods. In that sense, despite its serious critique, the novel achieves a life-affirming tone and an overarching frame that unites particulars to illustrate Brannigan’s comment about the social function of literature. Brannigan argues that by providing a means for the silenced and dispossessed to gain a voice in society, literature functions as a useful social tool that can lead to the creation of an idealist and imaginative space. In this space with the imaginative potential for change, ‘dissidence, critique and reinvention’ would be encouraged. (204) With its satire on corruption, greed, abuse and indifference, Gee’s text gains a polyphonic quality as a result of its rich array of characters and provides a close examination of society in its entirety. Unlike the other flooded London films and novels cited, the narrator’s focus is on people rather than events or setting. There are no lengthy descriptions of the flooded city, nor detailed telephone conversations of, for example, rescue team members, or reports about the Thames barriers, as in science-fictional narratives of a flood. Technocrats, people in authority, scientists, climate experts and the police constitute just a part of the crowded cast. And in line with the defining feature of satire, the novel is packed with people to offer a panoramic view of society. All these different characters, namely little children, grandparents, teenagers, rich, poor, black, white, straight, gay adults, men and women, PhDs in science, MAs in English, academics, writers, artists, editors, park keepers, thieves, postmen, housewives, school teachers, librarians, boatmen, politicians, students, cleaners, Iraqi, Iranian, American, English, British, agnostics, followers of a new age prophet, racists – all in  all, 65 characters, which means, effectively, only five pages per character – inhabit the novel, turning it into a microcosm of the world. Flooded by characters, the text itself becomes an ark saving these people from the flood. Gee herself revealed her intention to populate the novel with characters new and old in the keynote speech she gave in İstanbul, ‘Visions of the Future, Now and Then’. Writing the novel between 2002 and early 2003, ‘at a very specific time in British political history’, when ‘the citizens of then UK, like the citizens of Iraq, were enduring one of the longest run-ups to an inevitable war in which our leaders refused to tell the truth about what they were planning’, she devised a plan to ‘save’ all her characters (2011, 15) – in other words, she decided to write a novel, The Flood, which would contain at least one character from every one of her previous books, a fictional Ark.

120

Maggie Gee

The text’s reliance on characters does not mean that the characters are simply floating in a text flooded by people. Although there is not a strong element of suspense, much room for action or a tightly knit plot, The Flood manages to offer an exciting reading experience. A distinct feature of this modern-day dystopia is that the novel has a fascinating sense of intra and interconnectivity, on both thematic and stylistic levels. Characters are connected to each other via marriage, school, work and family. For instance, the writer character Angela Lamb’s little daughter Gerda is playing at the park with the son of Shirley, whose sister-in-law Delorice works at a publishing house that publishes Angela’s bestsellers, fit for the taste of people like Lottie, Shirley’s classmate in an Art and Culture course in the Lifelong Learning section of the University where Moira, Angela’s friend, works as a lecturer. This links four previous novels by Gee: Angela is from The Burning Book, Shirley is from The White Family, Lottie is from Light Years and Moira is from Dying, In Other Words. The theme of oneness and integrity supported by such intricate connections within the text is reinforced by the interconnectivity with her other novels, and the characters from all of the earlier Gee books are now, she claimed, ‘the age they would be according to the ages they were when the original books were published’ (2011, 15). Most of the members of The White Family feature here too; Lorna and Angela of The Burning Book seem to have survived the nuclear apocalypse of The Burning Book, and those who die in earlier novels, like Moira Penny of Dying, in Other Words and Isaac of Where Are the Snows, are resurrected here. As a project to put fragments back together to achieve integrity, it transgresses time and places barriers to create a sense of unity. As such, The Flood becomes an arena where Gee’s characters all appear in an ambitious attempt to make her oeuvre as a whole a single connected fiction contesting universal issues, and the novel bridges the gaps between different texts and contexts. In her insightful article, ‘Imagining Apocalypse: Maggie Gee’s The Flood’, Sarah Dillon interprets Gee’s attempt to save her characters as a sign of the survival of literature and contends that: ‘[. . .] in a historical context defined by fear of natural, biological, technological, and nuclear annihilation, Gee has written a novel that performatively guarantees the continuance of humankind and the survival of literature’ (384). Read in line with the novel’s representation of art and artists, it is obvious that The Flood becomes an ark not just for the characters but for the act of story telling itself, which functions as a reminder of ethical values and underlying unity. Gee herself considers this interconnectivity as a ‘completely non-realist framework’, a very modernist endeavour and quite an egotistical one, ‘or at least one that said “I take my work and my art seriously”, though on another level’, and she explains why she wanted to establish this network of connection: [I]t is all about my other books - there is at least one character from each of my preceding books in it, and I worked out ways of connecting them all, so my whole fictional world could come together and perhaps be saved, in case there really was (outside the book) a cataclysmic war with Iraq that spread into a world war, and I thought, I must finish my work, and hope that maybe, something that is a key to my work will survive. I did indeed want to paint a picture of the world I lived

Environmental Crisis, from Fact to Fiction

121

in and loved, a plural one, an inclusive one with space for everyone if the smiling, power-mad Blisses and Bares of the world would only leave their citizens alone.

From a different point of view, one can argue that this ‘unreality’ is employed to contribute to the novel’s countervailing realistic depiction of contemporary Britain. Justifying what Booker claims about utopian fiction in The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature, Gee’s book also responds to the real world outside it, for example, by chronicling the real-life move towards war against Iraq. He contends that utopian works are by no means escapist or disconnected from reality, and recalling the critique Thomas More’s Utopia makes of his time, he suggests that ‘These texts tend to participate in reality in an active and productive way. More’s book was written at a time of great social and political change and turmoil; it attempted to intervene in its contemporary historical moment by indicating desirable directions that these changes might take’ (1994a, 14). The Flood’s intervention in its historical moment and participation in reality is achieved through a realistic account of human nature and human social mechanisms, which are conveyed in a style ‘unromantic as Monday morning’. By not sensationalizing the action in the plot to add suspense or adventure to the story, the narrator treats the flood just like another adverse weather condition. To put it simply, the foreground of the novel encourages the reader to feel more interested in the panorama than the action, and to question the manner. For instance, we ask why Lola, who claims to be politically aware, is completely indifferent to her cleaner’s poverty while mechanically searching for fashionable demonstrations to attend. Or we ask how an anti-capitalist like her can enjoy indulging herself in expensive perfumes, elegant dresses and fancy chocolates. We also ponder why an MA in English Literature does not mean anything in a publishing firm. Understanding all, yet not residing within a singular perspective, treating characters from the margin and the mainstream equally, Gee offers a multilayered novel with many different points of view. The use of free indirect discourse already mentioned, together with the incessant tonal shifts made in a cinematographic fashion reinforce Gee’s panoramic social satire and leave the reader with a holistic understanding of all these characters. Once again, a picture functions as a tool for revealing Gee’s ars poetica. As in Where Are the Snows, Light Years and Lost Children, visual art conveys the novel’s perspective on life. This time it is ‘Morning Sun’ by the twentieth-century American painter Edward Hopper who is famous for his portrayal of human isolation in urban landscape. ‘Morning Sun’ showcases a woman looking towards the sun from the window of her room. Sitting unemotionally staring into the light outside the window, she is depicted as a detached observer of life outside. In her New Statesman article about the Hopper exhibition at Tate Modern in 2004, ‘View from Outside’, Maggie Gee provides clues about Hopper’s presence in her novel, published in the same year. Her comments on his art definitely reveal her criteria for good art and its social function: What really interests Hopper, and what makes him a great painter is his wider subject - not individuals but the human species, perching here on the immensity of earth. Hopper is a painter who shows us how we look in the perspective of the

122

Maggie Gee

wide, inhuman spaces beyond our inhabited thresholds. And his ordinary people [. . .] are caught looking out from their little lives at the beyond, just as he does. Tension between the familiar and the vast unknown infuses all his pictures, even the most apparently domestic, with excitement.

Gee’s viewpoint here perfectly applies to the picture she chooses for The Flood in the sense that the text is a view from outside, bridging the gap between the familiar and the vast unknown, the individual and what is outside the individual. As the description of ‘Morning Sun’ in the Columbus Museum of Art Catalogue suggests, Hopper’s painting represents life in the modern city: ‘The bare wall and the elevation of the room above the street also suggest the bleakness and solitude of impersonal urban life’ (‘Morning Sun’). The novel’s third-person narrator sees the woman in the painting as ‘Lottie’s alter ego’ – the alter ego of Lottie from Gee’s novel Light Years – and suggests the idea that ‘Morning Sun’ can be read as a subtext to the novel, which gives the reader a view from Gee’s window. Interestingly, in the novel’s dense space of intra and interconnectivity there stands one odd man out, who is a visual artist. Painting the picture of the world in decay, Ian, the mad artist, feels that he does not belong to this corrupt society. To illustrate the critical distance between the artist and the world he paints, Gee shows Ian, who was originally the desperate, drunken young barman in Grace, with not a single human connection; the only means to link him to this world is his art and the birds. He spends all his time at the zoo, and explains that he wants the birds to know that he is an animal too (50). When the waves come, he leaves his easel and his art behind without any hesitation and runs madly to smash the wire cage in order to save the birds. Merging his life with those of the birds, he establishes another plane of connections in the novel: he unites the animal world with that of the human. The prophetic quality he gains by redeeming the birds becomes clearer and increases into a god-like omnipotence when he answers Shirley, who asks what he is painting, ‘The end and the beginning of the world’ (50). In Gee’s version of an ‘Apology for Poetry’, the novel also renders Ian, the artist, infinitely wiser than Bruno, the leader of the new age religion called One Way, Brothers and Sisters of the Last Day. In other words, the poet, represented as a saviour, outdoes Bruno. As the saviour of birds, which are signs of survival and harbingers of new life in the ancient flood myths, Ian can be thought as the poet/creator weaving the threads of the text; a parallel can be drawn between him and the author of the text giving us ‘the end and the beginning of the world’ in the same order in which they happen in Gee’s text. The novel starts with the part titled ‘Before’, which accommodates the post-apocalyptic narrative voice telling us ‘I am going to tell you how it happened’, whereas ‘After’, the final part, gives a sense of imminence and a beginning with: ‘Here they come now/here they come/here we come’ (324–5). In reversing the order, starting with the end and ending with a new beginning, the text defies the linearity and transgresses the conventional understanding of time, as if to suggest a new order that will shatter the present system. The artist portraying an image of the beginning and end of the world in Maggie Gee’s novel might be read as a reminder of art’s universal function to warn us and improve society: it is as if the author thinks it is time a disaster was sent upon the

Environmental Crisis, from Fact to Fiction

123

contemporary society. Inevitably reminding us of the Sumerian flood myth, in which gods and goddesses sent the flood as a punishment to the ‘noisy’ people on earth, the novel seems to be portraying a modern city filled with its noisy people, unable either to listen or to act. It is ironically implied that if it were Sumerian times, people might believe that their problems could be solved in an instant by a flood wiping out the corrupt and the corrupted. Yet, what was then a religious punishment for the corrupt and noisy, in today’s secularized and democratic culture is regarded as a warning that invites the reader to ponder and question. These pages may seem to reveal a longing for something to come and demolish the decayed and decadent, but there doesn’t seem to be a divine or egalitarian conception of justice that exterminates only the corrupt but salvages the good. In the Sumerian myth, the God Ea had decided to eliminate humans and other land animals with a great flood, which was to become ‘the end of all flesh’, but he selected Utnapistim, the wise man, to be saved. In the biblical myth, only Noah and his family survive, in the Greek myth Zeus decides to preserve only two beings as fit to live: Deucalion, a son of Prometheus, and one good woman, Pyrrha, a daughter of Epimetheus. The flood submerges the whole earth except Mount Olympus, where the gods live, and Mount Parnassus, where Deucalion and Pyrrha find shelter (‘Greek Flood Myth’). There are always the elect, the happy few who are saved. Caroline Lucas, leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, a doctor of English literature, in her Guardian review of Maggie Gee’s novel, thinks that The Flood, with its well-drawn characters and lively prose, shows how the poor will always be the first to suffer the effects of climate change. In line with Lucas, I think that one of the central points of criticism for Gee is this class and economic divide in contemporary British society. The rich and the poor, and their dissimilar concerns are juxtaposed to highlight the gap between classes. When lower-middle-class May thinks about her son-in-law who is a medical doctor, she feels happy because this will probably secure her a relatively comfortable death, which is abstracted as: ‘a nice clean bed; the soft hands of the nurses. Sunlight through a window. The blue beyond’ (14). Without any marker or comment, the narrative switches to Lottie ‘a rich woman’ in one of the houses that ‘holds soft sleeping bodies, sparsely distributed among the big rooms, sleeping well because they have eaten well, and drunk good wine, and been lucky in life’ (14). Lottie refuses to grow old not because she fears death but because she will ultimately lose her beauty. And, of course, Lottie refuses to grow old because she loves life so much, selfish and rich though she is, and that’s why the novel portrays her ‘dancing in her moment’ at the very end, in Kew Gardens. The narrator speaks through her consciousness and says: ‘But life is sunny; life is easy’ (16). The next paragraph immediately draws the picture of people going to work in rush hour: ‘The towers are packed with rushing bodies, checking their pockets for pens, keys, looking for umbrellas, overalls, toolkits. Parents scream and children wail [. . .] Postmen drudge on with their heavy bags [. . .] cursing the freebies that weigh their bags down, damning e-mails that lessen the letters. The arms ache, and their knees are arthritic’. This follows the narrator’s voice infected by the postmen: ‘Life is chilly; life is hard’ (17). The reader is constantly made aware of the gap between rich and poor through such signs: ‘Away in the prosperous north of the city, nobody uses the Public Service’ (14). These prosperous people have the

124

Maggie Gee

luxury to buy ‘useless’ gifts like porcelain teddy bears: ‘Because there is money, objects can be useless’ (14). Through the juxtaposition of different people, the novel represents different conflicts in society. The white and the black, the innocent and the criminal, the young and the old speak in opposition to each other as if the text is a court case. To suggest a court-like atmosphere, the novel’s early pages give us Dirk from The White Family, who has killed a black man who turns out to be his sister’s brother-in-law; here, as the novel unfolds, we have him ‘out of prison three months’ (22). We are not expected to love him but in the end we understand him and see him as one of those poor and ignorant xenophobic people who blame black people for his misery: ‘Other prisoners liked him at first, since the man he killed was black, and also a poofter. “One less of them does no harm”, someone hissed’ (22). In this court-like space of the novel, after a single line-space appears a new character, this time the workingclass Faith who complains: ‘They say they are diverting the floods from the centre. No one cares about people round here’ (29). Lottie’s observation underscores the injustice they are subjected to: ‘If you’ve got no money or looks, you’re a zero’, which proves true in the novel’s plane of reality (73). When the tidal waves reach the city centre, the rich find a way to flee thanks to Mr Bliss’s helicopters, while the poor just watch the helicopters hanging above them: having got used to the divisions between the powerful and the powerless, they believe they can never leave. As the new waves come and sweep towards the city, the poor are lost one by one while ‘[t]he rich believe they can always leave, that money will always get them away’ (303). Acting as a judge, the narrator focuses on the happy few and makes an ironic comment: ‘The rich have choices. What will they save? Jewellery, art, their Slim Jim Shoos, those silvery slender kid-glove stilettos that will surely dance to dry land again, the gliding wheels of their Rollon watches, their Verso shirts, their Parade purses’ (302). The rich are not only saved but they have also things to save, and they do not save their fellow people but their goods. When there is room for one other passenger, Isaac, the art dealer, chooses to take his ‘best leather overcoat’ and ‘some pictures, instead of calling his lover Ian, he starts packaging his two-thousand-dollar bottles of wine, his small bronzes, his tiny Freud, his haunted Auerbach drawing of a head’ (289–90). It is only when more poor people like Faith complain about the discriminatory practices in flood management that the government finally starts to think, but not about finding ways to save them: ‘The people are restless around the Towers. A common enemy will unite us’ (38). The narrator turns the focus on the people in government who take advantage of the flood and the threats they pose; Mr Bliss (the fictional Tony Blair) ‘banging the war drum’ (78) thinks it is time they bombed the enemy and says: ‘I sense a new mood among our people. There is a historic opportunity here. We have to be big enough to seize it’ (38). Highlighting the class divide, the novel portrays a Gala Night organized to distract attention from a foreign war it has waged. In port­ raying a microcosm of society, the Gala Night resembles the millennial celebration in Where Are the Snows. The celebration seems to be a fictional representation of the earlier days of Tony Blair’s government, to quote from Gee’s keynote speech in İstanbul, when the Blair establishment ‘specialised in huge and meaningless public parties or

Environmental Crisis, from Fact to Fiction

125

galas to which a glut of celebrities from television, sports and the arts were asked’ (2011, 15). While the rich and famous are invited to enjoy themselves, the rest remain home to watch them on television: Only the crème de la crème have been chosen, the people the city defines itself by, the rich, the celebrities, the people who count, the styles and the faces that are known and copied, stars, actors, leaders, beauties, all the names baptised in the tabloids, famous chefs and fashionistas, ballet-dancers and fancy hairdressers, horoscope writers and football players, game-show hosts and TV presenters, all the showmen who make people happy [. . .] (235)

After the ironic ‘Everyone was there’ (242), the narrator lists those who, actually, were not invited since they do not count, and saying, ‘Actually, most of the world isn’t here’, she cites May, Shirley, Rhukshana, the minicab drivers, the binmen, the cleaners, the illegal immigrants; in brief, the ordinary, the poor, the simple, the unknown and the unpopular (247). With these many diverse characters denied the right to escape the flood and have fun, the narrator adds to the list: ‘The babies: the future hasn’t come to the party. The past isn’t here: the old, the dying’. In brief, drawing these sharp contrasts, Gee proposes a rhetorically persuasive view of the world doing injustice to its people. Unlike one common criticism of dystopian literature, which refers to the dryness and the lack of literariness of its narrative, The Flood is rich in artistic devices, which heighten the thematic effect of the text. One of them is the fact that the story is sandwiched between two tiny sections, ‘Before’ and ‘After’. As I mentioned earlier, this ‘After’ denotes the aftermath of the disaster, a post-apocalyptic setting in which the third-person narrator is replaced by the voice of the dead resurrected somewhere in London’s Kew Gardens, the first real-life place mentioned in the novel, outside in the sunlight: ‘It’s a holiday; everyone has come for the summer solstice’ (322). The summer solstice, the day the north pole is nearest the sun, which reaches its highest point in the sky around 21 June, is ‘the longest day of the year, celebrated as a time of joyous festivals, nature worship, and spiritual renewal, a holiday with lots of food, fun, and frolic with family and friends’ (‘Summer Solstice’). The novel, which starts with the first person ‘I am going to tell you how it happened’ in the part ‘Before’, a narrative voice which sets off to tell ‘how [s/he] came to this strange place with so many others’ (7), addresses the reader again in the final section. Pointing to the ‘happy few’ who survived the flood, now ultimately coming here to the land of the dead, Gee suggests that whatever you do to survive, the differences between all are erased, all oppositions end with the final voice speaking for all. Despite all the dark and grim facts in the book, like the so-called activists who do not care about life outside their comfort zone, the scientists who speak nonsense, the art experts failing to appreciate beauty and the publishers indifferent to aesthetic concerns, the text ultimately directs our attention to the bright side. The dead and the living, the animal and human, the rich and the poor, the white and the black, all become raw material for a new life in the sunlight in the paradisal place of our imagining.

126

Maggie Gee

This bright place in the novel recalls Campanella’s 1602 utopia ‘City of the Sun’, his vision of a unified, peaceful world that has a scene set on the summer solstice. This dystopian story ends on a utopian note, once again instigating the theme of interconnection, this time between utopia and dystopia. Since the dystopic text we read is told from this utopian land, the dark and bitter critique of contemporary life is lightened by the all-embracing and unifying tone depicting everyone as ultimately united in this city ‘whose name is time’ (324): City suspended over the darkness. Above the waters that have covered the earth, stained waters, bloody waters, water heaving with wreck and horror, pulling down papers, pictures, peoples; a patch of red satin, a starving crow, the last flash of a fox’s brush. City which holds all times and places. (325)

This dream-like state in the novel’s ending, which can be named ‘a view from an “ustopia” ’, a term Margaret Atwood coined by bringing together utopia and dystopia, ‘the imagined perfect society and its opposite’, not only gives a realistic portrayal of contemporary Britain with all its problems, but it also carries the strong optimistic vision of Maggie Gee. Considering the sympathy Gee has for her characters, and the rapport she establishes with the reader, it is clear that she employs dystopia to generate utopia. So, the novel’s third-person narrator becomes Gee’s mouthpiece as the novel ends with a view from the city that evokes death as the great leveller: ‘See, here they come, where all are welcome’ (325). Krishan Kumar’s remarks about the interdependence of the genres, utopia and dystopia, sheds further light on this scene in which life and death are intermingled: ‘Utopia and anti-utopia are antithetical yet interdependent. They are “contrast concepts”, getting their meaning and significance from their mutual differences. [. . .] [Anti-utopia] is the mirror image of utopia – but a distorted image, seen in a cracked mirror’ (100). Mixing the voices from the margin with the mainstream, Gee’s fictional representation of modern-day London gives a ‘utopia of the lived moment’, a day without worry or fear, which is Gee’s version of a Woolfian ‘moment of being’, also like the one in her story ‘Kew Gardens’. Gee’s comments about the novel’s ending at Kew Gardens, the first ‘undistorted’ place in the novel, reveal her egalitarian and optimistic vision, which she retains despite her awareness of human problems: In The Flood, after an imagined apocalypse, there is an imagined recuperation of everything precious. For the first time, though, a real place is mentioned. Kew Gardens, the Waterlily House. I return us to the real world because I want to say that heaven is here and now, and not in the terrifying, totalizing paradises of evangelical Christianity or Islam, caricatured in this book in the “One Way” cult. The garden of earthly delights is a literal public garden. (2009b, 36)

One can see that The Flood’s utopian vision, its city of the sun where all are welcome, is a version of earthly paradise, a longing for a truly democratic urban space where all differences are levelled. When the narrator speaks for everyone, saying ‘Here we come, to lie down at last’ (325), Maggie Gee’s philosophy as expressed in her recent autobiography My Animal Life becomes manifest: ‘Our lives are so short, a breath, half a breath’, so in this short life, ‘[t]his moment soaking up the sun’, which we survive by

Environmental Crisis, from Fact to Fiction

127

sheer ‘animal luck’, all that we need is the joy of the moment, not just the eternal (230). The Flood’s cracked mirror reflects the crystal clear idea that Gee enjoys and proposes: heaven, as well as hell, is here and now.

Notes 1 One cannot help but remember Robin Lakoff ’s arguments about women and

language. Dora, the robot seems to be a model of the passive woman who is supposed to follow a code of politeness to make the receiver feel good at the cost of her autonomy. Like a robot she speaks what is programmed, but as what Saul asks and what the machine responds are in conflict, Saul takes this as a form of disobedience and condemns Dora as a mere machine, forgetting about his attachment to the robot he has seen as a human companion for a long time. The title by Lakoff, Father Knows Best: The Use and Abuse of Therapy in Freud’s Case of Dora, also supports such a reading. 2 This is the opening paragraph of Maggie Gee’s article ‘Drowned Worlds’. It introduces photographer Gideon Mendel’s images that recorded the floods in India and England in summer 2007.

7

Of the Two Nations: The White Family (2002)

For Bernardine Evaristo, the black British-Nigerian novelist, Maggie Gee ‘is unique as a novelist who is white and explores issues of race’ and deserves awards for her achievement in presenting working-class and middle-class racism in England. The White Family, with its eponymous white family placed at the centre, offers a vivid representation of a society revealing xenophobia as it tackles the issues of migration. Most importantly, as a text produced by an English writer, the novel gives us clues about the way that contemporary British literature has responded to British society’s increasing multiculturalism. Focused on issues of identity and belonging, The White Family uses a portrait of an urban centre to show what it means to be a member of a multicultural society. Outlining a Britain redefining its identity, yet  also revealing strong feelings of nostalgia on the part of the English, Gee fictionalizes despair over the loss of empire and the fear of recession, which the indigenous inhabitants think is caused by the presence of black migrants. Gee’s novel, which gives a panorama of multicultural Britain from the perspective of the White family, can be seen as a significant and brave contribution to the range of novels about British perceptions of life in a multicultural society. Merolla and Ponzanesi contend that migration not only changes the borders of Europe, it also changes the perception of a nation, of boundaries, languages and identities (1). Delineating this process of change and diversity induced by migration, Gee portrays black characters in full interaction with white ones. In line with Ponzanesi’s view, Gee addresses migration ‘as a site of transition and transformation between received and appropriated categories’ (2004, 219); and as ‘an unsettling force’ (2004, 205), it plays a ‘role in reshaping [European] identities’ (Merolla and Ponzanesi, 1). In that sense, she not only gives a portrayal of resistance to change, but also offers a fresh perspective that envisions a more inclusive sense of Britishness. In her lecture ‘How May I Speak in My Own Voice?: Language and the Forbidden’, delivered at Birkbeck College in 1996, Maggie Gee says that moving in 1985 to South Brent, which has one of the highest concentrations of black people in the country, raised some questions for her: ‘Could I write as a white writer about black people, or through black characters? Are there some taboos which it is wrong to break?’. When she gave this lecture, she had already written The White Family and was having difficulties finding a publisher. What she diagnosed then, echoes in the voice of the narrator:

Of the Two Nations

129

Racism is pushed underground but not crushed. It apparently appears no longer in polite discourse, because educated people are frightened of sounding racist. And yet the racial attacks continue, and it is difficult for black people to get high visibility jobs or be accepted in white English homes, to appear in advertisements or be cast in plays. Moreover if you listen to the familiar speech of less educated, less self-conscious white people, typically self-employed tradesmen or low-paid workers who feel their livelihood is threatened, the racial prejudices are virulent and apparently unmodified by the careful silence that has fallen upon the so-called “chattering classes”. (13)

The White Family breaks this educated silence. Like Grace, the writing of the novel was stimulated by a real-life event. The racial murder of Stephen Lawrence, in April 1993 in London, made Gee want to express her sorrow and anger in some form, and as she said to Maya Jaggi in an interview, she wanted to show that not all white people are racist. She describes the publishing process as ‘Very rocky, very stony, very hard’ (Jaggi, 301); the novel was turned down by many different publishers. Taking the risk of speaking through black characters as well as racists, Gee both voices racism explicitly and provides a careful investigation of its possible root causes. Seeing racism as one social problem among many, the novel gives a critique of the state of Britain. A member of the ‘chattering classes’, Thomas, a librarian and a would-be writer, exposes the exclusive attitude of the English. His comment on the rejection embodied in repeated negative imperatives in the warning signs near the entrance to Hillesden Park, ‘No Loitering, No Soiling, No Golfing: No Motor-cycles, No Camping, No Caravans’, becomes a metaphor for this exclusionary impulse, bluntly warding off anything that is outside the control of the park keeper. In other words, summarizing the simplistic solutions the state finds to deal with problems, Thomas sardonically observes that: ‘This was England. If in doubt, keep them out’ (36). As is obvious from its symbolic title, the novel suggests a reading of the park as England. This place-conscious perspective facilitates an understanding of national identity defined in terms of space, and successfully presents the sense of displacement that both the English and the black British population feel. From the English side, Alfred White, the head of the White family and the keeper of the park in Hillesden Rise, sees himself on a mission to ‘hold the fort’ (220). The name Alfred, offering him as a contemporary version of the Anglo-Saxon King Alfred, reinforces the thematic link between national identity, the sense of belonging and landscape. Moreover, the section titles denote public places where black and white people mingle, namely the Park, the Hospital, the Shop and the Church. They also function as places that point to the process of cultural hybridity. As Gee also stated in her BBC Woman’s Hour interview, conducted by Jenni Murray, it is these ‘shared places’ that bring different people together. Thus, the way Gee arrays her characters in such shared places suggests an alternative vision that offers a sense of involvement and inclusiveness and broadens the definition of common identity. By showing Alfred White, the ‘park keeper’, protecting the land from the black ‘invaders’, the novel becomes a representation of Englishness in a multicultural world juxtaposed with the upsurge of nationalism. Alfred deems the black family in the park at the start of the novel to be a group of uncivilized invaders destroying his park. Gee’s

130

Maggie Gee

ironic representation of Alfred’s racism, laden with overstatement, renders this almost a caricature. Obsessed with keeping his country pure, he even hates the seasonal arrival of ‘yellow foreign (African) birds’, of oriental insects and flowers. He fears that these ‘ignorant’ people, unlike the English who ‘know not to go on the grass’, will ‘turn the Park into a jungle’ (12). As such, Alfred becomes the embodiment of the colonial discourse condensed in the definition of the black man as ‘the white man’s burden’. May, his loyal wife, though not as ethnocentric as Alfred, also broods over the fact that England has lost its ties with a glorious past. She is in need of signs to endorse Englishness, so much so that she sees even the impoverished hospital as a place, almost a fort, that stands for England. Associating the hospital with the national past, she maintains: ‘We fought the last war for places like this’ (22). Alfred exposes a similar form of patriotism with a reference to a national past in which he could enjoy a heroic sense of victory, particularly World War II. And his idea of Englishness relies on his ‘glorious’ past in this land; he remembers his 2-year national service in Palestine at the end of the war to remind himself of both his right to, and his bond with, the land: ‘It’s better than anywhere, really, England’ (242). Though in varying degrees, May and Alfred both define Englishness in terms of a historical bond with the landscape, which inevitably implies an exclusive attitude to migrants and refugees (22). Opening with a scene of dispute over place, the novel promptly becomes an argumentation about the denial of the black’s claim to ownership of the English landscape. However, although Alfred sees himself as superior to his black antagonist, he is not the heroic figure of power any longer. Old and losing his temper easily, Alfred almost becomes a symbol of weakness and failure. When the head of the black family visiting the park asserts that ‘This Park belongs to everyone’, Alfred sees the claim as a sign of his failure to protect his English space, and he collapses ‘as if shot in battle’ (10). The allegorical structure of the novel suggests a reading of Alfred’s hospitalization as King Alfred’s defeat in a battle. The novel shows this mock-heroic figure failing to ‘hold the fort’ in his private space also, symbolizing his failure to accept the change in British society. He resents the fact that his daughter Shirley, after the death of her Ghanaian husband Kojo, has another black lover, Jamaican Elroy. In his idiom, Elroy is a ‘cheeky black bastard’, a ‘performing monkey’ disguising himself by dressing up in a suit (40). When reminded by Shirley that Elroy is ‘as British as me or you’, Alfred abruptly rejects the idea of sameness and explodes: ‘He’s about as British as bananas, is Elroy’ (62). Looking down on black people in general, Alfred tries to empower himself by regaining his lost sense of superiority. Since he refuses to live with black people on egalitarian terms, Alfred rejects the advice that Elroy offers when he is ill, and warns Shirley: ‘Well thank you very much, I want English medicine, English medicine from English doctors’ (62). While portraying the debilitating connotations of Englishness in an increasingly multicultural society, The White Family also exposes the way English people react to these new conditions. Alfred broods over the loss of empire, and knows at heart that there is no basis for pride in Englishness any longer; thus, he interprets patriotic gestures as bad jokes. This is best represented by his bitter response to Shirley’s present, a John Bull figure made of glass, the fragility of which reveals Alfred’s insecurity. Shirley means it to be ‘something nice’, ‘something English’, ‘particularly for her father’.

Of the Two Nations

131

Enriching the ironic tone of the narrative, Shirley likens the John Bull figure to her father that ‘braced to the world, feet splayed, shoulders back, jaw pushed out towards the foreigners’ (179). Alfred’s response reads like an expression of his disillusionment about both the failure of his land and himself as its keeper; exposing his vulnerability, he calls the figure: ‘Ugly little bugger’, ‘A nonsense’, ‘Expensive rubbish’. With a sneering look at its base, which reads ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, Alfred speaks his mind on behalf of the despairing English: ‘Stuff and nonsense. We had it once. Hope, and glory. Now the British Empire doesn’t exist. I never thought that day would come. In my own life-time, the end of empire’ (333). To weave this theme of loss into an overall elegiac tone, Gee also employs May’s consciousness as she recites the poems by her ‘other Alfred’, Alfred Lord Tennyson. Her love of the words that Tennyson uses, ‘idyll’ and ‘ambergris’, immediately recalls his ‘Idylls of the King’, an allegory of the conflicts in Britain during the mid-Victorian era (22). Thus, Gee skilfully juxtaposes King Arthur’s failure to set up an ideal kingdom with the image of failure and recession in contemporary Britain. Although The White Family’s main focus is racism, already explored in Gee’s earlier fiction, it also gives a rich portrayal of economic recession and sociocultural decline in Britain. Portrayed as the background to the central theme, decline is a part of the panorama of the state of Britain. As is typical in Gee’s writing, the novel shows how economic and social conditions and differences of opinion about them pull a family apart, and also links the split in the family to the failure of the big picture. This is best described in the depressingly elegiac words of Kojo, Shirley’s dead husband; a professor of comparative literature, he astutely sees how despair pervades the country and comments: ‘English rain was quiet, like tears’ (127). This gloomy tone is also present in May’s voice, who sometimes thinks ‘Our world is ending. All the things we believed in, gone’ (222). While May observes that ‘London gets dirtier, and more frightening’ (15), Alfred misses ‘The old days. The good old days’ (222). Like Lost Children, the novel portrays the big change in the sociocultural texture of the country due to recession. As Darren White, a journalist in America, comes to London to visit his father at the hospital, he makes quasi-journalistic comments about the poor conditions of the health service. He tries to find something for his wife to eat, to no avail, and complains: ‘I’m just trying to get some morsel of sustenance out of the bloody NHS’ (88). Describing the shop closures in Hillesden Rise, May also seems to be giving a survey of post-Thatcher England: some in the late 1980s, most in the 1990s after the recession, almost all of the shops in their formerly village-like Hillesden close. In place of the long list of shops that close (a bank, a building society, two flower shops, two shoe shops, a bakery-cum-cake shop, a solicitor, electrical goods, hardware store, jewellers, three butchers and a fishmonger), there is now a big market, ‘Gigamart’. While the shopkeepers used to know their customers by their name and treat them kindly, offering toffees to children, Gigamart’s ‘staff ’ look like ‘robots’ (121). Now, ironically, filling the big void is an absurdly big ‘betting-shop’, ‘three times the size of a normal shop’, ‘a sort of sink, soaking up people’s money’, ‘making money out of people’s need for a better life’ (120). Once their ‘El Dorado’, which gave people all that they needed, Hillesden Rise today is just a metonym for the decay in the country.

132

Maggie Gee

Like Where Are the Snows, The White Family traces the marks of the consumer culture in the private lives of individuals. Expanding on this theme, the novel mirrors shopping as a new device replacing the lack of love and bonding; as such, Shirley’s shopping scenes denote individual tragedies. In the portrayal of Shirley, Gee delineates the fact that she can alleviate her acute sense of loneliness only by her shopping journeys to big stores. Ironically, it is the staff at Selfridges, DH Evans and John Lewis who welcome her with kindness. Shirley acknowledges indifference not only outside in the public space but also in her family, and it is ironically compensated by the generous attention that salespeople pay to her as a customer, she happily thinks:  ‘[.  .  .] they know my name, they know my taste. They look at me and think Givenchy’ (136). At the café of the shopping mall, which crowns her shopping spree, she sits alone looking out the windows; she imagines people sitting, lying or dreaming by these windows. In the absence of company, she endlessly counts windows: ‘I stopped when I got near two hundred’ (138). Ironically, in a culture that is more interested in looks, it is the malls that offer a sense of comradeship in a blissful state. Seeing the middle-aged customers as fellow people, she thinks: ‘All of us here are in paradise’ (183). In giving a panorama of the state of Britain, The White Family also cites gentrification as a social problem that is closely related to the decline in the welfare state and the rise of neo-liberal politics. Just as Lost Children critiques the politics of place through a representation of the homeless and estate agents, The White Family briefly represents gentrification, a process that induces displacement (Blomley, xix) and ‘wider urban inequalities’ (Atkinson and Bridge, 17). Gee presents unfair practices in contemporary capitalist society as the root causes of gentrification, showing what Clark calls the ‘commodification of space, polarised power relations, and a dominance of vision over sight’ (26); and the process accentuates the social divisions between gentrifiers and the displaced’ (Atkinson and Bridge, 2). This schism features in The White Family’s contradictory voices on the subject of Hillesden Rise; although May and Alfred feel displaced because the changes cause a sharp decline in their conditions, for the newcomers: ‘Hillesden isn’t dying. It’s coming up’ (177). While shop closures resulting from the recession erase the culture of the lower classes, the opening of new businesses addresses the middle-class occupiers’ need for luxury. The Sushi Bar, the off-licence that sells, ‘not beer and white wine’ but a wide selection of expensive red wine and champagne, ‘brand new cars, parked carelessly’, ‘For Sale’ signs, young people with crew cuts and dark glasses, ‘carrying computers in little flask cases’ (176–7), all point to the fact that the White family is being displaced by ‘an expansionist neo-liberalism in public policy’ (Atkinson and Bridge, 2). But more importantly, Gee connects this process of displacement with the complex features of gentrification comprising ‘the characteristics of a colonial elite’ (Atkinson  and Bridge, 3). Although the novel does not have gentrification as one of its central issues, Gee’s depiction of it does tell a lot about her view of the black members of British society. Research about gentrification shows that as a form of new urban colonialism, it almost mimics the process of colonization (Clark, 266). In that sense, revealing the spatial chaos and disorder within the city, The White Family not only portrays England in decline but also makes its White family, in a kind of poetic justice, suffer a process similar to that experienced by black people, whose migration

Of the Two Nations

133

was induced by displacement of colonial times, and who do not feel welcome in the ‘host’ culture. Gee’s mentioning of ‘three Indian restaurants’ and ‘two shops advertising “Cheap International Phone Calls” ’ stands in the novel’s critical realm as a tongue-incheek joke that problematizes both Englishness and displacement. Interestingly, May’s description of the good old days in Hillesden Rise as ‘El Dorado’ is identical to what Wendell Berry suggests, in his 1977 book The Unsettling of America, which exposes the nature of dispossession on a global scale: Generation after generation, those who intended to remain and prosper where they were have been disposed and driven out [. . .] by those who were carrying out some version of the search for El Dorado. Time after time, in place after place, these conquerors have fragmented and demolished traditional communities, the beginning of domestic cultures. (Berry in Clark, 266)

In the microcosmic world of The White Family, dispossession and recession also extend to the cultural life of the British. Gee informs the text with many examples to illustrate the commercialization of culture and education, portrayed through the experiences of both Melissa, a schoolteacher, and Thomas, a librarian. Melissa’s students, who are mostly black, are described as impoverished, and the school she works at does not receive satisfactory financial support from the government. One of her students, who likens the classroom to a ‘jail’, sums up the inadequate conditions at school: ‘Most of the teachers do their best. But everyone hates us. The government, the papers’ (380). Interestingly, what the novel portrays corresponds to the real figures for literacy in contemporary Britain. For instance, in his news report, ‘The number of children with no books rises’, Richard Garner reports the statistics of The National Literacy Trust (5 December 2011), which shows that ‘One in three children does not have a single book of their own at home’. The NLT report also informs us that ‘the figure has trebled in seven years’ and one in six adults leave school at 16 unable to read fluently. Gee’s novel regards ignorance as a social problem largely induced by the ever-increasing cuts in public services. An observation by Thomas also reflects how the commercialization of culture has changed the perception of books and book-reading in libraries: ‘In Thomas’ lifetime the official term had changed from “readers”, to “borrowers”, to “users”, and now to “customers”, which somehow meant less. Not that it mattered. They were “punters” to the staff.’ (96). In this customer-service mentality, even a librarian who enjoys reading is considered bizarre; the narrator informs us that ‘in new library parlance’, Thomas is a ‘book-man’, a ‘dinosaur’ (97). The books that the library has to clear away regularly also imply the severance of contemporary British culture from its prosperous past. Thomas, who pities the books ‘banished’ to ‘Purgatory- the “Reserve Stacks” ’, asks himself if he too is one of those ‘barbarians’. Interestingly, the titles that are sent to the stacks, ‘Ethics in Post-War British Business’ and ‘Into the Future with Hope: The Welfare State in Post-War Britain’ give clues about contemporary Britain, since through them we understand what is obsolete and incongruous with the current reality (103). Gee makes another light-hearted irony as she portrays Thomas brooding over another displaced title, ‘History of the Empire. Part One Expansion’ (103), while his black colleague Suneeta takes it frivolously and offers a whimsical consolation: ‘Death is part of life, my darling’ (103). Meanwhile, it is significant to note here that

134

Maggie Gee

such meticulously placed humour, as well as skilfully sketched in characters, makes the novel much more than just a dry and schematic account of racism in Britain. The narrative voices in the novel mostly belong to the white characters, as the title of the novel indicates, but through a few examples like Suneeta, Gee represents the black perspective too. Another example of a black character, Elroy, has a tendency to put all white people into one category. In a confrontation similar to that between Thomas and Suneeta, Shirley resents Elroy saying ‘You people think you own the language’. Upset, Shirley reminds him that not all white people are the same: ‘Elroy, I’m not white people, I’m me’ (167). Gee employs the library scenes also to suggest how important libraries are in making social life in Britain a shared experience. Through May’s narrative voice, the novel presents books as shared places, ‘meant for everyone’ (26), and reinforces the idea that books should offer space to all their readers regardless of sex, age or colour, just as The White Family itself manages to do. Today, Maggie Gee is one of the prominent figures struggling to defend local libraries against the government’s cuts, so how she represents the library in fiction and what she says as a writer in public establish a congruence, clearly demonstrating Gee’s awareness of social problems and her determination to find solutions. Explaining the rationale of the campaign she started to save local libraries from the cuts which may cause her local Kensal Rise library to close (among 375 libraries under threat as Phil Lavelle reports on BBC), Gee declared: ‘[A library] is much more than a place to borrow books; it means a free education, a free university, a space where the old and young can get together ’ (in Lavelle). Her voice reverberates in Thomas’ remark that only a few of the people at the library are there primarily to read; he says: ‘Libraries were always full of nutters’ (36). Thomas’ understanding, ‘Parks, libraries . . . where else could they go?’ (36), resonates with Gee’s real life television appearance about the cuts. In her defence of libraries as shared places, she articulated the opinion that it is the responsibility of governments to support their people rather than imposing cuts obliterating the welfare state: ‘You can’t have a big family if you don’t look after your small community societies, and these free spaces. Not everyone can afford latte land’. Read against this background, the White family’s racism is clearly depicted both as a sign and as a result of an overall failure in society. Of course, it is also presented as a destructive reaction to the changes caused by recession, displacement and migration. In other words, Gee exposes racism in terms of a lost sense of superiority, which cultivates an urge for revenge. Alfred misses the good old days when ‘authority’ was regarded as useful and necessary, and feels that, today, England feebly yields to everything ‘For fear of upsetting the coloured people’ (221). But the narrative shows that Alfred understands the cost of hatred only at the very last moment, when his son Dirk commits a racist murder in the very park he keeps. Destroying Alfred’s sense of pride, voiced in the statement: ‘There has never been a major crime in that Park.’ (239), Dirk kills Winston, the young brother of his sister Shirley’s boyfriend Elroy. Skilfully enfolding a family tragedy within this murder in a shared public place, Gee makes Dirk’s killing of Winston more than a plot device. It not only brings black and white characters together; it also suggests the theme of interconnectedness between the private and public realms. Alfred, for whom ‘the Park matters more than us’ (15),

Of the Two Nations

135

understands too late that without caring for each and every single person we know, the park does not mean anything. Otherwise, the park ceases to be a ‘safe’ place, and hatred dominates our lives. To reinforce the connection between the private and the public realms, the novel shows that as in The Burning Book, domestic violence and racism go hand in hand. As Maya Jaggi rightly puts it in her Guardian review, this is a ‘conditionof-England novel’ investigating the ‘roots of xenophobic hatred and violence in the English hearth’. Gee juxtaposes Alfred’s hitting Shirley with his hostile attitude towards the visitors in the park (146). Accordingly, May describes home in terms of boredom and coldness, similar to the indifference outside (20). As its central thesis, The White Family presents racism as the culmination of hatred, perhaps in antithesis to the key motifs, ‘love’ and ‘connect’, of Gee’s earlier novels. The novel does this by showing different degrees of racism exercised by different members of the White family. For example, to illustrate some white women’s deep-seated fear of black men, Gee shows even peaceful May mechanically adopting racist ideas. To her ‘white’ way of thinking, a black man approaching her must be a sign of danger. Ironically, it is a man who offers her a helping hand when she slips on the greasy pavement and falls, that arouses this fear. Seeing him as a potential abuser with a ‘pantherish face’, she shrinks back, ‘covering the money with her skirt’, and loudly cries ‘Help’, twice (142). Rendering May’s prejudice a source of comedy, Gee exposes more subtle forms of racism. Embarrassed to acknowledge her racist response, May nonsensically blames the light and her poor eyesight for this ‘misunderstanding’ (174). And revealing how her mind sees things as black and white, by way of apology, she ‘foolishly mentions her daughter living with a West Indian’ (160) and wishes to do something for ‘one of his people’ (175). With The White Family, absurd humour becomes an important component of Gee’s satire – a hard thing to achieve, given its subject matter – and the elegiac tone is skilfully tinged with sly comedy, a variation in tone that corresponds to the novel’s theme: dealing with difference. Gee’s skill in employing a wide range of narrative tones helps us zoom in and out of a range of different opinions about racism. To shed light on Dirk’s violent racism, the novel alludes to a journalistic analysis by referring to Ralph Ginzburg’s 100 Years of Lynchings, first published in 1962. Featuring as one of the books in the library that the third-year student Winston reads for his thesis, it is first referred to as ‘One Hundred Years of Lynchings’ (36), but then, underscoring the fact that racism has a longer history and is still a part of our contemporary world, the title becomes ‘One Thousand Years of Lynchings’ (272). Ginzburg’s book gives direct access to the newspaper reports from 1880 to 1961 on various lynching incidents, without any chapter divisions, interpretation or comment because the cases speak for themselves. The only frame that Ginzburg offers is a paragraph in his foreword that starts with the question: ‘What lies at the root of race hatred?’ Seeing unconscious guilt as the main source of hatred, Ginzburg clearly puts the psychology of ‘projection’. The answer he provides to the question can be read as Gee’s explanation of Dirk’s racist and homophobic murder: The person who hates Negroes usually hates other people beside Negroes. He’s almost a professional hater. If he is poor, he hates the rich. If he’s rich, he hates the poor. If he’s a Democrat, he hates the Republicans. If he’s a Protestant or a Jew, he

136

Maggie Gee

hates the Catholics. The reason is that the race-hater is inwardly a man who hates himself. He finds it necessary to shift to others his own unconscious feelings of guilt. Hence he chooses as his victim a member of a minority group who is less able to defend himself than the average person. (5)

Dirk hates black people, Jews, homosexuals, women, his family and, of course, himself. Feeling like ‘a dirty little dosser’, he muses over his name and repeats: ‘(Dirt White that’s who you are Dirt White.)’ (258–9). He also hates his parents, ‘old people’; he hates George, his boss, who he has known since he was a toddler and even considers killing him by not giving him the inhaler when he is having an attack (192). Dirk’s hatred also targets the educated; through this hatred, as in Dying, in Other Words, The Burning Book and Light Years, the novel also highlights the ever-widening gap between the educated and ignorant in contemporary Britain. Dirk insults Thomas, the ‘Guardian-reader!’ and calls him ‘Gobbler! Pansy!’ (125), a ‘wanker’ (107), ‘Wanker-in Chief, King of the Writers’ (125). And if he is proud of his journalist brother Darren, it is not because he reads a single word of what he writes, but because he is smart, famous and ‘cool’ (107). Dirk’s hatred knows no bounds but its main target is black people. So Dirk becomes a typical neo-Nazi, patrolling the streets with ‘his queer new friends. With their leather jackets, and crew-cuts and chains’ (331). Observing how like a ‘GI’, a ‘skinhead’, a ‘Nazi’ Dirk has become (70), Shirley complains: ‘I used to love him. I adored that boy. What’s he turned into? A thug. A- fascist. Worse than Dad, without Dad’s excuses’ (84). Like his father, Dirk misses the Hillesden of the past; the time ‘which was before coloured people came’ (108). Describing the presence of the black as a ‘take over’ (108), he feels that Hillesden has been invaded: Look around this bus and you can see it. Ninety percent coloureds. Well, fifty, at least. And the driver’s coloured, so they are on his side. And he has the fucking cheek to talk about English. As if they owned it. Our speech. Our language. (29)

His hatred culminates when a black man even ‘invades’ his personal space; he cannot accept the fact that Shirley loves a black man and starts verbally abusing his sister. Just like Angela’s racist brother Guy in Gee’s The Burning Book, Dirk calls her a ‘niggerlover’ (298). As in The Burning Book and Grace, misogyny and violence go hand in hand. Dirk, like Bruno in Grace and Guy in The Burning Book, claims that white is superior to black just as male is to female, and that only ‘thick’ people like Shirley fail to see that (108). The clear analogy between these novels written two decades apart shows that Gee’s concern about violence and racism stems neither from the new multicultural discourse of millennial Britain nor from a desire to address contemporary market interest. In a similar narrative perspective to that of The Burning Book and Grace, the text shows fascists from Thomas’s educated viewpoint; so Dirk’s fellow race haters are drawn as a ‘pack in full cry baying for blood’, ‘vandals who tore up the rules’, ‘a mob of white skinheads in leather and chains, jostling, giggling, surging onward’, ‘barking for someone’ and ‘roaring like murderers’ (103). Dirk’s ethnocentrism includes Italians and Jews on his black list, and finds its expression in homophobia too; he thinks that

Of the Two Nations

137

‘all Paki men are poofs’ (111). Though not as ‘soft and weak’ as Pakistani ‘swots, pansies’, other black people are demonized: ‘Very, very violent people, blacks’ (186). Like his father, he thinks that England is polluted by blackness, and he, Dirk, is responsible for holding the fort. Groping for the phrase used in the racist Spearhead magazine, he feels that it is now his turn to ‘hold the pass’ and ‘dam the flood’: ‘The older generation is on its way out. Up to us lot now to keep the torch burning’ (188). Thinking that black people are responsible for recession, decay and unemployment, he defensively states, ‘we are losing our birthright’, and so repeats the racist dictum: ‘Kill them. Kill them all’ (190). Through revealing black people as a central focus of white hatred, the novel implies that the optimistic discourse of multiculturalism as a celebration of differences does not mirror the real antagonistic practices in society. The culmination of this argument is revealed through Gee’s representation of Dirk’s racist murder in the park as another item in the history of ‘lynchings’. Recalling Ginzburg’s book, the text reports the murder as two news items; this way, the novel gains a foundation in realism and through such intertextual devices, text meets context. Evidently, Gee’s craft to connect her text with the context strengthens the novel’s claim to give a meaningful panorama of contemporary British society. Further reinforcing this connection between text and context is Gee’s skilful juxtaposition of her ars poetica with the thematic network of the novel. As almost all her novels do, The White Family expands on the role of literature and writers to suggest that books are meant to improve life by offering a critique, alternatives and hope. The novel manages this through another author figure, Thomas, the librarian who is represented in the process of writing his book ‘Postmodernism and the Death of Meaning’. Stimulated by an urge to leave something ‘behind on this planet’ (33), he is not sure if this non-fiction book he has been writing for 5 years will make it. His feeling of uncertainty increases as he questions if meaning is really dead. Investigating the function of literature in these postmodern times, he is portrayed as a figure who does not feel confident enough to formulate his refutation of the death of meaning. In need of literary precursors to measure himself against, he gladly remembers what one of his favourite writers, Baldwin, argues about books: ‘Books taught me that the things that tormented me the most were the very things that connected me to everyone else who was alive and who had ever been alive’ (272). Reflecting on this statement, he feels assertive enough to acknowledge the rock-solid existence of meaning. And he associates ‘his own numbness’, which prevents him from finishing the book, with his blind obedience to postmodernism’s claim about the loss of meaning and its assumption that texts, as signs, exist by themselves, detached from any external reality. Feeling motivated by Baldwin’s perception of books, Thomas seems to indicate a call back to the idea of relatedness between text and context, which validates the existence of meaning (33). Intrigued by the question of meaning, Thomas also reads from the Russian critic Mikhail Epstein and finds it almost impossible to refute his argument. Put simply, he is presented as a writer struggling to beat the idea that there is no meaning outside the text. Gee portrays Thomas asking himself how he could contest ‘Fred Burnett’s point in his review of Kevin J. Vanhoozer’ (196). Apparently, having read Vanhoozer’s book Is There a Meaning in This Text?, a biblical hermeneutics which argues that

138

Maggie Gee

there is a meaning in the text and that it is the readers’ task to find it by using their interpretative skills, Thomas asks if this argument can be applied to literature as well. As he is not sure about the loss of meaning altogether, he feels trapped (196). Oscillating between two poles, he grows more uncertain; Gee’s third-person narrator gives a humorous picture of Thomas as a self-doubting author: ‘Was he growing more stupid? Less modern, perhaps? Less post-post modern? Thomas’s mind began to drift’ (31). Thomas’ name may come from ‘Doubting Thomas’ in the Bible, who cannot believe through faith, but needs physical proof. Although Thomas cannot do it explicitly yet, he feels that Epstein might be suggesting what he believes at heart: ‘Post-postmodernism witnesses the rebirth of utopia after its own death .  .  .’ (31). But in the later stages of his thinking, his disbelief in the loss of meaning becomes so frail that even seeing a page from his study on postmodernism fills him with ‘a jolt of horror’ (378). Therefore, when Melissa reads from the manuscript and asks ‘Who wrote this stuff?’, ‘Hyper-irony, and the meaning of life . . . Simpsonian hyperironism is not a mask for an underlying moral commitment. ’, he promptly denies its authorship (378). As the novel ends on a note of hope and understanding with a reconciliation of black and white people, Thomas the author turns his face to the birth of meaning and decides to do something ‘meaningful’ rather than spend more time on a futile argument. Accordingly, he sets out to compile children’s stories about racism in a book with Melissa. Portraying Thomas as a writer whose block stems from his insecurity about the loss of meaning, Gee implies, as a British novelist with a challenging relationship to postmodernism, that a text’s power to influence external reality outside itself is generated by its meaning, which is by no means lost. To this purpose, Gee also employs May, a lover of literature, whose readings of Tennyson prove to offer hope and meaning in the midst of despair. When she tries to believe ‘Alfred will get better, and we’ll all love each other’, she feels that Tennyson is ‘ready’ to help; so she remembers the lines from Tennyson’s equally hopeless persona Maud, and like her, she prays: ‘Let  all be well, be well’ (71). Supporting the idea that art functions as a means of empathy and understanding, Gee characterizes May as a more understanding figure than Alfred, with a much greater capacity for empathy. And despite Alfred’s anger, May feels empowered enough to remind him that he is prejudiced about black people, and speaks her mind: ‘I liked Kojo. And I like Elroy. And Kojo was very good to you. You forget how many times you got your tea round at their house’ (82). Feeling proud of herself for having read James Baldwin and Martin Luther King, she says she does not care ‘what colour people are’ (41). Obviously, the novel proposes that by generating meaning and employing narrative strategies, authors have power not only to assert messages but also inculcate values and attitudes, something central to Gee’s ars poetica. As if to call writers to an act of generating meaning that can prevent prejudices and cultivate an ethical stance, Gee emphasizes the power of writers in the scene in which Melissa invites Thomas to give a mini-lecture to children in her class about writing. Planning the talk, he spots the picture of Thoth, god of writers, in the book ‘The History of Egypt’. Thoth’s physical strength empowers Thomas to refute the assumptions of postmodernism about the loss of meaning and he readily decides that: ‘I’ll tell them, writers are time-travellers. Sending messages from six thousand years’

Of the Two Nations

139

(378). He does so, and applauding a young Asian girl who recognizes Thoth, he also realizes another important function of writers in history: ‘And he was a peace-maker, did you know? After Seth killed his brother Osiris, Thoth made peace between Seth and Osiris’ son’. In the context of the novel, this myth reads not only like a story that sheds light on the function of authors, but also like an intertextual device that reminds us of Dirk’s killing Elroy’s brother Winston. Metaphorically, in the fictional space of the novel, Thoth, god of writers, revives the ‘dead’ author of Roland Barthes, and helps Thomas justify his argument that meaning is alive, which validates the function of the novel he features in. In that sense, The White Family, by employing the postmodern technique of intertextuality, proposes that writers can offer peace to societies divided by differences and suggests alternative meanings to those who only destroy brotherhood and solidarity. Despite all the bad things that happen in it, The White Family offers hope; it does so by employing the motif of interconnectedness. The good news that Shirley has twin babies: one from Elroy, one from Thomas, one black and one white, suggests a new beginning; and the funeral scene with two deaths, one from the White family and one from the black family, also functions as a device that points to Gee’s ideas of justice and a new order. The ending offers a note of irony too when the funeral brings the black and white families together. Alfred White now lies side by side with Winston, who has been killed by his own son. While the narrative maintains a unifying vision of mourners brooding over their dead, the mixed crowd recites their wish to live in the ‘Heavenly City’ and prays: ‘Bring us all to the golden city’ (359). Employing Shirley’s perspective, the novel portrays this scene of people praying, but does not seek to suggest that the solution lies in religion. It is more that in the context of the novel’s emphasis on shared places and its concern for envisaging a life of hope and peace purged of prejudice and hatred, the church acts as a symbol of possible equality. Through Shirley’s epiphany, I think Gee proposes an intentionally ambiguous message: ‘But heaven could never be lots of separate houses.’ (357), which can be read as meaning: ‘Even the church, divisive as it can be, does not support racism!’. The ending can be taken as a call to English intellectuals and writers to do more to prevent racism. This idea also resonates in Gee’s overt statements about The White Family. Responding to Jenni Murray in her BBC Radio interview, saying that the book is a ‘warning rather than a prediction’, she underscores another significant function of this novel. Like her dystopic novels The Ice People and The Flood, The White Family interacts with the discourse of multiculturalism in contemporary Britain to give a ‘timely’ warning about problems that threaten peace. I would argue, therefore, that through a close scrutiny of the encounters of different subjects from different worlds, Gee manages to fill a gap in British fiction. She represents the intersecting spaces in all their impossibility and difficulty, in a literary climate that readily canonizes the examples written by black British novelists like Zadie Smith, Arundhati Roy, Monica Ali, Andrea Levy, Bernardine Evaristo and Hanif Kureishi, but seems to have almost systematically ignored a white writer writing about white racism. Her next titles, My Cleaner and My Driver, offer clues about what it means to be a (white) English writer in a transnational culture and depict the condition of Britain from that perspective.

8

Authorship in a Globalized World: My Cleaner (2005) and My Driver (2009)

Authors, scholars and intellectuals trying to contextualize themselves in the contemporary literary environment are always present in Gee’s works, and she often represents them as perceived by other characters who are sometimes authors, scholars or intellectuals themselves. For instance, Gee’s first novel Dying, in Other Words features Moira, as a version of Maggie Gee, who became an academic, never married and (when she reappears in The Flood) went mad. Among a wide range of author figures in Gee’s fiction is Alexandra of Where Are the Snows, who makes a fortune on a shopping’n’fucking novel as a very young woman and then wastes her life spending the money. Then there is the best-selling author Angela Lamb in The Flood, who first appeared in The Burning Book as an awkward teenager. As Angela manages to become both a critically acclaimed novelist and a mother, she is set up in opposition to Moira, a blocked writer and a scholar in the same novel. Grace has a sulky journalist, Paula Timms, while The White Family portrays a spoiled US-based British journalist, Darren White, a parody of the real-life Christopher Hitchens. Of course, it also has Thomas, the blocked former academic who, as an author, asks if meaning is dead. ‘Into the Blue’, the last story in her collected short stories The Blue, is also about authorship in a wider way – about how the few get all the fame, and how some very good artists are forgotten for accidental reasons. And Gee’s short story ‘The Artist’ is about a confrontation between a nameless but major Bosnian artist and Mary, a pretentious English would-be novelist, who has not even written a full manuscript let alone published one. Trying to make ends meet in an unfriendly urban metropolis, London, the Bosnian artist’s practice is crudely reduced to renovating middle-class interiors. He meets Mary, the so-called writer, as her workman when she wants her kitchen refurbished. As Boris becomes an emblem of the ignored and rejected artist, the story both problematizes the position of dislocated artists who live beyond their national context and questions what it is that makes the artist a respectable figure. In their close dealings with writer characters, My Cleaner and My Driver come full circle to Gee’s debut novel Dying, in Other Words. But by juxtaposing two writers from two different national contexts, they can also be regarded as works developing the frame of ‘The Artist’. Although these novels are both about the intense antagonism between different subjects and about the state of Britain in transnational times, they go far beyond a simple portrayal of opposing conditions through their use of, in Gee’s words,

Authorship in a Globalized World

141

the ‘chemistry between’1 their writer characters, Vanessa and Mary. As such, they are perfect examples of migrant literature characterized by a shift, or shifts, in identity as its essential feature. In defining migrant literature in her article ‘From Literature of Exile to Migrant Literature’, Carin Mardorossian contends that by focusing on the ‘mixing of cultures, races and language’, migrant literature exposes identities as constructed and explores the process of change in established norms: Because of her displacement, the migrant’s identity undergoes radical shifts that alter her self-perception and often result in ambivalence towards both her old and new existence [. . .] Her identity is no longer to do with being but becoming. (16)

While giving a portrayal of the transnational state of Britain from the perspective of author figures, the two books also discuss the changing perception of authorship through the alteration in the way their writer subjects perceive themselves. Thus, in these novels, Gee revisions the role and identity of authors in a transnational context and delineates how this context has changed the idea of ‘authorship’. Interestingly, they not only offer a truthful representation of authorship in the transnational context, but they are also themselves the products of a transnational process. In other words, both in terms of their production and their thematic networks, Gee’s novels offer, as Mardorossian would claim, ‘a transnational, cosmopolitan, multilingual and hybrid map of the world that redraws boundaries by building bridges between Third and First Worlds’ (17). In  2003, the Cheltenham Literature Festival sent Maggie Gee and Tobias Hill to Uganda and Mexico within the framework of a cross-transcontinental writers’ exchange programme. As part of this exchange programme, four authors, Mexican, Ugandan and English, experienced contact with a different culture. In Uganda, Maggie Gee wrote a short story called ‘The Money’, the first two words of which were ‘My Driver’, and that, 6 years later, became the title of her latest novel.2 My Cleaner and My Driver portray two writer figures within a transnational context, a ‘world-spanning intensification of interconnectedness’ (Vertovec, 54). While My Cleaner represents many migrants residing in Britain, My Driver depicts the Kampala Sheraton Hotel hosting ‘The International Authors Conference’ and many European tourists on safari. Both books unfold through a writer figure bringing her cultural baggage into contact with a new area. My Cleaner starts with a letter that Ugandan Mary Tendo receives from English Vanessa Henman, which eventually brings her to London. And in it, the text delineates two female characters, Vanessa, a British professor of creative writing, and Mary who first came to London to acquire an MA in English literature. As a subject coming from a different culture, Mary is portrayed as Vanessa’s ‘other’. Showing her waiting among ‘Others’, the novel starts with images of the border crossing at Heathrow, which syntegmatically foreground the reader into an arena that underscores Mary’s otherness; ‘nervous about Immigration, she checks her passport once again’ (53), ‘she looks at the long slow queue of non-EU nationals’ (56). ‘Clutching her laptop tightly’, her ‘thing of beauty’, her ‘new baby’, her birthday present (53), Mary features as an aspiring writer who imagines herself collecting her emotions and experiences in her autobiography in a spontaneous manner. Now that she has the time and the laptop, she feels that she can finally write, and says: ‘I can write down the stories unravelling in my

142

Maggie Gee

head like pieces of ribbon. I will write about my youth, like Hemingway’ (31). Having made ‘the great journey between worlds’ (22) and attended Makerere University, ‘the best university in Africa’ (33), Mary is the self-content, confident African woman, a linen storekeeper at the Sheraton who enjoys writing. Through Mary’s romantic idea of authorship, Gee establishes the oppositional tone; as Mary steps into Vanessa’s land, she suggests the Romantic theory of authorship that designates the author as ‘autonomous, original and expressive’ (Bennett, 56). With its stress on individuality and uniqueness, Mary seems to speak for ‘the conscious intention of the autonomous subject’ (Bennett, 57). Despite the fact that her MA means little either in Uganda or in England, Mary has a very positive self-image; she defines herself as a ‘woman of the world’ (16). As opposed to Creative Writing Professor Vanessa Henman who hates being called a ‘teacher’, she is proud of being trained as a teacher too. Underscoring the way that the transnational context shows culturally constructed concepts of authorship operating within and between diverse settings, Gee’s My Cleaner represents Vanessa as a product of British supermarket culture. As the one-eyed writer in the land of the divorcee, of single parents, fat children, lost children, depression, yoga classes, de-tox, diets, ex-husbands, self-help books and friendships maintained on the phone, Vanessa is far from the romantic idea of an author. As Gee herself states, Vanessa is the ‘parody author’, whose public image is constructed by the politics of the literary market. She is the affiliated writer, teaching how to write publishable novels while her latest product is only a co-written book titled ‘The Long Lean Line: Pilates for Everyone’ (26). The one and only book she is mentioned reading is ‘Salads for Life: How to Make a Mixed Salad’ (29). Moreover, it is ironic that this creative writing professor spends most of her time assessing other people’s writing while Mary, the ex-cleaning lady and au pair, is smoothly weaving her text, unseen and unnoticed upstairs. In other words, Vanessa is presented as a writer so detached from the pleasure of writing that she even considers her writing courses as ‘an utter waste of time’. Trying to earn her living through writing, she seems to have lost the joy of it and to wish she were ‘teaching something real, nursing, astrophysics, not Creative Writing’ (269). The novel’s portrayal of Vanessa as a writer in distress seems to suggest a critique of the contemporary literary market and imply that by becoming a writer by profession, one runs the risk of using up one’s originality and creativity. Squeezed between the responsibilities of teaching and editing, Vanessa is almost reduced to an automaton for whom writing has long lost its therapeutic function. For this professional writer, writing mostly means a paid activity performed on academic premises, the product of which is submitted to a higher order embodied in the person of the editor. Far from the romantic image of the autonomous writer, Vanessa, in her huge yet suffocating study, feels like a prisoner. Unlike Mary, she defines authorship, not as the act of writing itself, but in terms of its external results, such as the number of publications, reviews and revenues. In doing so, she seems to be conforming to the conventional standards of success in her professional context; Gee’s third-person narrator shows Vanessa in a constant struggle to keep up as a writer: She published two novels in the 1980s, which were “very well-reviewed”, as she always points out. On the strength of them, she got the job she still holds, as Lecturer in Creative Writing at one of the new universities. She started that department,

Authorship in a Globalized World

143

designed the course, which over the years has grown increasingly popular. But the students always ask her what she’s written recently. They only half-smile, and look slightly disappointed, when she tells them about her Pilates books. (27)

Although in her students’ eyes, these books are of no value, ironically, in the cultural climate of her times, it is these non-fiction titles that pay. Assuring them that the books have made her a lot of money, she even gives these potential novelists some tips about the market and guides them: ‘Remember there is money to be made from non-fiction’ (27). By way of representing how money-oriented Vanessa, the contemporary novelist, has become, Gee’s narrator focuses on her calculating mind; Vanessa considers the money she offers to Mary and admits that when compared to what she is paid for one session of her writing course, it is too little: ‘After all, when she does a freelance lecture or workshop, she never charges less than two hundred pounds a shot’ (161). Overall, Vanessa, nevertheless, somehow manages to see herself as another ‘marginal’, ‘penniless writer’, in a ‘commercial struggle’, striving to overcome her writer’s block, ‘stuck on a novel for over a decade’ (84–5). Reinforcing her representation of authors in contemporary British culture, Gee employs Vanessa as a part of her own writing self in My Driver. In her autobiography My Animal Life, Gee says The White Family, which ‘gives the portrait of Britain out to the British’, ‘had fallen foul of the market’ (195). She wrote as a white writer about black people, and through black characters, and waited for years to find an English publisher to accept the manuscript in its original form. But soon after its publication, the novel received critical acclaim and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the 2004 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Considered in the light of Gee’s own successful experience of publishing The White Family (2002), it can be argued that My Driver’s depiction of Vanessa as a striving author is a self-conscious joke. My Driver fictionalizes Maggie Gee as Vanessa, who just fools herself that she is successful and finally receives the critical acclaim she has awaited for years. Making a parody of its author Maggie Gee, the novel describes Vanessa’s adventures in the literary market and playfully explains that although there are ‘wonderful reviews’ of her book, ‘The sales, of course, were not all that great, because the publisher was inefficient’ (55). Amusingly, this book titled ‘My Pale Ark’, a play on Gee’s own novels The Flood and My Cleaner, is reviewed by the ‘Independent on Sunday’ as ‘[a] courageous attempt at poetic prose’ – or at least, this is Vanessa’s very partial memory of it, the elliptical version from the book jacket. The full text of the review is by no means adulatory, however. It reads: ‘Though the author of this ambitious second novel has no insight into her own characters, she makes a brave stab at literary innovation. Her efforts to escape her own limitations are, surely, to be encouraged’ (56). Showing how Vanessa’s best friend Fifi nevertheless telephones Vanessa excitedly when she sees it, the novel’s parody extends to the contemporary readership as well. In tears, Fifi tells Vanessa how proud she is of seeing her friend’s novel reviewed in a daily newspaper. Although this only suggests how weak her comprehension skills are, ironically, Vanessa ignores it, and despite her knowledge that Fifi’s reading practice is limited to books on Pilates and cooking, she chooses to trust Fifi rather than the stern reviewer, thus remaining a figure of fun as an author.

144

Maggie Gee

While Vanessa’s disregard of the review is presented as self-deception, the prominence of editors and reviewers is also denounced. Vanessa’s publisher, in My Cleaner, sounds like an empty trendsetter revealing what will be in fashion. He shares some market secrets with Vanessa and says: ‘the multicultural bubble may have burst’, ‘The feeling is that “poor white rural”, sort of post-Cold Mountain with a nod to Deliverance, is going to be very big next year’ (304). Similarly, My Driver represents big publishers as more interested in sales figures than what they are really about. For instance, on finding the frankness of Mary’s autobiography promising, the publisher thinks some more explicit sensuality could secure publication. Like the big publisher in The Flood who thinks the best way to sell a book about breast cancer is to show a breast on its cover, this ‘big British publisher’ wants Mary to write ‘more about the times when she shared a bed with Justin’ (303). Also, with a view to increased book sales, the publisher asks Vanessa if Mary is photogenic (303). In fact, trying to persuade Mary to ‘improve’ her text and make it marketable, he reveals a commercialized world of publishing, visible, to quote Moran, in ‘the increasing prominence of the mediagenic, high-profile author in to Mary the UK’ (11). So, he speaks in an overconfident, bossy manner: ‘It’s normal, everyone does it, in the modern world, there’s no distinction between fact and fiction. Modern readers are sophisticated, Mary. And if you beef it up, you will have big sales’ (31). Mary remembers this incident with pride in My Driver to remind the reader that she did not agree to ‘improve’ it and she is happy being back in Kampala working as a linen storekeeper, ‘only just below the House Keeper’, rather than having lowered herself to please a publisher (13). Both My Cleaner and My Driver show writers operating in a commercial system. As such, writers are not only victims alienated from each other, they are also fierce rivals in the market. While the academic conference scene in My Driver shows the lack of solidarity among writers in general, Gee earlier employed a plot device in My Cleaner that gives an ironic depiction of intellectual rivalry between her two central writer figures. Both Vanessa and Mary, secretly, insert their sample pieces of writing into the portfolio of Vanessa’s creative writing class. Soon the publisher responds to Vanessa, and while Mary’s manuscript receives acclaim, the letter mentions Emily Self (Vanessa’s pseudonym) as lacking ‘the panache and style of Mary Tendo’ (304). The publishing world that Gee describes in these novels reminds one of the ‘horserace mentality’ Doris Lessing criticizes in her famous ‘Preface to The Golden Notebook’. Calling this world a ‘literary machine’, Lessing wittily illustrates the competitive terms in which  critics  perceive writers: ‘Writer X is, is not, a few paces ahead of Writer Y. Writer Y has fallen behind. In his last book Writer Z has shown himself as better than Writer A’ (38). As Lessing suggests, this ‘weeding-out system’ naturally breeds hostility since it is intended ‘to produce a few winners who are always in competition with each other’ (38). Like publishers, the conference delegates in My Driver, international writers, are depicted as mutually hostile people who have genuine interest, not in each other’s writing, but merely in sales. More explicitly than she does in My Cleaner, Gee here represents the fact that in this jungle, the success of writers is determined by sales figures. Vanessa’s musings at ‘The International Writers Conference’ reflect the way these criteria of success are internalized by the writers themselves as she judges fellow

Authorship in a Globalized World

145

writers as selling ‘more’ or ‘a few more’. Thus, she anxiously measures them as ‘gifted’, ‘well-known’, ‘famous’ or ‘second-rate’ (83). The rule of this literary space, the survival of the fittest, is as simple as that of a jungle; naturally, those who sell more have ‘patronising’ tendencies. Consequently, this jungle has its paragons too: the market runs on the star system. As Moran mentions in his study Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America, publishers, the media and authors themselves produce and propagate the ‘celebrity’, ‘a perniciously artificial figure’ (2). Vanessa’s description of the keynote speaker in this management-driven event organized by the British Council, brings to mind the witty definition that Moran quotes from Daniel Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America: a literary celebrity is just ‘well-known for his well-knownness’ (11). Accordingly, although Vanessa knows nothing about the keynote speaker, Veronique Tadjo, she feels honoured to be introduced to this ‘[w]onderful writer’, even as ‘Valerie Henman’. When Tadjo enters the room, all the other writers stop and turn to greet ‘A star’ (83). My Cleaner explores the anxiety of authorship on a smaller scale, juxtaposing Vanessa and Mary, and exposing Vanessa’s sense of superiority, originating mainly from her Englishness. But My Driver depicts this anxiety as intensified when Vanessa confronts other international writers in a big literary meeting. Drawing on the overall parodic nature of the novel, it can be thought that this time Gee leaves her Vanessa alone in the jungle and makes her survive the challenge. The first response she gives is fear; she feels nervous about her image as a British writer (69). That nobody knows her name adds to her sense of anxiety (81). And when a writer, Geoffrey Truman, replies to her greeting in an unimpressed tone and says, ‘Never ‘eard of you.’, Vanessa bitterly ponders how much she tried to be a writer and how unrewarding the market is (100). Out of resentment, she stubbornly repeats that she will ‘make it as a writer’; ‘she will; she must’ (100). Another contribution to Gee’s life-like portrayal of the contemporary literary climate is a playful fictionalization of another real writer, British-Nigerian novelist Bernardine Evaristo (one of Gee’s real-life friends) who Vanessa feels happy to spot among a crowd of intimidating people. However, this fictional version of Bernadine Evaristo does not remember Vanessa’s name, and even after hearing it, introduces her as ‘Valerie Henman’ (83). Despite all the indifference she suffers, Vanessa still feels delighted to be part of an international writers’ event, which means she is ‘Accepted!’ (84). The conference scene can also be read as a representation of the academy functioning under a rigid hierarchy similar to the star system in the world of publishing. Since academic excellence is often measured only by one’s title and publications, it also resembles a jungle. Thus, her affiliation to the university becomes another source of anxiety for Vanessa. Finally a ‘Senior lecturer’ after long years of being a ‘Lecturer’, Vanessa resents the fact that ‘They haven’t made her a Reader, or Professor’ (86). As in Light Years and The Flood, Gee’s portrayal of academics as boring and uncreative makes the novel’s critique of the academy tougher. To illustrate, the narrator ridicules the confusingly elegant paper title of a young academic: ‘Positioning the Outsider: A Semiotic Reading of Acts of Exclusion’ (125). Despite its stimulating opening, the paper soon turns the audience into a docile crowd – docile because they are mostly sleeping (126). The absurdity of this typical scholarly meeting, held this time at the

146

Maggie Gee

Sheraton Hotel, is revealed by Mary, who pops in briefly as a Sheraton member of staff and comments on the lifeless conference hall: The room is full, and very stuffy. She stands at the back trying to pick up the thread. But there is no thread: just a series of knots, getting larger and larger, woollier and woollier, tying up the poor speaker in worse and worse nonsense. (126)

Maggie Gee has also contributed to the discussion of authorship in her 2010 memoir My Animal Life, an epitext elaborating on how to survive in the ‘literary jungle’, a chapter title that suggests the ‘prey’ status of writers in the hands of big corporate publishers: her suggestion is partly articulated in the chapter title ‘your animal luck!’. In this memoir, Gee probes what it takes to produce as a writer encircled by marketing strategies and demands, and asks: So what are writers in this jungle? [. . .] In the jungle, writers are opportunists. We are show-offs, trying to display our coats. We need to be the most beautiful and youthful, we need to have novelty [. . .] If you want to know where the best writers are, you can’t tell by reading the literary pages, or going to big bookshops, or looking at prize lists. You must read for yourself, or listen to voices you know and trust: private readers: truth-tellers. (194)

It can be asserted that while her previous novels satirize the political, social and environmental conditions of Britain, My Cleaner and My Driver concentrate on showing the decay in its cultural life. Apparently, the current vision of authorship and readership is so overshadowed by market concerns that not only publishers and readers but also writers themselves fail to hear personal voices. As a result, Vanessa cannot imagine Mary, the ex-cleaning lady, as a writing subject. She easily forgets Mary’s MA degree and sees her as a woman skilled only in cleaning. Accordingly, her ears resist recognizing the all-too-familiar sound of the keyboard coming from Mary’s room, and she automatically thinks ‘this curious, repetitive noise’ must be the result of some strange Ugandan habit (145). Nor can Justin, a young reader who himself considers writing as an option, see Mary as a writer. Exposing the commodification of books and the market rules of the British cultural industry, he also forgets that Mary, an MA in English Literature, is a potential novelist, yet he can view his mother’s feepaying creative writing students as such despite their low profile. In his mind, Mary is the eternal cleaner with whom one can only play games and chat. When she drops his offer to play the ‘Hangman’ game and responds, ‘Perhaps later, Justin. I am writing something’, he foolishly asks, disclosing the limits of both the market and his mind: ‘Is it a shopping list?’ (311). Interestingly, as if restoring the balance between Mary and Vanessa in an ironic way, My Driver depicts Vanessa at the airport wanting to be recognized as a novelist. While Mary has to wait among ‘The Others’ at Heathrow, Vanessa refuses to be one of those ordinary passengers. Introducing herself as a writer who represents the British Council, she asks for an upgrade on her flight. In an attempt to gain it, she uses her writing skills as a bargaining tool and asserts: ‘I will definitely mention British Airways in my article, if you could offer me an upgrade’ (29). Vanessa’s attempt to bargain with the airport

Authorship in a Globalized World

147

staff exposes the writer’s role in contemporary consumer culture, reduced to mere scriptors writing to promote brands and institutions. Her claims to a privileged status on the grounds of authorship are also ridiculed as she is constantly met by indifference. However hard she tries, she cannot receive any extra respect for her supposedly superior status, let alone the upgrade. Later, when her laptop does not fit in the locker, the stewardess insists that it has to travel down in the hold. Vanessa, who is in economy class, almost begs, to no avail: ‘Impossible. My laptop’s in there. I am a novelist. It is essential’ (41). While functioning to expose Vanessa’s false pride, the scene also reveals Gee’s implicit criticism of the ubiquitous lack of interest in literature and the author’s loss of status in the profit-oriented capitalism. Eventually, Vanessa saves her writing tool from going down to the hold but she has to repack her case in front of everyone. Similarly, while Vanessa wastes time striving to be recognized in the conference in My Driver, Mary writes peacefully and autonomously in her room: ‘It makes me smile to watch myself, sitting there writing in my rose-pink room’ (117). But, juxtaposed with Vanessa’s vacant study, practically a storehouse of books, ‘never read’ but regularly dusted (35), Mary’s tiny study-bedroom on the second floor is her symbolic ivory tower. Here, Mary enjoys a spontaneous act of writing as a natural flow of experiences and memories, like ‘unravelling ribbon’, transcribed into a text. Mary’s means of survival has nothing to do with her skills as a writer, so she can and does write for the joy of writing, in her own good time and in a room of her own. It is helpful here to note that the ‘image of ivory tower occasionally appeared in art, with visual depictions of Virgin Mary in the hortus conclusus, in her enclosed garden untouched and protected from the hostile environment’ (‘Hortus conclusus’). So, this study-bedroom suggests a merry writer disconnected from the practical concerns of everyday life. Like the Virgin Mary, Mary Tendo is protected, this time, from the ‘literary jungle’; independent of the critics that would judge her work, she just writes. Ironically, it is Mary, the cleaner, who writes, while Vanessa, the writer, finds herself obsessively cleaning a single object for an hour because she cannot concentrate. Only in a dream scene is Vanessa portrayed as a productive author: she dreams she is writing the book of her lifetime. The book spools from her fingers, witty, brilliant. She has written two thirds of the book before breakfast (187). Waking, she remembers the rush of pleasure that came with the sense that she had written brilliantly (187). In contrast to Vanessa’s block, Mary writes generously, and in her case it is not only therapeutic but also consciousness-raising. She seems to gain further awareness as she reads Vanessa’s lecture notes while dusting her study. Studying these notes in Vanessa’s absence, she recognizes herself as the subject of the scholarly argument in them: ‘There is a pervasive discontent with the traditional convention-driven narratology of novels, and people are turning to life writing to reappropriate their own narratives. This is exactly evident in a post-colonial and postimperial context’ (118). Mary’s prompt response to this is a self-realization that comes a bit too quickly, adding to the comic tone of the novel: I am “post-colonial” and “post-imperial”, and so I have exactly the right context. Though if anyone else said it, I would be annoyed [. . .] I am going to write about my life in England, Uganda and all over the world. “My Autobiography and Life” or perhaps “The Life of Mary Tendo”. (118)

148

Maggie Gee

This tongue-in-cheek joke that Maggie Gee makes about black writers both parodies Vanessa’s postcolonial theory-oriented ‘Autobiography and Life Writing’ course, and the proliferation of such texts and the prizes they win, which Bennett explains with ‘authorcentric fascination’ (111). While Mary simply writes to discharge her emotions, Vanessa’s ‘mad Creative Writing students’ seem to attend the course to produce marketable works: contemporary culture seems to have ‘an endless appetite for literary biographies’ or ‘for newspaper and TV interviews with famous writers’ (Bennett, 108–9). In her depiction of Mary, a black subject composing her autobiography and potentially receiving critical acclaim for it, Gee turns her critical lens to focus on the market interest in, as the publisher’s letter puts it in My Cleaner, the ‘multicultural bubble’, making her satire on the market multilayered. She represents the increasing interest in life writing, perhaps especially by black writers, as a market strategy resulting from sociological changes in Britain. For instance, Vanessa and Fifi’s discussion of a ‘Nigerian author who had been shortlisted for a big prize’ could be a reference to Ben Okri whose The Famished Road won the Booker in 1991. Fifi says, ‘It’s only because she’s black. Come on darling, let’s not pretend!’. Vanessa laughs but does not deny it (283). Overhearing the conversation, Mary thinks ‘if she [ie Mary] won, Miss Henman would be jealous’ (283). In fact, Gee here seems to give a portrayal of the contemporary multicultural landscape of British fiction, and the attitude of white writers to it. This recalls the huge success of Brick Lane by Monica Ali, a British writer of Bangladeshi origin, shortlisted for the Man Booker in  2003. One cannot help but think also of White Teeth by Jamaican-British Zadie Smith, shortlisted for the same prize in 2005, of The Inheritance of Loss by Indian-American Kiran Desai, who was the youngest woman ever to win the Booker Prize in 2006 and Small Island (2004) by Andrea Levy, who won three important awards, the Whitbread Book of the Year, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize. Seen in the light of Gee’s own experience of authorship, Vanessa’s telling silence seems to echo Philip Tew’s critique of White Teeth’s success in 2000 as a literary phenomenon; his idea that most people saw Zadie Smith primarily as a ‘star’ and prioritized her ‘own mixed-race origins and her observations about a very mixed migrant community’, ignoring its ‘self-conscious equivocations, rather foregrounding certain ideological convictions of the critic’ (17). Reinforcing the critical perspectives of these novels, Gee portrays Mary reading Vanessa’s lecture notes, which say: ‘Most modern writers are exiles’ (217). As she reads about the increasing interest in texts written by exiles, Mary recognizes the potential she has as a postcolonial subject, and in an epiphanic burst, she thinks to herself: ‘I am a postcolonial subject’ and feels further motivated to ‘write from her own experience’ (217). Mary’s autobiography is neither about her migrant status nor offers touristic information about Uganda for the English. Instead, it owns a narrative voice that affirms Mary as a strong individual who has come to terms with her past partly through a fictionalization of true incidents; she gives an account of the sexual harassment by her professor in Kampala and says that when the professor hit her, she immediately hit him back. Observing through Mary’s consciousness, the narrator says: Mary is happy when this section is finished. Mary, in fact, has told a lie. It is perfectly true that her professor hit her. It’s true as well that he was sorry. But she

Authorship in a Globalized World

149

was too young and afraid to hit back. So her autobiography has made her stronger. She looks at herself in the dressing-table mirror. I, Mary Tendo, am becoming a writer. (176)

She is becoming a writer for whom literature is still a tool for self-realization and expression. Thus, Mary, whose second coming to Britain seems as redemptive as that traditionally associated with Christ’s, not only heals the depressive Justin but also the blocked writer in herself. They both come alive. In a sense, Mary becomes the mouthpiece of Maggie Gee and is an embodiment of the ideal author suggested in her memoir My Animal Life: Many of my literary models are modernists- Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokovbut for me the modernist aesthetic breaks down when it isolates the writer from the world. Like the modernists I love pattern, and try to give each book an overall controlling form but I also have one eye on reality. I want my books to express the whole of me, politics and jokes as well as love of beauty. (175)

The ‘chemistry between Mary and Vanessa’ becomes more visible here. In contrast to Mary’s original voice, Gee shows Vanessa in My Cleaner as a crippled, blocked writer whose work seems ‘so feeble, untrue and unhelpful’ (201). Sitting for 2 hours staring at her laptop, Vanessa confesses: ‘I don’t feel my writing is connected to me’ (201). But while drafting a new character, Emily, Vanessa slips into the first person and finds she is writing about her past in the village: ‘The things I was writing were all about me. The fear and excitement, the loneliness of leaving (I suppose all these quarrels must have left me feeling lonely)’ (201). So, Vanessa forgets about Emily and starts describing the rural bliss of her own childhood, her real-life English village, the wind, the chickens, her mother calling her in from the garden, sheets snapping on the line: thinking about herself in the country gives her a sense of connection3 and a hortus conclusus to release the tension of the urban jungle. Just like Gee’s description of her own writing practice in My Animal Life, Vanessa starts writing for the joy of writing. A shift in her identity – partly as a result of the encounter with Mary – occurs, and Vanessa is changed. Following on from the liberating note of this epiphany in My Cleaner, Vanessa experiences a similar moment when she changes her presentation for the International Conference in My Driver. She remembers that writers are just another kind of human being, not a privileged caste, and decides to read a passage about her actual life, her chickens and her father, instead of a passage from her unfinished novel: She’d intended to read from her novel in progress, the novel that stalled so long ago, and a passage about the self-conscious writer, the doubts and self-protectiveness that cripple you. And suddenly that seems trivial, irrelevant. Real writers try to make life real for others. (131)

By making these points, I think that Maggie Gee makes a significant contribution to the discussion of authorship in contemporary Britain and draws attention to the pull between being the writer who can market herself and the writer that one wants to be. Her memoir, which I consider to be a contemporary apology for poetry, asks the

150

Maggie Gee

simple question ‘what is writing?’, and by doing so asks, like Foucault, but shifting her focus back to the individual author, ‘What is an author?’: What was writing at bottom, biologically? A human activity, like painting, sculpting, a skill we use to make a reputation in our group. These skills aren’t magic; they come from a connection between senses, dreaming brain, and hand [. . .] Storytellers always had value to the tribe because humans like novelty, and laughter, the pleasure of adventure, of happy endings, of listening to ancestral memories or sometimes experiencing sorrow safely. (191)

Gee’s My Cleaner and My Driver leave the reader with a strong sense of connectedness. Echoing Thomas of The White Family, the writer characters convey Gee’s ars poetica. As Mary and Vanessa redeem each other by sharing their most precious stories, they radiate an atmosphere of love and understanding to the reader too. Gee’s answer to why she writes, which ends her autobiography, once again validates an author who seeks to place agape in her readers’ hands as a key to better conditions, namely to a better life: it reads like a call for a reconnection, a rebirth of the author to meet her reader: Before I go, before you go, I place my story in your hands, the wonder of your living hands: Sing, oh! My love, oh! My love, my love, my love, This have I done for my true love. (Anon) (231)

Notes 1 In the interview with Mariella Frostrup, Gee gives a detailed account of how she developed these two characters. 2 As Koval informs, within this scheme of exchange, poet and novelist Tobias Hill travelled to Mexico and wrote a short story called ‘Once Upon A Time’. After this transnational experience, he also wrote a new book called The Hidden set in modern-day Greece, where a young British academic, Ben Mercer, escapes London and his failed marriage.

Part Three

Author Interview

152

9

Interview with Maggie Gee: Mine Özyurt Kılıç, 17 April 2010, İstanbul

Shortly after the publication of her autobiography My Animal Life, Maggie Gee gave a keynote speech at the 1st International Akşit Göktürk Conference, ‘Visions of the Future: Now and Then’, held by İstanbul University. Her speech, titled ‘Wandering the Future in Search of Our Lost Animal Bodies’, addressed the question of what happens to people when they lose their material, physical context, and explored the way this is reflected in literature. Talking about her ideal vision of the future, Gee described heaven as a ‘utopia of the lived moment’, ‘a day without fear or worry’ and ‘a sunlit day’. This interview took its inspiration from that keynote. Q: Your novels open up a window for readers to see how people survive, how they manage in their corners, how they live on against all odds. As an English writer of the contemporary period, what would you like to see from your window? What is your vision of the future: now and then? A: If it is my window we are talking about, I would like to go on writing (and publishing) till I die, and reading, of course – may my eyes last. I would (honestly) love my writing to be more successful. To meet more readers – I learn from them. And not to worry about money – but that’s universal. To see grandchildren – ditto. And write about their world. I would like my country to accept being a small country, to decouple itself from America and be part of Europe, and to give up our nuclear program. More widely, I would like America to stop pursuing Iran. I would like us to stop threatening the Muslim world into fundamentalism – that is exactly what the West is doing. And I would like Israel to get a total change of regime so that the many intelligent, principled, liberal Jews there would have more power. And for books, I would like the future not to just mean a simplification to a few big names, with fewer and fewer small names, fewer ‘outsiders’, less choice, more commercialism. I hope that is not going to happen. Q: Speaking of books and big names, how would you describe your experience of judging books for prizes? What makes you think that a book is good and deserves to win? Its characters, plot, language or message?

154

Maggie Gee

A: What matters is that we judge the writing, not the reputation – that we do not care about fame or big names, but about the words. Anonymous competitions are the fairest. That said, the trouble with judging a book is that good books are of so many different kinds; it is eggs against oranges. But I agree with Virginia Woolf ’s definition. One of her characters in Between the Acts says art lets us live our unacted parts. The writers I like best make characters who are unlike themselves: through their characters they, and their readers, gain a sense of freedom that real life doesn’t offer. I do feel that there is a failure of emotional truth in a lot of contemporary British fiction. That is, it is clever, it is amusing, it is ironic, it is even well structured. But why should we care, because we don’t really feel those characters. I think writers should sometimes be brave enough to show their hearts. It is easier to be ironic. I give points to books that feel and make me feel. But then I think of how much I admire J M Coetzee. He is a writer of such intelligence and such structural skill, who tells us something we really need to know about political situations. In the feeling aspect I think he is rather lacking, yet he is still a great writer. And again, I think of the time when I was a Booker judge. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day was the book that won, but he was my second choice. I was happy that he won, it’s a good book, but he was only my second choice, equal with Rose Tremain and Margaret Atwood. My first choice was a book by John Banville. I chose it purely because I thought the writing was so beautiful. It was as if he was throwing a ribbon of silk, just superb. That finish; every word felt inevitable, I had that absolute sense ‘This deserves to win.’ At the core, the beauty of the language is what writing is. The very last grain of writing is in the beauty of the words, and you judge it like poetry. That does not mean that some of the writers I most admire are always like that. Dickens, for instance, he has fantastic verbal energy and humour and brilliance, but I love him even when he overwrites or writes too fast. It is just like people, isn’t it? I mean if I have twenty friends and if I have ten good friends, and five friends I really love, it is for so many different reasons. Same with books, isn’t it? Q: It is a wonderful metaphor. You mean, it is all those different parts that make the whole, that good book. This idea of organic unity, of interconnectedness, is also central to your work, thematically too; the awareness that beyond all the divisions rests a world we share. Is this part of your vision of here and now? A: Well, I do believe that we are all part of one another. I don’t know, I have always felt it. The painful side of empathy is that it means I don’t quite have enough boundaries, so sometimes I feel like my world is leaking or something. That is why I need to be alone quite a lot, even though I genuinely find being with people creative, happy-making on one level, funny and touching. But I am always trying to find bits of myself in other people; I mean, looking for common ground. That’s why being with other people can be draining after a bit. I try to find something in myself that’s like my characters, too, including the really bad ones. When people deplore violence – we all deplore it, any sane person does – we must also be honest; it is part of us, so deploring it is really like rejecting a part of yourself; ‘OK it is out there, and it is very bad.’ But this is not useful I think. It is more

Interview with Maggie Gee

155

useful to find where it is in ourselves and why it is there, and then you can understand why it is in other people. . . Q: You live in a big city, London, a city of many different people, not always ready to understand and accept each other. How do you see London as a writer, perhaps as a white writer? A: In some respects London is heaven – the city of acceptance that welcomes refugees from every land, the place of genetic and cultural mixing – with so much free culture – galleries and museums and street happenings. Many of my stories have been set in London, The White Family is my big London novel, and I loved being one of the writers in the Arts Council’s anthology, Diaspora London. But of course, cities are also potential targets in warfare. When 9/11 happened, I think every Londoner wondered if we would be next. There were the underground and bus bombs of 7/7. But the human organism has to survive, so Londoners forget and get on with our lives. As a writer it’s a wonderful place to be, so alive, so free. But for many people it’s hell. Q: Your novels also explore the rift between the country and the city. How did you experience that when you first get to London? A: At first I was too afraid and shy to come to London at all. My first experience of London was through a literary agent who wanted to represent me after I wrote my first, still unpublished, novel, and of course they wanted to meet me. The last letter from the agency ended, despairingly, ‘Do you never come to London?’ Basically I was a country bumpkin, and it was overwhelming, the idea of London. As a visitor and outsider, you have no home, all you see is the people streaming up and down at Tottenham Court Road, you feel they would pour over the top of you if you fell down. Then I moved to London, for the last year of my PhD. At last I began to understand it is a series of interconnecting villages, nationalities, cultural groupings, languages, and I began to find my place there (living among Russians, as it happens) and to love it. And now I really love the city’s human richness, and to be a Londoner is a very proud thing. There are black writers I know who are happy to call themselves Londoners when they don’t particularly identify as British – a tradition highlighted by that wonderful Caribbean writer Samuel Selvon with his strange, poetic novel The Lonely Londoners, and by Mike Phillips in his London Crossings, among many others. Q: You often define your characters in terms of the space they inhabit. You create scenes in which central characters go back to the country after many years, to revisit their relatives and settle their accounts. They come to terms with themselves as they change places. Vanessa in My Cleaner, Harold in Light Years, or Grace in Grace. Is this part of a nostalgia for a simple life? For a contemporary version of Merry England? A: I grew up in the countryside, so it is nature that makes me feel happy and refreshes me. When I kept a London diary for eighteen months, I found again and again I was writing about the plants in city parks and gardens, about urban places exploding with nature that is never quite tamed. I love the city because I chose it as a way of escaping my original family, I love its art galleries, theatres, cinema, and I am excited by urban

156

Maggie Gee

beauty. But the city is also what you grow up into in a bad way – it means adult life, but also the place of killing, the place of hatred and stress, the place of haste and tension. It’s contradictory, but then, so is the country. Most of us have an Arcadian vision of childhood – mine is Arcadian. And yet! The country is also the place of repression and secrets, the place of the past, the place I fear to return to. I fear losing my adult life and becoming the frightened child again, so it is a complicated thing. I do have a strong sense also of an urban centre in the UK that rejects, and is bored by, the country; a lot of modern intellectuals are alienated even by the idea of nature, the idea of the natural. They think they can live without nature, but I know I can’t. For example when I was at a writers’ retreat in El Gouna, Egypt, in 2010, I at first felt very alienated by this entirely new, beautiful town, built in the past twenty years. But one morning I walked to the sea and found a little beach with no-one and nothing there, and of course there was the same seascape, the same sand and shells and gulls and tides, that I grew up with in the seaside town of Poole, Dorset. I felt all right again because there was something familiar and yet disorderly, something that human beings couldn’t control. In Grace Bruno is a killer because he wants to control everything, from his cat to the grass coming through his terrace, which he sees with terror. He’s the kind of human who wants the city to be a monoculture – just humans. Whereas I see the disorderly and unpredictable and wild as living. Q: Well, in that sense, your novels kindly host the disorderly. Animals and trees, zoos, parks and gardens, images from nature figure very often, in Light Years, The Flood, My Driver, as well as in your autobiography My Animal Life. Where do such vital nature images come from? A: I visit Kew Gardens all the time. And in The Burning Book, Kew Gardens is the place of earthly beauty where my characters see the beginning of world war, and in The Flood Kew Gardens represents an earthly interpretation of heaven. In Light Years, Regent’s Park is the place of beauty, as is the sea where the teenagers escape to make love. In the same book, Harold goes back to Dorset to rediscover the flora and fauna of his childhood and his discovery of the universe reflects my own rediscovery of that childhood sense of pantheistic connection, as an adult. One of my most intense experiences is this feeling that we are all located in nature, that there’s too much of it for humans to spoil it, that it will outlive our civilisation. And birds, ‘skeins of starlings’ in The Flood which must not drown are important to me as an image of freedom. Bruno in Grace can’t bear the fact that we are all a part of this rich tapestry. The Bible tells us we must tame nature and draw borderlines between humans and other animals. But my animal characters have feeling and imagination, and actually I believe animals are as intelligent as us, it’s just that we don’t understand their way of being intelligent. We like to think other animals are inferior to us, but of course they are not. There are experiments from the 1950s that show rhesus monkeys are at least as empathic as human beings, probably more – they refuse to eat when eating gives an electric shock to another monkey within sight. Q: In Where Are the Snows, Alex says “What a waste of planet, England!” Do you feel that we have fallen from grace and condemned to live here in this “waste of planet”?

Interview with Maggie Gee

157

A: Exactly, we live in a post-industrial, fallen world. If you look at Shakespeare’s imagery, humans lived among animals then, they lived among nature, and the range of metaphors is extraordinary. It may not have been ‘Merry’, but life had a richness we have lost. And yet if we want we can go and find it again. One of the strongest experiences of my life was the period when Nick and I went to visit the zoo every day, in the first year we were married, and lived nearby. We got to know a family of orang-utans; we talked to them, we showed them things, they started to recognise us, and we were desolated when one of them, a young male called Bin-Tang, was sent away from the group to another zoo, and died in transit. This ‘zoo period’ is reflected all through my novel Light Years, when Lottie visits the zoo. Zoos are certainly not Arcadia. I turn her experience into comedy, because Lottie is a comic character, but she also learns. And that experience, that spiritual experience of being with animals, was very important to me. A richer but briefer version of it was my real-life visit to the Bwindi gorillas in Uganda 20 years later, which I give to my character Vanessa in My Driver. Q: You also deal with the spiritual experience of being with other people, and the tensions of everyday life. Reading such scenes has a certain therapeutic function. What would you say about exploring the minutiae of everyday life in your writing? A: A lot of fiction is about nothing but small tensions. The texture of our daily lives is very often emotional and internal. When trying to record a story or history, I like to change levels a lot, to zoom in and out. I like to show the big world and the things happening there but also to focus on the exact, tiny moment, the tiniest net of connectivity, where it is about this specific nerve, that part of the brain, those instant feelings that can be brushed away with one brush stroke. I say that they affect decisions people think they are making intellectually, analytically; maybe a woman makes a world-shaking decision because she is momentarily angry with her husband. I empathise with my characters because they are parts of myself, and as I write I love, and can identify with, all my characters. In that sense writing is certainly therapeutic for the writer – letting you explore unexplored parts of your psyche. It’s back to Woolf and ‘unacted parts’ again! Q: You explore a different genre, memoir, with your recent book My Animal Life. Together with My Cleaner and My Driver, it sounds as if you complete the trilogy with this memoir. What did you have in mind while entitling them? A: After The Flood, I was reborn with my two African novels, My Cleaner and My Driver. The sense of post-Flood emptiness was replaced by a sense of freedom to do something new, maybe writing about the same themes but in a more pacy and popular way. If these two books have to fit in the dread category ‘post-imperial literature’, I really hope they also escape the shadow of the Empire and say, we are living in a new world, inventing new relationships. The title of My Cleaner plays on the feeling of unsettlement and discomfort people have with the term “my cleaner”. They are either deaf to the problems of claiming possession of another human being, or embarrassed to say it. (And readers really are embarrassed – people so often refer by mistake to ‘your novel, The Cleaner.’) My Driver was a pair for it. The trope in both novels is cultural

158

Maggie Gee

misunderstanding and the comedy that produces: Mary Tendo and Vanessa Henman, a black woman and a white woman, misunderstand each other, but more fundamentally they misunderstand each other’s cultures – Ugandan Mary makes mistakes (which often reveal aspects of British life) in the UK in the first novel, British Vanessa makes mistakes in Uganda in the second. Both of them also get things wrong about their own lives – but that’s why we feel for them, I hope. And My Animal Life wasn’t part of a trilogy. It just had to be “my” – it’s my memoir. Maybe I had to write this to show that I was not Vanessa Henman, even though she is a caricature of me. Q: Many of your characters, like Vanessa Henman of My Cleaner and My Driver, feature in more than one novel. Lottie, Bruno, Hugo, Grace, Moira and Ian, to name but a few, appear in your work as repeated motifs. Is it a form of postmodern playfulness? A: I am making a body of work. It is also the work of a female artist, and I am taking myself seriously; I see my work as a body of work, as men like Anthony Powell or Honore de Balzac have done. Writing The Flood was a kind of claim: that I could bring all my work together in one book, which included characters from all my other novels to date, at the age they would be according to the age they were when ‘their’ book was published. I invented stories that linked them all – it was very difficult and very enjoyable. I am happy with what I did, though I wish my publisher and agent had supported my wish to include a dramatis personae listing all the characters and which novels they came from originally. Maybe I wish I had been stronger about insisting! After The Flood I had to make a decision whether or not to go on integrating the new books into my fictional cosmos. My Cleaner at first had no links to it, then at the last moment I thought ‘No, I must.’ So I included a newsagent from The White Family. And in My Driver, I made Davie, from Light Years, a friend to Justin. It’s a fun thing to do, as well as serious. Q: Do you also want to say that books can be connected too? A: I have never really done it before The Flood, and the initial impetus was that I wanted to bring all my work together in case we were all destroyed in the aftermath of the Iraq war. I wanted to have at least my fictional work put together. And I hoped the book might survive, because it is my life, it is my being. Q: Then the book became an ark, didn’t it? A: Yes, the book really became an ark. Sometimes one character, sometimes two, there is somebody from every book. Now all my books can be connected. I do think all books can be dreamed together: what do I mean? – maybe they are dreaming together in libraries. I thought that when I was in the private Berg collection in the New York Public Library reading for my new book, which is ‘Virginia Woolf in Manhattan’. I thought about all the authors, all the manuscripts together, and I thought, maybe, they are interpenetrating, writers and dead writers meeting in the dark. Sometimes, quite often, you admire a writer and then you find that they admired another writer you admire. And your writing is influenced by both of those writers. This is the tradition and I love it. I love the idea of literature and storytelling as a continuing tradition, a long, connected dream that will go on. In that sense it is great

Interview with Maggie Gee

159

to meet students who want to write or who read, because they are the future. I like to meet them, and sometimes I have a chance to help them. I wish that had happened to me as a young, unpublished writer. Q: Speaking of students and the tradition, I would like to ask about another subject you explore in your novels. I am wondering where you place academia and your experience of being in it. A: I used to have a big problem with academia because I felt I would never escape it, when I was completing my three academic degrees. I have been liberated for decades. However, that feeling of confinement found fictional form in the character of Moira – a literature graduate like me who may or may not have died in my first novel, Dying in Other Words, depending on how you read it, but who certainly survives as a much older and less happy woman in The Flood, where she has not left academic life, as her author did, but stayed on and become a professor. I cooked the books unfairly against Moira and against academic life, by giving both the child and the creative freedom I craved to another character who, like Moira, is a split-off part of myself – Angela Lamb. (Fiction requires simplification, that’s why.) The end result is that Moira is terribly jealous of Angela, who has become a best-selling novelist, and about whom Moira is writing a book. Moira in effect goes mad, but she is redeemed in the coda to The Flood by a union with her large and beautiful red dog, Fool, who represents the bodily, playful self Moira has repressed. You can see I was working out my own conflicts here, maybe unconsciously taking revenge for my years of working too hard. (I also satirised structuralist and postmodernist theory in The White Family, where I showed the librarian, Thomas, was working endlessly and abortively on a book that was ultimately meaningless. Of course there are amazing, radical, creative ideas in the best of that theory – Roland Bathes writes so beautifully – but it has also generated, at worst, a bad, turgid sub-literature where nothing can be said simply. In real life I have huge respect for the university as a whole, it is one of the few places where things are valued not just for their monetary value – although our government seems eager to justify everything in functional terms. Also universities have been very good to me. I have been taught and kept alive in universities. For my own personal part, there is a big confusion in my mind between academic work and pleasing my parents, as I always had to be this clever girl: clever girl clever girl clever girl! And by the time I got to the university, I just did not want to be ‘good’ any more. I had had enough, but then I ended up doing more degrees. How could this happen? I used to go into the park, to look at the seagulls and I promised myself ‘After doing my PhD I will be free.’ You know about that, Mine, because you have done them too. You know a PhD is so oppressive. And what is it about? Why do they have to be so long? You could prove your skills in 20,000 words; the rest is just an endurance test. It is just “Grind them down!” When I finished my PhD viva I said I would never ever do another exam. Now of course there is the academic creative writing industry. I do guest slots at universities and enjoy that very much. But I would not be a full time creative writing teacher because I think there are big problems both with the validity of creative writing degrees, and with how far a writer should get involved with institutions.

160

Maggie Gee

Q: You are now writing a novel ‘Virginia Woolf in Manhattan’ in which you take Woolf to Manhattan. In your earlier novels, you have also some characters who come to England from America; for instance, Alfred’s son Darren White, the journalist in The White Family, or Harold’s father Hugo, in Light Years. What does America mean to you? A: I went to America very very late. I was already, I think, sixty, maybe 59, and I was fascinated by it. I had begun to fear I would die without seeing America. I have a very ambivalent relationship to it politically. I loathed the way Britain under Blair and Brown followed the American way blindly, and I saw America as the place, in a sense, of stupidity, where people do not have passports, do not want to know about anyone else and believe everything can be solved by good housekeeping and a few bombs. But to be honest, I probably saw it as the place of stupidity because I had not been there. In fact perhaps I felt inferior to America, and rejected by America. I was published in America with my early novels, and had very good reviews actually from places like the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. Then in 1988 I wrote Grace which was a novel more narrowly centred in the UK, and it did badly in the US, so the publisher dropped me. After that only one novel of mine was published in the US, Where Are the Snows (1990) (re-titled Christopher and Alexandra.) So all this helps to explain my anti-American feelings. Also I had a dear friend who became a very successful journalist and went to America. He came back from America once when I was in my twenties, and we were talking about nuclear war. I said ‘If the UK is the place from which American planes take off to bomb, then the UK is also greatly at risk.’ He said ‘Frankly, who would worry if it was wiped off the map? England feels so small when you live in America.’ I gained this sense of England being small and despised. Perhaps that’s why in The White Family, I made Darren, the journalist who goes to America, despised in his turn. Q: You write about a very important literary figure, Virginia Woolf. When I think that there are many contemporary writers who employ historical figures in their novels, I want to ask how you interpret this interest in history and rewriting it? A: I was rather unfair about historical novels in the past, obviously the secret may have been that I had never written one and perhaps could not – though nor did I want to. Every writer generalises about literature to prove their own work is best. With that proviso, I do think there are reasons why it is unhealthy for a nation’s literature to focus on the past and flee the present. In Britain’s case I think it is partly to do with the empire. We are an empire after the end of empire, and maybe that’s why people are interested in the past, because our past was better than our present. I think there is some of that. There is also the idea of the ‘meme’, the units of ideas which are passed on like genes through copying and repetition, and become famous – things like brand names, logos, famous names, famous titles of artworks, powerful images are memes that spread through the population. Let’s take Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, a novel inspired by Vermeer’s beautiful painting, “A Girl with a Pearl Earring”. It is a very good historical novel, and Chevalier is a very good writer. The book was very successful.

Interview with Maggie Gee

161

But I think that was also partly because she linked herself to a very prominent meme, and the meme was Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring”. Hilary Mantel, a writer I greatly admire because her sentences are so beautiful, she uses Cromwell in the same way. It always happens when people re-invent the lives and times of famous historical characters: they gain instant recognition, and interest among readers. I think I used to slightly sneer at this, once I deduced it, but now I will have to stop sneering because I am about to write about Virginia Woolf, reincarnated in the present. The present is what fascinates me. It’s so exciting. And what is really happening that isn’t in journalists’ reports or politicians’ claims, that fascinates me, I want to understand. I used to feel that if I tried to write about one of my heroes, say Jane Austen, and if I pretended I knew what she felt and said, wouldn’t that be stealing, like invading her and taking away the only thing we absolutely possess, which is our identity? To me it seemed like identity fraud. I think it is also because my academic training taught me “You know things or you don’t know them”. Of course it is a postmodern thing that identity does not matter in authorship, but I think it does. Stealing souls. . . I still have problems with it. Q: So, how do you use Virginia Woolf? A: I am transporting her into Manhattan in 2010, so nobody can think it is the real Virginia Woolf. She will obviously be my construction. I am using her meme obviously, though, guilty to that . . . But I also want to link myself to a tradition and see someone I hugely admired, and discuss what that means, in a fictional way. And I want to look again at some of the things she has written that have been very fertile for me. For instance, she said there is a silence that falls over women when they try to write about their bodies, and she meant about sex, really. She was right in her time, but I think now we can write about sex and the body, and I have done, and will again. So I would love to play with such topics in her novel, my novel I mean, her novel, our novel; using history is something new, something I haven’t done that I am doing in my own way, which I hope is not stealing a soul. I hope, though this may be impertinent, that I am giving Woolf another life, trying to take on the painful fact of her suicide and give her another soul in the present. She will find how famous she has become, and will have to deal with that. There’s quite a lot of comedy. But almost everyone she loved is dead. It’s a risk – just wait for the Woolf scholars to fall on my head! Q: Maggie Gee, many thanks for this wonderfully inspiring and generous interview. We are very much looking forward to your “Virginia Woolf in Manhattan”.

162

Bibliography

Contextualizing Maggie Gee’s Fiction Primary sources Gee, Maggie (1981), Dying, In Other Words. Brighton: Harvester Press. — (1983), The Burning Book. London: Faber and Faber. — (1988), Grace. London: Heinemann. — (1991), Where Are the Snows. London: Heinemann. — (1994), Lost Children. London: Flamingo. — (1996), ‘How May I Speak in My Own Voice?: Language and the Forbidden’ (The William Matthews Lecture, 23 May 1996). London: Birkbeck College. — (1998a), The Ice People. London: Richard Cohen Books. — (1998b), ‘The contemporary writer: Gender and genre’, in Judy Simons and Kate Fullbrook (eds), Writing, A Woman’s Business: Women, Writing and the Marketplace. New York: Manchester University Press. — (2002), The White Family. London: Saqi Books. — (2004a) [1985], Light Years. London: Saqi Books. — (2004b), The Flood. London: Saqi Books. — (2004c), ‘View from Outside’, New Statesman, 24 May, 12 October 2010. www. newstatesman.com/200405240033. — (2005), My Cleaner. London: Saqi Books. — (2009a), My Driver. London: Telegram Books. — (2009b), Interview with Elaine Showalter. December 2009. www.shewrites.com. — (2010), My Animal Life. London: Telegram Books. www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/ openbook_20050821.shtml.

Secondary sources Adams, James Eli (2005), ‘Class in the Victorian novel’, in Francis O’Gorman (ed.), A Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Amis, Martin (2010) [1984], Money: A Suicide Note. New York: Penguin Books. — (1999) [1989], London Fields. London: Vintage. Barker, Pat (1982), Union Street. London: Virago. — (1984), Blow Your House Down. New York: Putnam. — (1996) [1986], Liza’s England. London: Virago.

164

Bibliography

Bradbury, Malcolm (1989), No, Not Bloomsbury. London: Arrow Books. — (1991), Eating People is Wrong. Chicago: Academy Chicago Publishers. Bradford, Richard (2007), The Novel Now: Contemporary British Fiction. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Brontë, Charlotte (1996) [1849], Shirley. Ware: Wordsworth. Carlyle, Thomas (1843), ‘The Condition of England’, Past and Present. A Web of English History. www.historyhome.co.uk/readings/condit.htm. Accessed 30 May 2011. — (1899), ‘Condition-of-England question’, Chartism. www.uoguelph.ca/englit/victorian/ HTML/chartism.html#11. Accessed 26 May 2011. Coe, Jonathan (1994), What a Carve Up! London: Viking. — (2002), The Rotters’ Club. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Connor, Steven (1996), The English Novel in History: 1950–95. London and New York: Routledge. Cotton, John (1996), in Susan Windisch Brown (ed.), Contemporary Novelists. New York: St. James Press. David, Deirdre (2001), The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dickens, Charles (1994) [1854], Hard Times. London: Penguin Books. — (2003) [1841], Barnaby Rudge. London: Penguin Books. Diniejko, Andrzej (2010), ‘Condition-of-England novels’. The Victorian Web: Literature, History and Culture in the Age of Victoria, 22 February 2010. www.victorianweb.org/ vn/litov.html. Disraeli, Benjamin (1998), Sybil, Or, the Two Nations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Drabble, Margaret and Jenny Springer (2003), The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eliot, George and Bert G. Hornback (1977) [1871], Middlemarch: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Reviews and Criticism. New York: Norton. Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds (1997), The English Novel in History: 1840–95. London: Routledge. Frostrup, Mariella (2005), ‘Interview with Maggie Gee’, BBC Radio 4 Open Book, 21 August, 27 October 2006. Gaskell, Elizabeth C. and MacDonald Daly (1996) [1848], Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life. London: Penguin Books. — (1996) [1855], North and South. London: Penguin Books. Greaney, Michael (2006), Contemporary Fiction and the Uses of Theory: The Novel from Structuralism to Postmodernism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Guy, Josephine M. (1996), The Victorian Social-Problem Novel: The Market, the Individual and Communal Life. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Hewitt, Douglas John (1988), English Fiction of the Early Modern Period: 1890–1940. London: Longman. Hickling, Alfred (2004), ‘Water, Water Everywhere’, The Guardian, 28 February 2004. www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/feb/28/featuresreviews.guardianreview10. Keen, Suzanne (2005), Victorian Renovations of the Novel: Narrative Annexes and The Boundaries of Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kingsley, Charles and Elizabeth A. Cripps (1993) [1850], Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet: An Autobiography. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bibliography

165

Lea, Daniel (2005), ‘One Nation, Oneself: Politics, Place and Identity in Martin Amis’ Fiction’, in James Acheson and Sarah C. E. Ross (eds), The Contemporary British Novel Since 1980. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lodge, David (1989) [1988], Nice Work. London: Penguin Books. Marshall, Tim and Robert Winston (2002), ‘ “The shadows of history”: The “Condition of England” in Nice Work’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 44, (1), 3–23. Nicol, Bran (2009), The Cambridge Introduction to Postmodern Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Purchase, Sean (2006), Key Concepts in Victorian Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pykett, Lyn (1987), ‘The Century’s Daughters: Recent Women’s Fiction and History’, Critical Quarterly, 29: 71–7. Robbins, Bruce (2006), ‘ “What the porter saw”: On the Academic Novel’, in James F. English (ed.), A Concise Companion to Contemporary British Fiction. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Roberts, Michéle (1994), ‘Ways of Seeing in the Underworld: Lost Children by Maggie Gee’, The Independent, 17 April, 3 September 2009. www.independent.co.uk/artsentertainment/book-review--ways-of-seeing-in-the-underworld-lost-children-bymaggie-gee-harpercollins-pounds-1499-1370684.html. Ross, Sarah C. E. (2005), ‘Regeneration, Redemption, Resurrection: Pat Barker and the Problem of Evil’, in James Acheson and Sarah C. E. Ross (eds), The Contemporary British Novel Since 1980. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sanders, Andrew (1994), The Short Oxford History of English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Shaffer, Brian W. (2006), Reading the Novel in English 1950–2000. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Showalter, Elaine (2009), ‘Five Questions for Maggie Gee’, 3 December 2009. www.shewrites.com. Simmons, James Richard Jr (2002), ‘Industrial and “Condition of England” novels’, in Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing (eds), A Companion to the Victorian Novel. Oxford: Blackwell. Stonebridge, Lyndsey and Marina MacKay (2007), British Fiction After Modernism The Novel at Mid-Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Thurschwell, Pamela (2006), ‘Genre, Repetition and History in Jonathan Coe’, in Philip Tew and Rod Mengham (eds), British Fiction Today. London: Continuum. Waugh, Patricia (2005), ‘Postmodern Fiction and the Rise of Critical Theory’, in Brian W. Shaffer (ed.), A Companion to the British and Irish Novel: 1945–2000. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub. Wheeler, Michael (1985), English Fiction of the Victorian Period: 1830–90. London: Longman. Womack, Kenneth (2005), ‘Academic Satire in Context’, in Brian W. Shaffer (ed.), A Companion to the British and Irish Novel: 1945–2000. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Woolf, Virginia (1925), ‘Modern Fiction’, The Common Reader, 23 October 2008. www.ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91c/chapter13.html. — (1966), ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’, in Leonard Wolff (ed.), Collected Essays. London: Hogarth.

166

Bibliography

Chapter 1: Author Flinging Herself from the Ivory Tower: Dying, In Other Words (1981) Primary sources Gee, Maggie (1981), Dying, In Other Words. Brighton: Harvester Press. — (1988), Grace. London: Heinemann — (2002), The White Family. London: Saqi Books. — (2004a) [1985], Light Years. London: Saqi Books. — (2004b), The Flood. London: Saqi Books. — (2010), My Animal Life. London: Telegram Books.

Secondary sources Barthes, Roland (1977a), ‘Death of the Author’, in Image/Music/Text, (ed.) Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang. — (1977b), ‘From work to text’, in Image/Music/Text, (ed.) Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang. McDonald, Rόnán (2007), The Death of the Critic. London and New York: Continuum. ‘Moira’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 12 January 2012. Web. 20 July 2011. www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moirae. ‘Moirae’, 20 July 2011. www.ancienthistory.about.com/od/mterms/g/Moira.htm. Sears, John (2004), ‘ “Making Sorrow Speak”: Maggie Gee’s Novels’, in Emma Parker (ed.), Essays and Studies 2004: Contemporary British Women Writers. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer (for the English Association). Shiner, Lary (2001), The Invention of Art: A Cultural History. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Woolf, Virginia (1925), Mrs Dalloway. London: Hogarth Press.

Chapter 2: Of the Nuclear Family and the Hibakusha: The Burning Book (1983) Primary sources Gee, Maggie (1981), Dying, In Other Words. Brighton: Harvester Press. — (1983), The Burning Book. London: Faber and Faber. — (1988), Grace. London: Heinemann. — (1998), The Ice People. London: Richard Cohen Books. — (2002), The White Family. London: Saqi Books. — (2004), The Flood. London: Saqi Books.

Bibliography

167

Secondary sources ‘British Empire Party’. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 16 April 2011. Web. 22 July 2011. www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Empire_Party. Dickens, Charles (1994) [1854], Hard Times. London: Penguin. Powell, Enoch, ‘Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” Speech’, reprinted in www.telegraph. co.uk. 20 April 1968. 10 June 2011. www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/3643823/EnochPowells-Rivers-of-Blood. Wordsworth, William (2000) [1798], ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’, in Stephen Greenblatt (ed.), The Norton Anthology: English Literature (7th edn). New York: Norton.

Chapter 3: Telescopic View of England, England: Light Years (1985) Primary sources Gee, Maggie (1981), Dying, In Other Words. Brighton: Harvester Press. — (1983), The Burning Book. London: Faber and Faber. — (1988), Grace. London: Heinemann. — (1991), Where Are the Snows. London: Heinemann. — (1994), Lost Children. London: Flamingo. — (1998), The Ice People. London: Richard Cohen Books. — (2002), The White Family. London: Saqi Books. — (2004a) [1985], Light Years. London: Saqi Books. — (2004b), The Flood. London: Saqi Books. — (2005), My Cleaner. London: Saqi Books. — (2009), My Driver. London: Telegram Books.

Secondary sources Barnes, Julian (1998) [2000], England, England. New York: Vintage. Chilvers, Ian (2004), ‘Bonnard, Pierre’ The Oxford Dictionary of Art. Encyclopedia.com. 22 Jun. 2012 http://www.encyclopedia.com. Dante, Alighieri (2008) [1308–21], The Divine Comedy: Paradiso. London: Penguin Classics. Dickens, Charles (1994) [1854], Hard Times. London: Penguin. Gaskell, Elizabeth (1996) [1855], North and South. London: Penguin. Mayhew, Henry (1968) [1851], London Labour and the London Poor. New York: Dover Publications. ‘Merrie England’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 28 December 2011. Web. 13 May 2011. www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merry_England. Orwell, George (2000) [1956], Keep the Aspidistra Flying. London: Penguin Books. Swift, Jonathan (1987) [1726], Gulliver’s Travel. London: Penguin. The World of Wonders: A Record of Things Wonderful in Nature, Science and Art. (c. 1883), London: Cassell, Petter, and Galpin.

168

Bibliography

Chapter 4: Hard Times: Grace (1988) and Where Are the Snows (1991) Primary sources Gee, Maggie (1981), Dying, In Other Words. Brighton: Harvester Press. — (1983), The Burning Book. London: Faber and Faber. — (1988), Grace. London: Heinemann. — (1991), Where Are the Snows. London: Heinemann. — (1994), Lost Children. London: Flamingo. — (1998), The Ice People. London: Richard Cohen Books. — (2002), The White Family. London: Saqi Books. — (2004a) [1985], Light Years. London: Saqi Books. — (2004b), The Flood. London: Saqi Books. — (2005), My Cleaner. London: Saqi Books. — (2009), My Driver. London: Telegram Books.

Secondary sources Allen, Woody (1969), ‘Take the Money and Run’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 28 January 2012. Web. 19 August 2011. www. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Take_the_Money_and_Run. Bachelard, Gaston (1969), The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press. Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984), Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Barker, Pat (1996) [1986], Liza’s England. London: Virago. Bertell, Rosalie (2000) [1990], No Immediate Danger: Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth. Summertown, TN: Book Publishing Company. Blake, William (2000) [1789], ‘Songs of Experience’, in Stephen Greenblatt (ed.), The Norton Anthology of English Literature (7th edn). New York: Norton. Chiappini, Rudy (1998), (ed.) Edvard Munch. Museo d’arte moderna, Lugano Exhibition Catalog. Switzerland: Museo d’arte moderna. Cook, Judith (1985), Who Killed Hilda Murrell? London: New English Library. Dante, Alighieri (2005) [1308–21], The Divine Comedy: Inferno. London: Penguin Classics. Dubois, A. D. (1922), ‘Our English Nomenclature’. The Condor, 24, (5), 158–62. Eliot, T. S. (2000) [1922], ‘The Waste Land’, in Stephen Greenblatt (ed.), The Norton Anthology of English Literature (7th edn). New York: Norton. Flaubert, Gustave (2002) [1857], Madame Bovary. London: Penguin Classics. Gee, Maggie (2011), ‘Conversation with the author’. 23 June. London: Doyle Gardens. Haffenden, John (1985), Novelists in Interview. London: Methuen. ‘Hilda Murrell’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 9 November 2011. Web. 13 August 2011. www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilda_Murrell. Joyce, James (1964), ‘Daniel Defoe’, trans. Joseph Prescott. Buffalo Studies, 1, 24–5. Orwell, George (1968) [1943], Homage to Catalonia. Harmondsworth: Penguin. — (2001) [1939], Coming up for Air. London: Penguin. Özyurt Kılıç, Mine (2009), ‘Introduction’, in Margaret J.-M. Sönmez and Mine Özyurt Kılıç (eds), Winterson Narrating Time and Space. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars.

Bibliography

169

Sade, Marquis de (1959) [1794], The Story of Juliette; or, Vice Amply Rewarded. Paris: Olympia Press. ‘Shropshire’, Virtual Shropshire: Tourist Information Site. 15 July 2011. www.virtualshropshire.co.uk/. ‘Tam Dalyell’, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 28 January 2011. Web. 20 July 2011. www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tam_Dalyell. Vargas-Llosa, Mario (1986), The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Villon, François, ‘The Ballad of the Dead Ladies’, trans. D. G. Rossetti. 17 July 2011, www.poetry-archive.com/v/the_ballad_of_dead_ladies.html. Wolf, Naomi (1991), The Beauty Myth. London: Vintage. Woolf, Virginia and Jeanne Schulkind (1985), Moments of Being. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Chapter 5: Are Such Things Done on Albion’s Shore?: Lost Children (1994) Primary sources Gee, Maggie (1983), The Burning Book. London: Faber and Faber. — (1988), Grace. London: Heinemann. — (1991), Where Are the Snows. London: Heinemann. — (1994), Lost Children. London: Flamingo. — (2004) [1985], Light Years. London: Saqi Books. — (2005), My Cleaner. London: Saqi Books. — (2009), My Driver. London: Telegram Books.

Secondary sources Blake, William (2000) [1789], ‘Songs of Experience’, in Stephen Greenblatt (ed.), The Norton Anthology of English Literature (7th edn). New York: Norton. — (2000) [1794], ‘London’, in Stephen Greenblatt (ed.), The Norton Anthology of English Literature (7th edn). New York: Norton. Brontë, Charlotte (1996) [1849], Shirley. Ware: Wordsworth. Dante, Alighieri (2005) [1308–21], The Divine Comedy: Inferno. London: Penguin Classics. Dickens, Charles (1994) [1854], Hard Times. London: Penguin Books. Elliott, Larry (2011), ‘Britain will be back in recession this winter, warns OECD’, The Guardian. 28 November. www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/nov/28/britain-recessionwinter-oecd?newsfeed=true. Gaskell, Elizabeth (1996) [1855], North and South. London: Penguin. King, Sir Mervyn (2011), in Larry Elliott, ‘Britain will be back in recession this winter, warns OECD’, The Guardian. 28 November. www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/ nov/28/britain-recession-winter-oecd?newsfeedtrue. Neustatter, Angela (1994), ‘Lost Children and Lost Mothers: Maggie Gee Discusses Her Novel About a Woman’s Mid-life Crisis with Angela Neustatter’, The Independent, 22 April, 19 August 2011. www.independent.co.uk/life-style/lost-children-and-lostmpthers-maggie-gee.

170

Bibliography

Nietzsche, Friedrich (1954), ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’, in The Portable Nietzsche,  (ed.), Walter Kaufmann. New York: Viking Press. ‘Occupy London: Initial Statement’, 19 November 2011, 28 November 2011. www.occupylsx. org/?page_id575. Roberts, Michéle (1994), ‘Ways of Seeing in the Underworld: Lost Children by Maggie Gee’, The Independent, 17 April, 3 September 2009. www.independent.co.uk/artsentertainment/book-review--ways-of-seeing-in-the-underworld-lost-children-by maggie-gee-harpercollins-pounds-1499-1370684.html. ‘Shelter England: The Housing and Homelessness Charity’, 17 November 2011. www.england.shelter.org.uk/home.

Chapter 6: Environmental Crisis, from Fact to Fiction: The Ice People (1998) and The Flood (2004) Primary sources Gee, Maggie (1981), Dying, In Other Words. Brighton: Harvester Press. — (1983), The Burning Book. London: Faber and Faber. — (1988), Grace. London: Heinemann. — (1991), Where Are the Snows. London: Heinemann. — (1994), Lost Children. London: Flamingo. — (1998), The Ice People. London: Richard Cohen Books. — (2002), The White Family. London: Saqi Books. — (2004a) [1985], Light Years. London: Saqi Books. — (2004b), ‘View from Outside’, New Statesman, 24 May, 12 October 2010. www. newstatesman.com/200405240033. — (2004c), The Flood. London: Saqi Books. — (2005), My Cleaner. London: Saqi Books. — (2007), ‘Drowned Worlds’, The Guardian, 20 December, 14 November 2010. www. guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/dec/20/flooding.naturaldisasters. — (2009a), My Driver. London: Telegram Books. — (2009b), ‘Utopia and the Living Body: Drought, Flood, Terror and Engineering in the Garden of Earthly Delights’. in Trans/Forming Utopia. ed. Elizabeth Russell. Oxford: Peter Lang. — (2010), My Animal Life. London: Telegram Books. — (2011),  ‘Feel her heart, feel her breath, feel her strong legs’: Wandering the Future in Search of Our Lost Bodies’. 1st International Akşit Göktürk Conference: ‘Visions of the Future Now and Then in Literatures in English’, 15–16 April 2010. Conference Proceedings. Dilta Dil Hizmetleri Ltd. Şti: İstanbul, 2011. (ed.), İstanbul University. English Language and Literature Department.

Secondary sources Atwood, Margaret (2009), The Year of the Flood: A Novel. New York: Nan A. Talese/ Doubleday. — (2011), ‘The Road to Ustopia’, The Guardian, 14 October, 15 October 2011. http://www. guardian.co.uk/books/2011/oct/14/margaret-atwood-road-to-ustopia

Bibliography

171

Ballard, J. G. (2002) [2000], Super-Cannes. London: Picador. Baxter, Stephen (2007), ‘The Flooding of London’. 25 January 2010. www.stephen-baxter. com/articles.html#london. Benn, Melissa (2002), ‘Maggie Gee: Black, White and Blue’, The Independent, 27 Saturday April, 5 February 2010. www.independent.co.uk/arts- entertainment/books/features/ maggie-gee-black-white-and-blue-658196.html. Booker, M. Keith (1994a), The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. — (1994b), Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Brannigan, John (2003), Orwell to the Present: Literature in England, 1945–2000. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Burton, Richard F. (2001) [1885], The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights. New York: Modern Library. Campanella, Tommaso (1981) [c. 1600], The City of the Sun: A Poetical Dialogue, trans. Daniel J. Donno. Berkeley, CA: California University Press. Carter, Angela (1998) [1983], ‘Notes from a Maternity Ward’, in Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings. Angela Carter and Jennifer S. Uglow. New York: Penguin Books. Cranach, Lucas the Elder (c. 1530), ‘The Close of the Silver Age’, The National Gallery, 20 September 2011. www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/glossary/silver-age. Cunningham, Valerie (2004), ‘Fiction 2004’, Literature Matters-On-line Newsletter 2, British Council. www.britishcouncil.org/arts-literature-matters-newsletter-2fiction2004.htm. Defoe, Daniel (2003) [1719], Robinson Crusoe. London: Penguin Classics. Dillon, Sarah (2007), ‘Imagining Apocalypse: Maggie Gee’s The Flood’. Contemporary Literature, 48, (3), 374–97. Ellis, Edward S. and Charles F. Home (1913), ‘Greek flood myth’, in The Story of the Greatest Nations and the World’s Famous Events, Vol. 1, July 2007. ‘Ensemble’, Glossary of Technical Theatre Terms. www.theatrecrafts.com/glossary/. Feinberg, Leonard (1967), Introduction to Satire. Ames, IA: Iowa State University Press. Firchow, Peter Edgerly (2007), Modern Utopian Fictions from H. G. Wells to Iris Murdoch. Washington: The Catholic University of America Press. Freud, Sigmund and Philip Rieff (1963), Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. New York: Collier. ‘Greek Flood Myth’, The Story of the Great Nations, 9 October 2010. www.publicbookshelf. com/public_html. Huxley, Aldous (1943) [1932], Brave New World. Stockholm: Zephyr Books. Kumar, Krishan (1987), Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. Kureishi, Hanif (2005) [1990], The Buddha of Suburbia. London: Penguin. Lakoff, Robin and James C. Coyne (1993), Father Knows Best: The Use and Abuse of Power in Freud’s Case of ‘Dora’. New York: Teachers College Press. Lessing, Doris (1988) [1974], Memoirs of a Survivor. London: Vintage. — (2000) [1999], Mara and Dann: An Adventure. New York: Harper Perennial. — (2008) [2007], The Cleft. New York: HarperCollins. Lucas, Caroline (2008), ‘Words of Warming’, The Guardian, 9 August, 10 November 2010. www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/au/09/scienceandnature.climatechange. More, Thomas (2003) [1516], Utopia. London: Penguin Classics.

172

Bibliography

‘Morning Sun’, (1952), Edward Hopper, Columbus Museum of Art Catalogue. Moylan, Tom (2000), Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Orwell, George (1983) [1949], Nineteen Eighty-Four. New York: Plume. Paul, Diane B. (1995), Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present. New York: Humanity Books. Rich, Adrienne (1995), Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. New York: Norton. Sisk, David W. (1997), Transformations of Language in Modern Dystopias. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ‘Summer Solstice’, 20 November 2010. www.bbc.co.uk/science/space/solarsystem/earth/ solsticescience.shtml. Woolf, Virginia (1989) [1919], ‘Kew Gardens’, The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. New York: Harcourt. Zamyatin, Yevgeny (1993) [1921], We. London: Penguin Books.

Chapter 7: Of the Two Nations: The White Family (2002) Primary sources Gee, Maggie (1981), Dying, In Other Words. Brighton: Harvester Press. — (1983), The Burning Book. London: Faber and Faber. — (1988), Grace. London: Heinemann. — (1991), Where Are the Snows. London: Heinemann. — (1994), Lost Children. London: Flamingo. — (1996), ‘How May I Speak in My Own Voice?: Language and the Forbidden’ (The William Matthews Lecture, May 23 1996). London: Birkbeck College. — (1998), The Ice People. London: Richard Cohen Books. — (2002), The White Family. London: Saqi Books. — (2004a) [1985], Light Years. London: Saqi Books. — (2004b), The Flood. London: Saqi Books. — (2005), My Cleaner. London: Saqi Books. — (2009), My Driver. London: Telegram Books.

Secondary sources Atkinson, Rowland and Gary Bridge (2005), Gentrification in a Global Context: the New Urban Colonialism. London and New York: Routledge. Barthes, Roland (1977), ‘Death of the Author’, in Image/Music/Text, trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang. Berry, Wendell (1977), The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. New York: Avon. Blomley, Nicholas (2004), Unsettling the City: Urban Land and the Politics of Property. New York and London: Routledge.

Bibliography

173

Clark, Eric (2005), ‘The Order and Simplicity of Gentrification’, in Rowland Atkinson and Gary Bridge (eds), Gentrification in a Global Context: The Urban Colonialism. London and New York: Routledge. Epstein, Mikhail (1995), After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Evaristo, Bernardine (2008), ‘My Literary Top 10’, November 2008, 5 July 2008. www.pulp. net/top10/21/bernardine_evaristo.html. Gardner, Richard (2011), ‘The number of children with no books rises’, The Independent, 5 December, 7 December 2011. www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/ news/the-number-of-children-with-no-books-rises-6272344.html. Ginzburg, Ralph (1988), 100 Years of Lynchings. Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press. Jaggi, Maya (1995), ‘Maggie Gee with Maya Jaggi’, in Susheila Nasta (ed.), Writing Across Worlds: Contemporary Writers Talk. London and New York: Routledge. — (2002), ‘Too Close to Home’, The Guardian, 25 May, 23 April 2007. www.guardian. co.uk/books/2002/may/25/fiction.orangeprizeforfiction2002. Lavelle, Phil (2011), ‘Could volunteers save local libraries from council cuts?’, BBC News, 19 January, 22 October 2011. www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12223368. Merolla, Daniela and Sandra Ponzanesi (2005), ‘Introduction’, in Ponzanesi and Merolla (eds), Migrant Cartographies: New Cultural and Literary Spaces in Post-Colonial Europe. Oxford: Lexington. Murray, Jenni (2002), ‘Interview with Maggie Gee’, BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour, 15 May, 27 April 2007. www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/2002_20_wed_01.shtml. Ponzanesi, Sandra (2004), Paradoxes of Post-colonial Culture: Contemporary Women Writers of the Indian and Afro-Italian Diaspora. New York: SUNY Press. Tennyson, Alfred (2000) [1869], ‘Idylls of the King’, in Stephen Greenblatt (ed.), The Norton Anthology: English Literature (7th edn). New York: Norton. Vanhoozer, Kevin J. (1998), Is There a Meaning in This Text?: The Bible, The Reader, and The Morality of Literary Knowledge. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan.

Chapter 8: Authorship in a Globalized World: My Cleaner (2005) and My Driver (2009) Primary sources Gee, Maggie (1981), Dying, In Other Words. Brighton: Harvester Press. — (1983), The Burning Book. London: Faber and Faber. — (1988), Grace. London: Heinemann. — (1991), Where Are the Snows. London: Heinemann. — (2002), The White Family. London: Saqi Books. — (2003), ‘The Artist’, in The Blue. London: Telegram Books. — (2004a) [1985], Light Years. London: Saqi Books. — (2004b), The Flood. London: Saqi Books. — (2005), My Cleaner. London: Saqi Books. — (2006), The Blue. London: Telegram Books. — (2009), My Driver. London: Telegram Books. — (2010), My Animal Life. London: Telegram Books.

174

Bibliography

Secondary sources Ali, Monica (2004) [2003], Brick Lane. London: Black Swan. Bennett, Andrew (2005), The Author. London and New York: Routledge. Boorstin, Daniel (1992), The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Vintage. Desai, Kiran (2006), The Inheritance of Loss. London: Hamish Hamilton. Foucault, Michel [1969] (2000), ‘What is an Author?’ in Sean Burke (ed.), Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Frostrup, Mariella (2005), ‘Interview with Maggie Gee’, BBC Radio 4 Open Book, 21 August, 27 October 2006. www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/openbook_20050821.shtml. ‘Hortus Conclusus,’ Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 3 Jun. 2012. Web. 24 Jun. 2012. Koval, Ramona (2009), ‘Maggie Gee’s My Driver’, ABC RadioNational The Book Show, 22 July, 12 November 2009. www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/stories/2009/2738329.htm. Lessing, Doris (1994), ‘Preface to The Golden Notebook’, in Paul Schlueter (ed.), A Small Personal Voice. London: Flamingo. Levy, Andrea (2004), Small Island. London: Picador. Mardorossian, Carin M. (2002), ‘From literature of exile to migrant literature’. Modern Language Studies, 32, (2), 15–33. Moran, Joe (2000), Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America. London: Pluto Press. Okri, Ben (1992) [1991], The Famished Road. London: Vintage. Smith, Zadie (2000), White Teeth. New York: Random House. Tew, Philip (2009), Zadie Smith. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Vertovec, Steven (2009), Transnationalism. London and New York: Routledge.

Index academia  31–2, 57, 61, 159 Adams, James Eli, ‘Class in the Victorian novel’  6–9 ageing  23, 35, 64, 70, 76, 79–80, 86, 96 Ali, Monica, Brick Lane  148 alienation  23, 29–30, 42, 46–7, 54, 59, 72–3, 81, 84, 107–8, 113 Allen, Woody, ‘Take the Money and Run’  81 Amis, Martin, London Fields  13 Money: A Suicide Note  13 ‘The Artist’  140 Atwood, Margaret  154 ‘The Road to Ustopia’  126 The Year of the Flood  115 authorship  16, 18–19, 23, 26, 29, 79, 82, 140–2, 145–9 Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space  84–5 Bakhtin, Mikhail, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics  80 Ballard, J. G., The Drowned World  115 Super-Cannes  117 Barker, Pat, Liza’s England  13, 67 Barnes, Julian, England, England  56 Barthes, Roland, ‘The Death of the Author’  23, 26–7, 35, 139 Baxter, Stephen, ‘The Flooding of London’  115 Bennett, Andrew, The Author  148 Berry, Wendell, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture  133

Bertell, Rosalie, No Immediate Danger: Prognosis for a Radioactive Earth  68 Blake, William, ‘Songs of Experience’  78, 89–90, 94 The Blue  140 Bonnard’s paintings  65–6, 99 Booker, M. Keith, The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism  116–18, 121 Boorstin, Daniel, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America  145 Bradbury, Malcolm, Eating People is Wrong  11 No, Not Bloomsbury  11 Brannigan, John, Orwell to the Present: Literature in England, 1945–2000  119 Brontë, Charlotte, Shirley  7, 93 The Burning Book, alienation  46 British atom bomb  48–9 family saga  37 money  46–7 New British Empire Party  50–1 peace and happiness  52 racism  51 synopsis  38 unemployment and poverty  45–6 violence  47 war  17, 42, 44, 49–50, 53 Campanella, Tommaso, The City of the Sun: A Poetical Dialogue  126 Carlyle, Thomas, ‘The Condition of England’  5 Carter, Angela  87, 110 chattering classes  129

176

Index

child/children  6, 18, 32, 36, 43, 45, 57, 59, 71, 74, 76–8, 80–1, 84, 88–100, 102–3, 105, 107, 109–11, 114, 119, 123, 131, 133, 138, 142, 156, 159 childcare  3, 90, 112–13 Clark, Eric  132 Coe, Jonathan, The Rotters’ Club  13 What a Carve Up!  13 commercialization of culture  3, 19, 65, 133 Connor, Steven,  The English Novel in History: 1950–95  10–11, 17 Cook, Judith, Who Killed Hilda Murrell?  68 Cotton, John  14 country versus city  155–6 culture industry  18, 56, 58–61, 64, 82, 117, 147–8 Cunningham, Valentine  118 Dante, Alighieri,  The Divine Comedy: Inferno  54, 69, 91 The Divine Comedy: Paradiso  54 Desai, Kiran, The Inheritance of Loss  148 Dickens, Charles, Barnaby Rudge  6 Hard Times  6, 42, 59, 93 Dillon, Sarah, ‘Imagining Apocalypse: Maggie Gee’s The Flood’  120 Disraeli, Benjamin, Sybil, or the Two Nations  6–7, 13, 86 Dying, In Other Words, academia, literary representation of  32 alienation  29–30 Author’s note  24 comic relief  35 the death of the Author  26 funeral scene  36 prologue  30 self-referentiality  28 sense of loneliness  29–31 social awareness  29 suspense  25

theme of death and ageing  35–6 violence  33 writing and authorship  26 dystopia  18, 101–2, 104, 116–17, 120, 126 Elliott, Larry  10n. 2, 93 Epstein, Mikhail, After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture  137–8 Ermarth, Elizabeth Deeds, The English Novel in History: 1840–95  7 ethics  4, 8, 11, 14–15, 18, 66, 75, 84, 98, 103–4, 106–7, 120, 133, 138 ethnocentrism  70, 136 Eurocentric  87, 104, 106 Evaristo, Bernardine, ‘My Literary Top 10’  128, 139, 145 Feinberg, Leonard, Introduction to Satire  118 feminism  44, 64–5, 88, 109–10 Firchow, Peter Edgerly, Modern Utopian Fictions  101 Flaubert, Gustave, Madame Bovary  81 The Flood, dystopia and satire  116–17 environmental warning  116 gap between rich and poor  123–5 religious punishment or corruption  123 social criticism  116 social and political critique  118 utopia and dystopia  126 Frostrup, Mariella  3, 150n. 1 Garner, Richard, The National Literacy Trust Report  133 Gaskell, Elizabeth, Mary Barton  6–7 North and South  6–7, 12–13, 59, 93 gender roles  44–5, 64, 97, 108–13 gentrification  3, 19, 132 Ginzburg, Ralph, 100 Years of Lynchings  135, 137

Index global warming  3, 18, 101, 106, 108, 112 Grace, Bruno’s violence  74 environmental awareness  69 ethnocentrism  70 Health Service, poor conditions of  74 images of babies  78 Murrell’s death  67 nuclear threat  67–8 public indifference  72 subversive activities  73 traditional image of England  71–2 Greaney, Michael, Contemporary Fiction and the Uses of Theory: The Novel from Structuralism to Postmodernism  12 hibakusha  37–8, 40–1, 44, 47, 49 Hickling, Alfred, The Guardian review  19 homeless people  3, 18, 91 housing policies  12, 18, 61, 92, 100n. 1 Hungry Forties  5 Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World  109–10, 117 The Ice People, anthropocentric worldview  107 children  102 dystopia  101–2 feminism, critique of  109 gender roles, in society  112–13 medicalized labour  110 migrants  105–6 racist discourse  105–6 segregated society  108 ideal vision of the future  153 infertility  3, 109 interconnectedness  15, 27, 52, 55, 80, 85, 97, 103, 107, 114, 134, 139, 141, 154 Jaggi, Maya  129, 135 Koval, Ramona, ‘Maggie Gee’s My Driver ’  150n. 2 Kumar, Krishan, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times  126

177

Kureishi, Hanif, The Buddha of Suburbia  105, 139 Lea, Daniel, ‘One Nation, Oneself: Politics, Place and Identity in Martin Amis’ Fiction’  13 Lessing, Doris, The Cleft  110 Memoirs of a Survivor  102 ‘Preface to The Golden Notebook’  144 Levy, Andrea, Small Island  148 Light Years, beauty myth and ageing  64 Bonnard’s intimiste painting  66 educated and ignorant  60 feminism  64–5 human-centredness  62–3 nature, annual cycle of  55 pollution  57 rich and poor  58–9 schooling  60 scientific data  55 space and time  54 Lodge, David, Nice Work  12 Lost Children, Bonnard’s paintings  99 children as life-affirming forces  90 departure from nature  95 economic recession  93 gender issues  97 homeless people  91 interconnectedness, human relations  97 love  98 old people  96 television  96 theme of loss  89 unemployed youth  93 Mantel, Hilary  3, 14, 161 Mardorossian, Carin M., ‘From Literature of Exile to Migrant Literature’  141 Mayhew, Henry, London Labour and the London Poor  58 mid-Victorian realist tradition  4

178 militarization  3, 118 modernism  9–10 ‘The Money’  141 Moran, Joe, Star Authors: Literary Celebrity in America  144–5 More, Thomas, Utopia  121 Moylan, Tom, Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia  101 Murray, Jenni  129, 139 My Animal Life  4, 32, 126, 143, 146, 149, 153, 158 authorship  146 the soul, definition of  15 My Cleaner and My Driver, authorship  149 authorship, transnational context  141 British supermarket culture, product of  142 commercialization of culture  144, 146–7 literary prizes  143 migrant literature  141 multicultural landscape, British fiction  148 publishing and writer conferences  144–5 nature images  156 nature of society, class conflict  7 music  8 panoramic paintings  8 Neustatter, Angela, ‘Children Living on the Streets’  89, 91 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spoke Zarasthustra  90 nuclear threat  67–8, 72–5 Okri, Ben, The Famished Road  148 Orwell, George, Keep the Aspidistra Flying  61 Nineteen Eighty-Four  101, 110, 117

Index Ponzanesi, Sandra, Paradoxes of Post-colonial Culture: Contemporary Women Writers of the Indian and Afro-Italian Diaspora  128 poverty  6, 19, 23, 26, 37, 42, 45–7, 49, 58–9, 69, 80–2, 90, 97, 100n. 1, 102, 116, 121 Powell, Enoch, ‘Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” Speech’  50, 158 publishing, lowering of standards in  3, 18, 82, 116–18, 129, 144–5 Pykett, Lyn, ‘The Century’s Daughters: Recent Women’s Fiction and History’  13 racism  37, 45, 49, 51, 70, 74–5, 106, 108, 128–31, 134–6, 138–9 Rich, Adrienne  110 Roberts, Michèle, ‘Ways of Seeing in the Underworld: Lost Children by Maggie Gee’  18, 89 Ross, Sarah C. E. 13 Sade, Marquis de, The Story of Juliette; or, Vice Amply Rewarded  87 Sears, John, ‘ “Making Sorrow Speak”: Maggie Gee’s Novels’  30 Shaffer, Brian W., Reading the Novel in English 1950–2000  3, 10 Showalter, Elaine, ‘Five Questions for Maggie Gee’  14 Smith, Zadie, White Teeth  148 Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver’s Travels  56 Tennyson, Alfred, ‘Idylls of the King’  131, 138 Tew, Philip, Zadie Smith  148 Thurschwell, Pamela  13 ‘Two Nations’  5, 7, 12, 19, 58–9, 69, 86, 104, 128–39

Index unemployment  3, 6, 18, 37, 42, 45–7, 49, 56, 77, 100n. 1, 102, 137 Vanhoozer, Kevin J., Is There a Meaning in This Text?  137 Vargas-Llosa, Mario, The Perpetual Orgy: Flaubert and Madame Bovary  81 violence  3, 6, 17, 33–4, 42, 45–9, 51, 53, 69, 72, 74, 84, 94, 96, 111, 135–6, 154 Waugh, Patricia, ‘Postmodern Fiction and the Rise of Critical Theory’  12 Wheeler, Michael,  English Fiction of the Victorian Period: 1830–90  6–7 Where Are the Snows, beauty myth, consumer culture  86 consumerism  81, 87 female characters  87–8 first epigraph  79 luxurious life  80 money-world, critique of  82 second epigraph  79 ‘Take the Money and Run’  81 theme of connectedness  84 third-person narrator  79–80 younger characters, criticisms of  86 The White Family, culture and education, commercialization of  133

179

displacement  132–3 gentrification  132 ‘How May I Speak in My Own Voice?: Language and the Forbidden’  128 interconnectedness, motif of  139 library scenes  134 migration  128 racism  129 shopping  132 Winterson, Jeanette  85 Wolf, Naomi, The Beauty Myth  86 Womack, Kenneth, ‘Academic Satire in Context’  11 Woolf, Virginia  5, 10, 16, 32, 149, 158, 160–1 Between the Acts  154 ‘cotton wool of everyday life’  27 ‘Kew Gardens’  126 Moments of Being  85, 126 ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’  9 Mrs Dalloway  27 Wordsworth, William, ‘Tintern Abbey’  41 Writer character  13–14, 17, 19, 23, 27–30, 32, 34, 39, 41–2, 52, 57, 61, 68, 82, 117, 120, 137–41, 143–50, 154–5, 157–60 Zamyatin, Yevgeny, We  101, 110, 117

180

181

182

183

184