Fantastic Metropolis

I have been a fan of Alan Wall’s since I came across his first novel Bless The Thief in a South Coast Oxfam shop in 1998 and read it pretty much on the spot. I then read his second novel The Lightning Cage when I received a copy from a friend and tried to review it for a well known weekly who bizarrely told me the book didn’t exist. After that I acquired but almost immediately lost his collection of short stories Richard Dadd in Bedlam (which I’ve since read and thoroughly recommend) and read his The School of Night as soon as I got the chance. I missed his second novel Silent Conversations and have still to read it. His verse narrative Jacob (1993) was published by a small press who also published his novella Curved Light (1994) and two volumes of verse, Chronicle (1995) and Lenses (1997). I have also yet to read Curved Light, Jacob or Chronicle, though I find Lenses a substantial collection, very much to my taste. Not having had much chance to return to London in recent years I have failed to browse an extensive stock of modern fiction published in England, so my reading has been patchy, dependent more on what people recommend or publishers send. I have not read all his poetry or his essays, which have appeared in various literary journals. Happily Andy Hedgecock, the critic and writer on cultural matters, was so struck by Wall’s latest novel China that he sent it to me on disc. I then reread the book in proof and concluded that Wall was no longer a promising novelist. He had definitely arrived! China is a mature work, one of the best and most assured novels I have read in recent years and for me marks a return to a higher value than I’d become used to in what’s usually called ‘mainstream’ fiction. His fascination for the visionary aspects of the world is intense but he shares something in common with the writers I most admire from the immediate post-war period, including Iris Murdoch and Angus Wilson, as well as Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Taylor, Henry Green and the best of Aldous Huxley, all of whom I regard as rather more important than Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, whom I also enjoy. I ought also to include my friends Iain Sinclair and J.G. Ballard in that list. Wall’s prose has become steadily more assured and his accuracy of touch and observation astonishing. Like Wilson a relatively late starter as a novelist, he has a breadth of range which marks him from most of his contemporaries, a fascination with what you might call visionary scientific themes, with perceptions of sanity and a post-modern sophistication regarding the nature of contemporary capitalist society. If his technique seemed a little limited in his earlier novels (echoing something of Ackroyd’s literary mysteries or Nye’s novels which move back and forth between one period of time and another) he has now broadened that method admirably and in China has given us a formidable social novel which has all the virtues of a modern novel while confronting important post-modern issues. His characters are drawn from life, as are his backgrounds. They are emblematic without ever being caricatures and remain recognisable with no danger of becoming stereotypical. It’s rare for me to want to interview a writer and apart from a political interview with Andrea Dworkin I haven’t done so in print, as far as I recall, since the early 1980s when I was asked to interview Angus Wilson for the Radio Times on the advent of his The Old Men at the Zoo serialised on BBC TV. In that case I was, as it turned out, talking to an old friend close to the end of his career, in Alan Wall’s case I am interviewing a new friend, whom I have never met face to face, at a relatively early point in his career, though, after five novels, a volume of short stories and two volumes of poems, not to mention a novella, essays and reviews in such periodicals as The London Magazine and The Spectator, it hardly seems fair to describe him in those terms. It would probably be fairer to say that I am interviewing him at a point where he is just beginning to be recognised by a wider public for the extraordinarily talented writer he is. China has received excellent reviews in most of the prominent English national journals and was highly praised by, among others, M. John Harrison in The Guardian and by Andrew Hedgecock who also interviewed him in The Third Alternative in May 2003.

“Richard Dadd in Bedlam,” republished here, is a relatively slight story by Wall, but one which seemed a good introduction to his work. I began my conversation by asking him about his new novel, White Ivory, currently in progress.

Alan Wall: White Ivory is dynastic. I suppose China was too, but in a skeletal manner. Here I’m intrigued by the inheritance of empire, and the white ivory of Africa seemed a suitably dangerous and ambiguous emblem of it. There’s a curiosity about ivory products which, if you did believe in the decline of the west, might give more ammunition for your convictions: the things we make grow ever more trivial as the clock ticks off the hours. The more of them we can make with the aid of machines, and the greater the profit accruing to such mass production, the less worth keeping is the result of our labours.

Look at the Romanesque ivories in the V and A. They really are astonishingly beautiful. Reliquaries, gospel covers, crucifixes, portraits of the saints: every item is pitched at a level of spiritual intensity, and fashioned by a craft that is only possible through spiritual intensity, which we now find remarkable, though to some extent it must then have been routine, in the way that an icon painter’s work is routine; in the way that daily meditation for a Buddhist monk is routine. Interesting how banal we have made the word routine. Routine merely implies the necessity of repetition. To be always craving the new is to be condemned to triviality. You can’t learn anything, in the arts or out of them, without routine.

Even the ivories made for pure leisure and enjoyment, like the Lewis chessmen, are beautiful.

Move on six or seven hundred years and check what’s on the ivory counters: billiard balls, shaving brushes, some expensive women’s combs. Elaborate bindings for expensive notebooks to be filled with expensive trivialities in exquisite copperplate script. Can’t help but make you ponder for a while on the gifts of time.

And so this family inheritance, the source of the family wealth, such as it is, runs through the book, makes people look back on so many dead elephants, so many hours of labour, so many black, sweating faces so many thousands of miles away. The relatively worthless products of mass-produced Fenshawe Ivory were used to buy some beautiful early ivories, in that classic pattern of using the wealth of industry to finance the arts. We buy the past, not noticing its indictment of the present. There’s surely a parallel here with any achievement in the arts: you can buy it with your life, but you can’t rent it by the day.

A late scion of this family, William, is now a philosophy lecturer. I suppose I couldn’t help but think of that extraordinary essay by Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, where he more or less says that when we can’t make history any more, we philosophize about it instead. When the intensity of action burns out, we’re left with the intensity of thought to fill the vacuum.

There’s a shadow behind this book of course: Heart of Darkness. I’m bringing the theme of that book back home to the place the original book starts out from. England. Finance. Control. Wealth and guilt, two themes that obsess me.