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| The dream of the Great Unfinished Novel Nabokov didn't finish The Original of Laura, so we'll never know how good it might have been – and that's the key to its tantalising appeal"For all sad words of tongue or pen / the saddest are these: 'it might have been!'" John Greenleaf Whittier's lines seem particularly resonant this week as, after a 30-year wait, Vladimir Nabokov's The Original of Laura is finally publilshed. It takes its place among the ranks of other posthumously-published unfinished novels such as F Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon, Mervyn Peake's Titus Alone, Truman Capote's Answered Prayers, and Charles Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Putting aside the ethical debate as to whether any of these novels should have seen the light of day (a little more acute in the case of Nabokov, as he specifically requested The Original of Laura to be destroyed), the amount of interest generated by such titles suggests an enduring fascination with the Great Unfinished Novel. Now I know the addition of the word Great here is a tad presumptuous, but surely this is what we're hoping for? We've come to terms with the all-too-likely possibility that the GUN in question will not bear close comparison with the author's finished works, but we still like to think that had the GUN been completed it would have been able to hold its own in their company. After all, no one wants to spend time reading a MUN (Mediocre Unfinished Novel) or a DRUN (Downright Rotten Unfinished Novel). Though no doubt there are more of these out there than we'd care to admit.Obviously, the problem here is that we have no way of knowing how any of these GUNs would have turned out had the authors in question not died before finishing them, or even if they'd have been completed at all: for who's to say that The Last Tycoon wouldn't have collapsed under the strain of the early death of the main protagonist and a narrative perspective that seems hard to maintain even in the 100 or so pages we do have? Similarly, would Titus Alone have scaled the same heights as Titus Groan and Gormenghast to justify making what seems a perfectly balanced pair of novels into a trilogy? Or would it merely have cast a flawed shadow over the brilliance of the first two works and become the literary equivalent of Godfather III?Of course, this is all academic. (To quote Nabokov's greatest and most infamous creation, Humbert Humbert: "I am just winking happy thoughts into a little tiddle cup".) Also, it is grossly unfair to the deceased authors. Unable to defend or explain themselves, they are no doubt spinning in their graves at the thought of their unpolished prose being dissected and pawed over by not-so-gentle readers. Yes, we know (if the biographies are to be believed) that writers are a clay-footed bunch at best, but nevertheless we expect them to write on through the booze and the blackouts and whatever personal traumas are assailing their lives. At the very least, we expect them to have the common decency to finish off any major works before their final surrender. And here, for me, is another interesting aspect of GUNs: they make us realize how random art (and life) actually is. While it seems impossible to imagine a world without Shakespeare, Joyce, Dickens and other members of the Cannon Gang, the existence of the GUN makes us realize that the canon only exists by chance and is not the inevitable force of nature we like to think it is. At the same time the GUN also gives us a tantalising glimpse of a whole new imaginary literary landscape. After all, even Lolita only escaped death by fire thanks to the intervention of Vera Nabokov and we have Max Brod to thank for Kafka.So maybe we shouldn't expect too much of the GUN. While justifiably sighing over what might have been, perhaps we should also be grateful for being allowed this voyeuristic peek at a frozen work in progress, and realise just how lucky we are to have the great finished novels we do. For now though, let's give Nabokov and co the benefit of the doubt. Let's believe that The Original of Laura would have been as beguiling and focused as Lolita and Pale Fire, and not an overly baroque riddle such as later works, Look at the Harlequins! and Ada (obviously am hoping for the former but girding myself for all evidence to point to the latter).So in this spirit of goodwill, what is your favourite GUN? The one work you'd like to have seen realise its full potential? For me, it has to be The Last Tycoon. I love to imagine my earlier reservations would've been laughed off by a clean and sober Fitzgerald and the finished work combine the control of The Great Gatsby with the ambitious emotional sweep of Tender is the Night, to be hailed as Fitzgerald's true masterpiece. (Ah, "my little cup brims with tiddles...") Vladimir NabokovFictionWayne Gooderhamguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
Cook like activists with 'Ingredients for Peace' recipes Ingredients for Peace is a new cookbook that offers recipes from more than 60 Nobel Peace Prize laureates and peace activists. rssfeeds.usatoday.com |
Ransom by David Malouf Tom Holland says that it takes a special kind of foolhardiness to go head to head with HomerIf Classic FM published fiction, then Ransom is the kind of novel that would surely result. David Malouf's reworking of the climactic episode of the Iliad demonstrates that epics are no less susceptible than symphonies to being chopped up and repackaged in accessible, bite-size chunks. As slim and spare as Homer's great poem is immense, Ransom starts at the moment when Hector, noblest of the princes of Troy, has been slain at the hands of Achilles, deadliest and most god-like of the Greeks. Savage with grief for his beloved cousin, Patroclus, whom Hector had killed, Achilles vents his rage and misery on the Trojan prince's corpse. Dragging the body behind his chariot, so that it is left a mere "thing – bloody and unrecognisable", he refuses either to have it burned or to ransom it.The scene is set for one of the most wrenching episodes in world literature: when Priam, Hector's father, travels to Achilles' camp, falls to his knees, and begs for the return of the corpse. "I have endured what no one on earth has ever done before," he says. "I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son."No one, and certainly not a writer as talented as Malouf, can go far wrong with material like this. As in the Iliad, so in Ransom, the moment when Priam finally meets Achilles and states his mission brings a lump to the throat. Both the lyricism of his prose and the delicacy of his characterisation enable Malouf to avoid the risk of bathos that so often stalks novelists when they try to update epic. He also manages to avoid another tripwire with his treatment of the gods: the immortals, though they manifest themselves throughout the novel, tend to do so elliptically, appearing on the margins of Priam's vision, or else by revealing personal knowledge of a character that no mere mortal could be expected to know.Why, then, despite its many qualities, does Ransom disappoint? The problem is that Malouf does not do enough with his source material. To be sure, there are some wonderful felicities of invention: a passage where Priam imagines what his life might have been as a slave, "with a smell on me that I had taken till then to be the smell of another order of beings", is powerfully unsettling; the character of the mule-loving carter who drives Priam to Achilles is a particularly well-drawn addition to Homer's roster; the foreshadowing of Priam's death at the hands of Achilles' son is indeed, as Malouf asserts, "a joke of the kind the gods delight in, who joke darkly".Yet none of these virtues can quite outweigh the nagging feeling that anyone who wants to read about Priam's ransoming of his dead son would be much better off picking up Homer's own account. When, at the end of the Iliad, a tearful Helen hails Hector as the "dearest to me of all my husband's brothers" and salutes his "gentle temper", we are moved because we too, having read the 24 books of the poem, know precisely the quality of the man she is mourning. In Malouf's novel, Helen is a noticeable absentee and Hector himself little more than a cipher. As a result, nothing in the novel can compare for emotional impact with the poem's final line: "And so the Trojans buried Hector breaker of horses."To go head to head with a writer as great as Homer requires a very special brand of foolhardiness. Perhaps that is why the most effective novelisations of his poetry have tended to be those marked by a sense of either humility or exuberant brashness. The versions of the Iliad and Odyssey told for children, for instance, rarely pretend to be much more than a straightforward redrafting of the original story; contrariwise, a science-fiction novel such as Dan Simmons's Ilium, which translates the Trojan war to the improbable setting of 30th-century Mars, succeeds precisely by virtue of its full-throated audacity. As it is, Ransom falls between the two stools: neither true enough to Homer, nor sufficiently untrue to him either.Tom Holland's Millennium is published by Abacus.FictionClassicsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
How I met my long-lost half brother Matthew Hall was 12 when he discovered he had a half-brother. Twenty years later, he traced him via the internet and sent him an email ...A fragment of memory survives from when I was three years old: a small blond boy, a little older than me, playing on the swing in our back garden. I didn't know it then, but he was Adrian, my half-brother, whom I wouldn't see again for another 30 years.I was born in 1967; my mother was 19, and my father 23. In the London of the giddy 1960s there was a lot of partying and consequently a fair number of little accidents. I don't know the precise circumstances (it has never seemed quite decent to ask), but 18 months before I was born, my father had had a son by a girlfriend who went on to marry his best friend. You might think that this was a recipe for an almighty fall-out, but they seem to have reached a surprisingly civilised arrangement: the mother and her husband agreed to raise the baby boy as their own, and glossed over the issue of biological parenthood. In fact, until Adrian's family moved away a couple of years later, all concerned seemed to have remained on amicable terms.I knew nothing of this until I was 12, when, in a characteristically confessional moment, my mother spilled the beans. My parents had separated when I was 10, and for a few unsettled years I had lived mostly with my grandparents. The information that I had a half-brother called Adrian wasn't something I could do much with at the time. Living in an out-of-the-way cottage with my maternal grandmother, for whom divorce and extramarital shenanigans were a cause for deep and profound shame, it wasn't something to be discussed.I was 32 and happily married with two young sons of my own when I received two unexpected pieces of information from my mother through a friend of hers who had remained in touch with Adrian's parents. The first was that he had emigrated to America some years before – a little unhappy, it was suggested, with his life in the UK. The second was that he had never been told who his father was. Being a writer, my imagination naturally conflated the two facts and created an image of a moody exile, listlessly in search of himself. Months passed, and a nagging feeling that it was incumbent upon me to do something – for his sake if not for mine – grew stronger.I wrestled with conflicting feelings. I knew my mother wouldn't have any objection to my tracking Adrian down – she's all for getting everything out there (usually while I cough uncomfortably into my sleeve and mutter something about the weather) – but concern at how my dad (who hadn't seen Adrian since he was a small boy) might feel, and how Adrian's mother and adoptive father would react, stopped me pressing ahead. As the child of divorced parents, my overriding instinct was to avoid emotional confrontation at all costs. I had always cast myself as the family peacemaker and calmer of troubled waters; shocking a grown man with the information that his father wasn't who he believed him to be raised the prospect of ugly recriminations.But the more I thought about it, the more this decision seemed to represent some strange, belated rite of passage.One morning, I made an impulsive decision to act. A few internet searches brought up the names and email addresses of a handful of likely candidates in north-east America. I emailed Adrian to say that he may or may not already know that he was my half-brother, apologised for the shock if he didn't, but I felt it was something he ought to know. As I recall, I signed off telling him not to worry if he didn't feel like responding; I'd understand. I hit send, and a second later the email arrived in Adrian's inbox in Rhode Island (and those of a few other bemused New Englanders, as well).There must have been something in the air: I was soon to learn that, only weeks before, Adrian's mother had finally written to tell him that his father wasn't her husband, but a man he had never heard of. He was still reeling when I pinged into his life. It took a few days for him to respond. At first it was a short, tentative message explaining that he was still processing the information. I waited nervously. A few weeks later, a much fuller and more enthusiastic email arrived. He was keen to see me on his next visit to the UK and to meet his biological father.It took more than a few glasses of wine to summon the courage to talk to my dad, who had never mentioned Adrian to me, to tell him what I had done. To my delight he wasn't shocked or angry; a little embarrassed, perhaps, but underneath touchingly pleased. I got the impression that he would have been too shy ever to have approached Adrian on his own initiative – I imagine he may not have felt entitled to – but I could see that he was as keen to meet him as I was.Adrian and I met several months later at my house in London. Adrian had sent a picture of himself before we saw each other in the flesh, so I knew he was taller than me, built more like my younger brother – both 6ft-plus to my modest 5ft 8in. But as I opened the front door to him, there was an instant recognition. Within minutes, it was really as if we had known each other all our lives. A few days later, I arranged for Adrian and my dad to come for dinner and, heart in mouth, introduced them for the first time as father and son. They politely shook hands, and after a little nervous laughter sat at the table and chatted about this and that. There were no great declarations or eruptions of emotion, but instead a deeply reassuring sense that these two men liked each other and might become good friends, which, I'm glad to say, is precisely what has happened.The most striking thing for me was how similar Adrian and I were. We're both undemonstrative, have a certain sang-froid and tend to be the person in the room gauging and, when necessary, lowering the emotional temperature. We're both family men and even like the same food – bakewell tart topping the list. More profoundly, having found each other, we were able to understand more about ourselves. Adrian, now a professional soccer commentator for ESPN, had inherited his (hitherto inexplicable) passion for sport from our father; I could finally be assured that my reserve wasn't the result of some childhood trauma but wired into my DNA.The sense of relief we both felt rippled outwards. My full brother, to whom I have always been very close, hit it off with Adrian just as easily as I had. Adrian's half-brother and sister took it in their stride, and all of us and our respective partners got together as soon as we could for a party. Suddenly we had a large, noisy extended family and our kids had lots of new cousins.In recent years, we've had several joint holidays during which we've gradually formed a new family entity that has collectively processed the past and, through a determination to be together, (mostly) overcome the fear of upsetting the older generation. Initially, we all struggled a little with the fact that the pleasure we felt in knowing each other was itself a form of transgression – a breach of a secret kept for over three decades – but before long a sense emerged that it was time to move on and claim the present for ourselves and our children. All we wanted for our parents was for them to put any residual guilt aside and be glad that good consequences had ensued. To a large extent, that has happened.I've recently been to the US and spent a very happy weekend with Adrian and his family in Connecticut. I watched him record a show at ESPN's studios and felt very proud of all that he had achieved. Only three days before, our father, still a working  musician, had stayed with them during an orchestral tour and they had all gone to hear him play; a pleasure I had had for decades.Even as I write, I feel a twinge of apprehension that someone somewhere in the equation will feel awkward or let down, but I have to remind myself that even if that's the case, it doesn't outweigh the happiness that putting the missing pieces together has brought. Families are a complex knot, but they are with us for ever and how we deal with them is perhaps the biggest test of character we face in life. I'm overjoyed to have found Adrian and his brood, and I think he feels the same. And to our respective parents: you all did the very best you could and we wouldn't correct your little accident for the world.MR Hall's new novel, The Disappeared, is published by Pan Macmillan, £12.99FamilyParents and parentingCrime booksguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |
The digested read Chatto & Windus, £15On the one side there was Maman, on the other Nan. They were like the sun and the moon and in the interstices between them the seeds of Bettina's defeatism grew. She knew that a great deal was expected of her because her mother was Vanessa Bell, and yet she implicitly understood that she was somehow unimportant in the mythology of the Bloomsbury group. Perhaps if she too were to try her hand at fiction she might believe herself less ineffectual."I don't think that will help, Angelica, I mean Bettina," Maman said wearily, arching her eyebrows in resignation towards Virginia, "especially if you are going to wheel out some of the same family stories you told in your autobiography 25 years ago." But Bettina was not to be deterred. Duncan Grant, he of the cornflower eyes, could be Jamie. Papa Clive could be Howard, and her brothers Julian and Quentin, Justin and Giles. If only she could remember how she had once been rude to Howard, or how she had felt when Maman had told her Jamie was her real father, then maybe her fiction would sing like a nightingale! But sadly she couldn't, so the first story petered out into inconsequentiality.Undiscouraged, Bettina shrugged off the chrysalid mantle to re-emerge as Agnes for the second shocking episode. For you, this may be instantly forgettable, yet for me it is a story of my own unimaginable cruelty.I was 16 when my parents sent me abroad to perfect my French. Justin had gone to China and I was like the tiniest chick on the edge of the nest when I became friends with Juliana and Gilles in Paris. I felt out of my depth with people who were older than me, so I didn't say very much, though I did imagine myself to be Jane Eyre.The second world war was a particularly beastly period but I wasn't very interested in politics so I just did a bit of painting, and it wasn't until some years later I met Juliana and Gilles again. By now they had had a rather unattractive daughter called Aurore, whom I tried to befriend. Aurore turned out to be better than me at everything. I now see that wasn't difficult, but I could not see that then, so I wrote Juliana a letter in which I wasn't very nice about Aurore. How I regret that, especially as Aurore died after plastic surgery and Juliana died soon after! I've also just remembered their real names were Sylvie, Zoum and Francois Walter, so I'm not really sure why I changed them.My third story isn't really a story at all. It's just a few notes about how Mischa – that's my real dad! – might have felt on his 93rd birthday just before he died. But my publishers seem to be happy, as they think any old rubbish about my family will sell. "Just bash out one more and we're done," they say and I oblige.I am now Helen and am in my 70s and living in France. Helen realises she must have got married and had three children at some point but can't remember much about them, so she'd rather write about a young couple, Carlotta and John, and their badly brought-up son Pierre. Carlotta was a tricky woman; she really didn't know much about painting at all, even though, like Helen, she was an artist. John was altogether more intriguing – an Australian no less! Helen rather took a fancy to him and, in the classical tradition of Maecenas, tried to advance his career as a photographer by arranging exhibitions for him and buying some of his crap pictures.Having befriended them both for 20 years, Helen received a letter from Carlotta saying she'd never really liked her as she'd obviously preferred her husband. Helen has since wondered if she had been a bit patronising, but, after much deliberation, she has now decided Carlotta was just a miserable cow. Friendships can be very tiring, so Helen is having a nap.Digested read, digested: It's really dull.John Craceguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds feeds.guardian.co.uk |