The Master’s Voice

Alice Munro (2000), The Love of a Good Woman, Vintage, London, pp. 340

‘The Love of a Good Woman’ is an anthology of eight stories by Nobel Laureate Alice Munro. The stories bring out her native country Canada in its full splendor. Set in different time periods, seasons and moods, these stories plumb the Canadian life through the slow, pendulous prose that swings back and forth between memory, love, loss and longing of its characters. The terrain of Munro’s narrative is like the peat bogs that are ubiquitous to her landscape, it is slippery and difficult to navigate, but buries within something precious and clarifying. You journey to the end of the story and wait for the story to reappear in its entirety, illuminating parts that you did not know existed in the first reading. That is part of the delectable satisfaction in entering Munro’s beguiling world.

Truth and Illusion

The book begins with the story ‘the love of a good woman’. The good woman has cocooned herself in a role that she plays to perfection. Just when it seems life is invariant; a small opening comes into sight. There is a road that could lead to new beginnings, but her rite of passage is through a test of truth that could make or break her life. We leave her at the beginning of this crossroad. Similarly, the story ‘Jakarta’ is a man’s journey to understand what he truly lost four decades ago. In the search for clarity, he meets with an old friend’s narrative that could either be the very truth or a tragic delusion of a broken heart. We leave such protagonists in the middle of their journey where new beginnings are just a corner away, shielded by a wall so deliberate and vile that we fear the outcome even as we know the inevitable has to happen.

A characteristic that simmers in this quiet cauldron is the echo in the narrative that ricochets and threatens the fragile worlds of our characters. A daughter visits her father’s clinic after aborting her child only to assist in another for a stranger. A grandmother plays the same silly game she used to entertain her daughter with, only to enter a dangerous territory with her grandchildren. Reverberating through this story is her own adolescent wanderlust, her daughter’s careful separation and the reunion with the next generation. There is always this echo from the past that spirals into something more tangible and intends to wreck the future.

A Woman’s World

Finally, there is the delicious perspective of women, forever becoming more of themselves, no matter what. They push through dreams and hopes, erotic fantasies and dangerous liaisons, adventures and wanderlust, nightmares and confounding labyrinth of their lives and memories, to emerge at new beginnings. It is in the stunning voices of these women that the world opens out and shuts down in unexpected ways in these stories.

This book is an excellent introduction to the master of short stories that Munro is. If difficult pleasures are what you are looking for, you have arrived home as a quiet winter sets in!

The Master of Spare Elegance

Kazuo Ishiguro (1989). The Remains of the Day, Faber and Faber, pp. 258

With the 2017 Nobel Prize in Literature coming to Japanese-born British writer, Kazuo Ishiguro, the turf of literary feud (since the award was given to Bob Dylan last year) has calmed down. Ishiguro, a literary polymath, has written seven novels in addition to screenplays, short fiction and lyrics. It is a great time to revisit one of his much-loved novels and the winner of the Man Booker Prize 1989, ‘The Remains of the Day’.

This novel is about the short journey that Stevens, the butler of the now decrepit Darlington Hall, takes across west countryside of England. Stevens has tirelessly worked for the distinguished family of Darlington Hall during the inter-war years, and the second world war. His old master is dead and in his place an American comes along, retaining Stevens as part of the ‘package of an old English house’. Stevens struggles to fit in the ‘new world’ of careless banter and informality. He feels a little lost, bereft of older ideals and notions of honour.

It is when Stevens is struggling with change, that an unexpected holiday comes. An opportunity to leave Darlington Hall for a few days gives him a chance to reflect on his life and work. He stumbles upon the truth about his lost love and his old master’s fall from esteem in the eyes of the world. It is a poignant journey of epiphany, but the realization of truth is by slow and painful degrees with the glacial chipping away at the fog of illusion that holds the protagonist intact.

Reflections on the Past

Stevens look at the past begins as a fairly straightforward narrative, with his neat, organized and sparse mind that never regrets. He believes that staunch loyalty to work and ‘dignity’ of conduct above mere competence, are what makes a butler truly ‘great’. He is looking back at himself at a time when the world has little use for his virtues and his place in the order of things stand precipitous. Happy and non-oblivious to the mechanization of the larger world of affairs that he stands by waiting every day, and the smaller microcosm of his own life, he evaluates and validates his life.

His contentment and pride are shattered by revelations that take place throughout his holidays. Often poignantly told to him directly by others who love him, he becomes aware of what he has lost. With a few pages to spare in the novel, we witness Stevens understanding his life for not just what it was, but also for what it could have been. He sees the trade-off, the point where there was a choice and how he missed it completely. And what he decides from there, is the rest of the story.

The theme of an unassuming protagonist and his journey towards truth is recurrent in Ishiguro’s works. In his other novel, ‘The Artist of the Floating World’, truth is stubbornly refused by the artist even as it stares at him. The acceptance of truth and the awareness of loss that comes with it, are done only when it is inevitable. Ishiguro takes his readers through these small inner worlds of people with great austerity and sympathy. The epiphany is not of the Joycean artist as a young man so that it reveals a world of possibilities ahead. It is the lives of individuals nearing the end of their lives, and the thick fog of possibilities that could have been is heart breaking. How Ishiguro’s protagonists negotiate these bargains forms the enduring philosophy of his works.