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Coe: talented writer |
Coe’s great humour deserts him in a tale of suffering
The Rain Before It Falls. By Jonathan Coe Penguin Viking £I7.99. Order this book
JONATHAN Coe is a brutal taskmaster. Brutal most of all to himself, I suspect.
At the end of reading his latest novella-length novel, The Rain Before It Falls, I was reminded of Emily Dickinson’s intuitive poem which begins: “Much madness is divinest sense.”
How could his narrator, 73-year-old Rosamund, whose funeral takes place right at the beginning, have pinned all her hopes of happiness on a blind young relative, Imogen, whom she meets all too briefly at her 50th birthday in Belsize Park, but stays obsessed with for the rest of her life?
There can only be one explanation. Rosamund is attracted to suffering for the sake of suffering, as are many of the women in the story she feels compelled to leave behind for Imogen.
Rosamund leaves 20 photographs, with accompanying explanatory tapes, in the hope “it will give you a context, in which to understand the difficult things, the painful things you will hear at the end”. Her conclusion involves her having to have the last word: “There is a story that you don’t know, Imogen. A story about your family, and me, and most important of all, about yourself. Perhaps your – perhaps the people who brought you up, have told you some of it. Some distortion of it, most likely. But they cannot know the truth, because only I know that”.
The trouble is that her story is such a dismal and long-suffering one that by the end we just don’t care what happens to her any more. Jonathan loves the machinations involved contriving tricksy plots out of the ether.The plot of The House of Sleep was tricksy in the extreme. But he still managed to transform it into a work of art. Like A Fiery Elephant, his biography of the novelist and film-maker B S Johnson, ends with his suicide. But he managed to reinvent the writing of biography, which is its redeeming feature.
Surprise surprise, Rosamund’s death at the end of The Rain Before It Falls is a similarly tragic cul de sac. But there are no redeeming features this time. Every talented writer is entitled to disappoint his most ardent fans by churning out a turkey now and again. Jonathan is no exception to this rule. Before he puts pen to paper again, he should take heed of Emily Dickinson’s eight line poem, which I now quote in its entirety:
Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
’Tis the majority
In this, as all, prevails
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur, –you’re straightway dangerous.
And handled with a chain
As long as he knows consciously he is attracted to writing about pain-filled characters and situations, he may live to entertain us with his humour, as he did so magnificently in The Rotters Club, one more time. It would be madness with his talent for him not to do so.
John Horder
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