This month features: Heart’s Journey in Winter, James Buchan, Panther, 1860461441, £6.99 |
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‘..there is a kind of ostentation in claiming to labour long and lovingly over the form of one’s work. There even arises, sometimes, a precosity of conciseness (for labouring at one’s material usually means reducing it)…’
(Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, pg 63)
That’s a wonderful phrase, ‘precosity of conciseness’ – and it almost applies to James Buchan’s prose in Heart’s Journey in Winter.
Almost applies, I’d say, because in his case, certainly in the case of this novel, the consciseness works: it’s a thriller, and it is thrillingly tight, both in construction and style.
James Buchan, as his blurb says, ‘was for ten years a foreign correspondent of the Financial Times, reporting from the Middle East, Germany and Central Europe…’
Journalists turning to fiction often lack something – a quality that’s very hard to describe but which I would call ‘liquidity’. This is to suggest both an economy and a sufficiency of words: words that are fluid, not desiccated; words that can intermingle, don’t just clack against one another.
One of the most basic differences between journalists and novelists is that journalists write expecting to be cut, novelists in hopes that each and every word is necessary to the whole. Novelists, to put it crudely, search for ‘le mot juste’; journalists follow house style.
Most news articles are structured around an opening sentence that gives you all you really need to know of the story. What comes after is verification and colour.
The opening sentence of a novel may do many things but it will never tell you everything.
‘Gretchen Lightner opened the apartment door.’
And?
‘She looked older than in West Germany. I smelled piss and brown coal. Behind her, a chair scraped on board or lino. She said:
“Have you come to kill me, young man?”’
Michael Reynolds in Hemingway The Paris Years gives a beautiful summary of what James Buchan is doing here:
‘This technique, advocated by [Ezra] Pound, was simple yet demanding: let action speak for itself. Without telling readers how to respond, what to feel, how to judge, let images convey meaning. If action is presented truly, precisely, using only its essential elements, then readers, without being told, will respond emotionally as the writer intended.’
Novelists work by implication; journalists must state – the closest they usually come to implication is innuendo.
In Heart’s Journey in Winter, James Buchan pushes this style about as far as it can go – at least, as far as it can go in a literary thriller. A poem by J.H.Prynne is terser still, more allusive. But, compared to Heart’s Journey in Winter, John le Carre’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold seems highly expository, almost like a briefing. That’s perhaps necessary: the quiet adventures of George Smiley take place within an overwhelmingly beaurocratic world. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is a brilliant book, archetypal; Heart’s Journey in Winter feels like a farewell to that same form: the Cold War Thriller.
‘When the Berlin Wall fell down, it buried not just the division of Germany but a way of looking at the world. The Cold War petrified the map of Europe at the state of mid-century, and also the societies on both sides of the divide, notions of history and right, the way men and women arrange matters between them, habits of ruling and doing business. In the crackup, a new language came into use which could no longer describe the old order.’
Buchan’s hero, Richard Fisher, follows a trajectory in strict obedience to the genre: he tries to save the world; he falls for a dangerous woman; world and woman become indistinguishale.
‘She reached up to my wrist, unclasped my fingers, took the bottle of wine, put it to her mouth and drank from it. She handed the bottle back to me and said: “So what are you doing here?”’
That’s Polina Mertz, and with this transferred kiss her and Richard’s intricate geo-political love story begins.
Having said what I did about journalistic writing and a lack of liquidity, you might be expecting me to say that James Buchan bucks the trend. And, in a way, he does – but by heading in the opposite to expected stylistic direction: word-dryness, word-separateness. There is a great deal of information in each of Buchan’s sentences; sometimes you have to read them two or three times. Usually, I’d say this is a bad thing. In his case, it’s part of the game of misunderstanding.
However, Heart’s Journey in Winter has, in its form, been written anti-journalistically. It is uncuttable; everything that might be cut has been. To the point where ‘a precosity of conciseness’ comes into play.
Here is a train journey through Germany.
‘The railway to Cologne runs over farmland. There are small fields under beets or cabbages, with no fences between them, just a new crop or plough to mark where one field ends and another begins. On the horizon is an abandoned office block, the Wesseling gas-cracker, the towers of Cologne cathedral; as if, on this tedious plain, scale and history had disintegrated. Transmission lines lope out of sight. Somewhere, parallel to the tracks, is a slabby 1930s autobahn. Also the phlegmatic Rhine.’
Here is all Germany.
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