The Fall, Albert Camus

 The Heaney Letters can progress steadily during what is usually an Irish week at Cheltenham. Stewart Lee's books make their point time and again at bedtime providing a good example of why it's sometimes a good idea not to read all of a writer in one go. There are further weighty volumes on Shostakovich and Dorothy Parker in waiting before those projects are completed. Sometimes one has more on the go than seems right but on an average day at school one would be expected to take in Maths, Chemistry, Latin and French, say, all in one day so thank heavens there was the respite of English. In the meantime I read The Fall by Camus. It's only 100 pages and one realizes that one ought to be reading, or re-reading, literature itself and not only 'about' it.

The Fall has as its abiding image that of the suicide attempt overheard by its central character whose paragon assessment of himself is undone by his shame at not jumping in to rescue them. By extension we are thus aware of his fall from a state of grace and the agonies of self-doubt he sets out in his confessional monologue. His name is Clamence which, surely, like Mersault in L'Etranger, has echoes of significant meaning, clemency - with all available religious overtones.

While he's the opposite of Mersault who we imagine not having much to say for himself, Clamence is not one you'd ideally find yourself chosen by as the audience for his anxieties but they are similar in finding moral vacuums inside themselves. As in Engleby by Sebastian Faulks, many years ago, it was chilling to find quite so many resonances with oneself in Clamence's self-absorption,

it seemed to me that at the time I felt the need of love. Obscene, isn't it? In any case I experienced a secret suffering, a sort of privation that made me emptier and allowed me, partly forced to it, and partly just out of curiosity, to make a few commitments. Inasmuch as I needed to love and be loved., I thought I was in love. In other words, I acted the fool.

The 'fallen' human condition, being absurd, compromises us, being unable to regain the unfallen condition which might be why death is such a common motif in Camus. While in life he was full of political commitment and apparently approaching a kind of sainthood as such, in philosophy the idea of death provided an absolute if all too simplistic way out of solipsistic meaninglessness.

Novels don't need to be long to be masterpieces and The Fall is a succinct analysis of the conundrum of 'being human', Clamence being a bore on the subject of himself and yet, we might think, profound if bleak. 

In traditional terms it's not really a novel, it's more of an essay, deeply ironic with an unreliable narrator that we can't be expected to like but perhaps end up with more sympathy for than we thought we would have. I'm not saying it's better than The Plague or L'Etranger but I will say that if there's ever been a more artful fiction writer then unless it's James Joyce I don't think I've read them.