Time and other stories

I'm not entirely against the way that some novels mix up time so that one isn't told everything in strict, linear, chronological order. There can be reasons for it. 

Time might not be quite what those of us who think we're trapped in it think it is but there's more reason to believe in it than there is, say, God.

But, on the other hand, while I can deal with some flashbacks, a bit of back story and a certain amount of shifting about, Maggie O'Farrell's After You'd Gone splinters time into such small fragments that it risked blurring into an eternal present.

Maybe that is the point but I will always remember reading the blurb on Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, in the 1970's, that (something like) not a word was wasted. That is certainly what a good poem should be like and there's no reason why a novel, which is also a piece of creative writing shouldn't be so, too. While After You'd Gone is rich in well-observed circumstantial detail, it's not obvious how the axototl that John keeps in a glass tank contributes to the story.

We are told that you can't mention a gun in a story unless it's going to be used or, I dare say, significantly not used. So, what does the axototl (pictured) do apart from cast a mournful eye on Alice like an unwitting harbinger of doom. Again, maybe that is the point but it's not for the reader to justify everything the author throws in, it's for the author to justify it to the reader.

I don't want to become a 'critic', it's an awful word that implies fault finding and I only want to enjoy good books and good writing. Maggie O'Farrell brings as much convincing 'life' to this book as she does to those others recently mentioned even if The Marriage Portrait remains the top recommendation.

Such a shortfall of redemption comes far too late and is less than we are offered in King Lear. Is that the point, or is it more straight-forwardly more like Romeo and Juliet in that there, but for foolish loyalties, could have been a genuine and credible attempt at 'love'.

Not all of us believe that 'what will survive of us is love' and it was most gratifying to read Wendy Cope, among all her other homespun wisdom, writing to D. M. Thomas in 1985 that,

What will survive of us will be quoted out of context.

 

I dare say we will all continue to believe in what we want to believe despite all evidence to the contrary. It might have seemed to me I found evidence that After You'd Gone wasn't a good novel but it still worked. There's a bit more to it than applying rules to such things. That's not how it works at all.