LIDIA VIANU

Alan Brownjohn and the Desperado Age

FICTION

THE NOVEL AS A EURO-TUNNEL,

OR THE WAY YOU TELL THEM, THE TRUTH AND NOTHING BUT

In poetry, Alan Brownjohn has devised a perfect hiding place. The blank despair of words conceals his particular sensibility, the innumerable small features, loves, likes and dislikes, that make him himself. Unlike many other poets, Alan Brownjohn feels safe behind his lines precisely because he does not confess. He is a highly discreet poet.

Fiction catches the poet unawares. Language comes too easily and there is no time for the novelist Alan Brownjohn to duck behind characters or plot. His voice comes through loud and clear. Without the robe of poetry, the prose-writer  blinks blinded by our curiosity and imagines he can continue the game, telling us ‘the truth and nothing but...’, which in his conception would mean the truth about all the others. Actually we are fascinated by the novelist himself. In  his novels, Brownjohn still plays hide-and-seek with his poetry readers, but this time he does it the Hansel and Gretel way, by scattering bits as he goes along, lest he should forget the way back and be trapped in the sensibilities of his readers. Unaware of how much of his own personality becomes visible, the novelist takes great pains to build heroes, plot, denouement, when all we hunt for, and find at last, is the moments when he utters his own thoughts, no matter under what guise, and we are there to pick each one.

The Way You Tell Them (1990, Andre Deutsch, London) has as a motto an excerpt from John Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera:

            ‘The valley is gone, and the gods with it; and now, every fool  in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half-an-hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton; which you think a lucrative process of exchange, you fools everywhere!’

It is indeed a matter of the way you tell them, as the same can be said about the tunnel between Britain and the Continent, which is actually copiously mocked at all through the novel that begins in London but ends with a writer’s death in the above mentioned space.

The very first words are a joke which, again, in an understatement that reminds strongly of poetic indirectness, evinces sarcasm. The joke deals with a prostitute that is called by that precise name to her face, and introduces the main hero of the novel, a political satirist who allows himself to be trapped into silence by the very tycoon he used to attack. Chris Lexham accepts a handsome cheque and does not realize that his real pay is in fact his own death, which closes the plot. This is how the novel ends, in an understatement again:

 ‘But – for a man like Lexham,’ exclaimed another, ‘to literally act the clown – tell public bar jokes – and caper around just for people’s amusement – he’d have to be pretty well mad.’

‘Or pretty well rewarded,’ I said.

The reward of self-betrayal or self-sale is death. The last words are a melancholy indirect afterthought. The novel spells nothing very clearly for the reader, who is compelled to guess everything, chasing the author’s opinions behind the hints, half-statements, character descriptions. In this novel written in 1988, but dealing with the nineties in a kind of dystopic world – the novel is a dystopia of sorts, beyond any doubt – , Brownjohn the poet is still haunting Brownjohn the prose writer. In To Clear the River, adolescent novel, poetry reigned. Now poetic devices are resorted to instead of fictional situations. Soon – The Long Shadows – fiction will struggle free from poetry. But not yet.

Just like The Long Shadows, this second novel is witnessed by a character who, a writer himself, records a writer’s life,  or rather, a writer’s death, this time, in an obituary. It begins in the first person – ‘They asked me to write Chris’s obituary.’ – but goes on as a description of Chris as the main hero, in the third person, by the narrating literary witness, who seems to know everything. Traditional omniscience and Desperado coy reticence in handling all the ropes of the story join hands.

The man who writes the obituary stays unknown. The novel begins with the first paragraph of his article and ends with a comment on the hero’s death, stated from the second page of the novel:

‘Chris Lexham, whose death in a shooting incident at the Folkestone Euro Tunnel Terminal was reported last night, was one of the most talented and controversial literary figures and social critics of his generation.’

Like Conrad’s Marlow  in Heart of Darkness and even Lord Jim, Brownjohn’s obituary writer is not a real hero, but an attempt at understanding. He is made to think:

‘The best I can do is credit him with wondering what exactly he was doing when he set out for the first, wildly unexpected lunch date on that bright spring morning...’

Chris lives a decade on from 1989, in the future, and the author of the novel plays constantly with the idea of slipping into dystopia, then retracing his steps back to the present. Certain details are unfamiliar and obviously imagined in order to make us feel the thrill of sharing with the author the forbidden knowledge of what is to come. Such is an advertising balloon in the sky, that has ‘the words ‘The New Millennium’ on it, as if some corporation owned the thousand years which would be starting in a few months’ time.’ Brownjohn’s book takes place in between millennia, almost between worlds, inside the unfamiliar and the undesired, which might be a definition for Desperado dystopia.

            Brownjohn, just like Orwell or Huxley and their fanatic followers, tries his hand at creating several words for future realities. One of them is ‘Amalgamated Democratic Workers, or ADWs’, known in short as ‘Addies’. A member of this organization is seen by Chris to read Chris’s latest book, whose description very well fits Brownjohn’s attempt, too:

‘ a sustained outburst of satirical  indignation at the state of England in the late 1990s: a vibrant mixture of prose fictions, polemical essays, and caustic cabaret sketches.’

In good Desperado tradition, literary genres are supposed to mix freely, and the innovation here is the joke as part of the narrative. But the jokes are just a façade, behind which both the imagined and the real writer bitterly hope to draw our attention to the shapes and dangers of the ‘power complex controlling all our lives.’  Money has become an a-moral, a-political, a-social, a-anything tyrant that brings death to the writer who dares unveil it. First Chris is bought, then he is thrown to the lions. All ideals are dead, morals, sympathy, human understanding are empty words, no longer understood by those who govern the world.

The issue Brownjohn chose for his dystopia is the use of ‘unmanned trains’ for the Euro Tunnel, financed by Sir Clive Deanley, who hopes to make even more money out of this, and ignores the protests  of common beings, concerned with travellers’ security, jobs, and the rest. Deanley  is director of many banks, controls the media empire and transportation, and has even been made a knight. He comes close to the Emperor figure and his empire is the whole world. He is described at the beginning of Brownjohn’s dystopic tale as a mafia head who is in the process of buying Chris, after his men have destroyed Chris’s theatre so methodically that no chair was left untouched and there was no hope of ever starting it again. He invites Chris for lunch, out of the blue, and turns up ‘smartly dark-suited with white shirt and neat dark grey tie’, a man in his sixties who is perceived by the satirical writer as a ‘monster.’

The book takes place at a time when water, source of life, is menaced: ‘water from British water companies was now mostly impure and unhygienic.’ An apocalyptic tinge darkens the narrative from beginning to end. It is a tale of dignity lost to money and life lost to the wrong cause.  Significantly, the book Brownjohn’s book is about is entitled England in the Night. Chris wrote it, not knowing that one night he would die in the Euro Tunnel, pushed over the brink by the ‘monster’ and killed inadvertently at first sight, but with an obvious plan for whoever reads The Way You Tell Them twice.

To begin with, Chris Lexham is fascinated by wealth and its apparent oddities. He is eager to please, and fights his immorality unwillingly. The suspense of the book lies in the simple question, Why is Deanley interested in Chris? The death of the satirical writer whom Deanley could not silence in any other way ends the novel as a suggested, though not very clear, answer. From the very beginning of his acquaintance with Deanley, Chris feels ‘trapped’, sees ‘no escape, no way out.’ Brownjohn creates in Deanley a non-character – very Desperado-like technique of ruining the human structure of all heroes – , an idea with a semblance of life. He pretends he needs to be compelled to laugh and that is why he resorts to Chris, the only person who can help him survive. Jokes alone can keep him away from food and daily stress. The price he claims he is prepared to pay is a handsome cheque, which will be used to reopen the destroyed theatre. Chris could never hope to do that on his own and stubbornly thinks that he will be free to go on criticizing the hidden powers as before. Deanley even asks him to do it, but the artificiality of this situation is transparent. Both Chris and the reader know that criticism is dead and Deanley’s empire has just acquired a new element.

Deanley explains: ‘the thing I really need is to be entertained.’ Chris’s formerly destroyed theatre, symbolically named The End of the World, will be sponsored by Deanley himself, because ‘It was a mistake I couldn’t stop before it was too late.’ The mistake is a question mark in Chris’s mind, as he is never sure who hired the men to thoroughly destroy his theatre. It was described by the papers as ‘vandalism.’ Actually, Deanley is, as he calls himself with pride, ‘the Great Manipulator.’ He owns everyone, from jobs to their innermost thoughts. The power of money is threatening that of the mind.

Invited to Deanley’s estate, where his every whim will possibly be gratified, Chris is warned by a friendly secretary: ‘Don’t go where he’s taking you tonight.’ Chris has no idea that Deanley means to launch the first unmanned train in the Euro Tunnel, in spite of furious protesters:

‘But I am going to put the first unmanned train on the rails tonight! (...) Thirty celebrity guests and sixty representatives of the press and broadcasting media will board it. (...) The Deanley Unmanned Euroshuttle will travel on the Loop through the Euro Tunnel to Calais.’

Deanley concludes that progress cannot be stopped, because ‘the world is at our feet,’ and Chris muses between brackets, ‘(And we, thought Chris, have the heaviest boots).’ Brownjohn does not waste much hope on the future, therefore.

Deanley calls his plan for the night narrated ‘a symbolic journey.’ History repeats itself. There are ‘fools’ in Ruskin’s time and at the end of the second millennium. People bow to speed and convenience like children obsessed with a new toy. And if they refuse to accept ‘progress’, there is always a Deanley to force them. All through the story, Chris is tortured by the desire to offend his host with his jokes, but, like the pianist’s nightmare in Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled, his attempt is lame. Deanley smothers him when he says:

‘I’m sponsoring Chris Lexham to say, and perform, exactly what he wants to. He’s a very rare person, these days, the writer who has the courage to speak out.’

Actually Chris’s freedom is lost the minute Deanley buys it with his cheque. Sponsoring freedom is the best way of killing it. Brownjohn is terrified by this lack of personal freedom, and this is an obsession in both this dystopia and the third novel, The Long Shadows, where the communist terror is joined by an instinctive fear of displacement. Actually, in Brownjohn’s opinion, it seems that capitalism and communism combine in a final fear caused by the reign of a totalitarianism, whether political or financial at its roots it no longer matters. Slavery is the future of mankind, whatever the road that takes us there.

Just like Ruskin, whom he quotes in his motto, Brownjohn despises the slaves of convenience, the future of material wealth and spiritual death, taking the defacement of the planet as the major symptom of the End. The Euro Tunnel is just one sign. The fact that Deanley wants an autonomous train, a mere machinery driving blindly into the arms of a bleak destiny, to cross it, points again to the almost Biblical menace of dehumanization. Just like Ruskin, he murmurs to himself, ‘the fools...’, when he writes: ‘Now that the Euro Tunnel is finished and working so well, and carrying so many English people across to spend their money on the continent each year...’

The atmosphere of the book is dark and oppressive. Everyone is a type. The psychology of the character is unimportant, and the plot is just a pretext to make us feel a dim, yet overwhelming revolt at the fact that everyone, the academic, the writer, the secretary, the actress (the list could go on if Brownjohn had felt like illustrating it)  are all enslaved to the power of money, in a soulless world of the future, where only the rich are ‘alphas’ (to use Huxley’s term for the privileged). The end of the novel is a demonstration of workers in favour of ‘Trains for Safety’. Ironically, Deanley himself is caught in the whirlwind of the demonstrators and briefly mistaken by them as one of theirs, addressed as ‘brother’:

            ‘I’m thinking it’s really marvellous of you to turn out for this. I mean, you’re no chicken are you! Don’t get me wrong. I’ll be at home with my feet up watching it on the telly when I’m your age. But you’ve turned out for us when you’re really needed. We appreciate it, brother.’

The irony Brownjohn used in poetry as a screen between us and his soul turns up again, this time as a reminder of the real theme of the novel, which is hatred of the dystopic world we are preparing for ourselves, with or without our being aware of what is going on. Deanley is taken aback for the first hour or so, but he soon makes his power felt and shows us that future we were afraid of a page ago is already here:

‘Don’t <brother> me!’ he shouted. ‘I’m nobody’s brother. I’m Sir Clive Deanley.’

The ‘Addies’ turn up and, after having vandalized Chris’s theatre (‘The End of the World’), annihilate this powerless demonstration of common, poor individuals. The novelist thinks with bitterness of ‘all his years of protest and dissent.’ Chris Lexham is inadvertently shot, mistaken for one of the multitude. Or shot because he has to be silenced somehow, because he is worse than one of the multitude, he is the voice of them all, mocking at money. Money cannot be mocked at, in Brownjohn’s dystopia. Chris’s fate is sealed by

‘a total deprivation of the ability to think, or do, anything, because you did not possess the breath to achieve it. If I had breath, when I regain breath, I will have time to react, recover myself, he knew that. I am going to react when I have breath to understand what is happening. But there is  no breath.’

As powerless as the teenager in the march described in To Clear the River, Chris is even more disappointed. He loses more than an ideal or the miracle of the first love, he wastes his life and it looks as if nothing could have prevented his death. Actually, the bitterly disappointed hero is Brownjohn’s forte, both in prose and in poetry.

The book goes victoriously on and on. The ‘Deanley Unmanned EuroShuttle (the DUE)’ makes its first trip through the EuroTunnel shortly after Chris’s death. The irony itself goes on:

‘The first journey of the DUE with its shining cargo of media celebrities outbid all other news (even the San Francisco earthquake and the Concorde disaster) for space in Deanley’s media, at least.’

The demonstration that had tried to prevent that trip is ‘ignored.’ Ruskin is at last present in a direct statement:

‘...daily making this trip at a lower cost than ever before, all because of private enterprise. Soon, everyone in Folkestone  could be in Calais in half an hour and everyone in Calais at Folkestone. And as a very wise old Victorian once said, what a marvellous exchange that would be!’

Brownjohn was delicately ironical in his poetry but he treads with heavy soles of sarcasm here. The novel ends with Chris’s obituary, that had been required on the first page. The unknown writer – another Desperado trick: the novel within a novel, the writer within another writer or about another (even dead) writer – wonders how ‘the End of the World’ could hope to mock at the top of ‘English society’ with permission from those lampooned. The paragraph about this insinuation that the dystopia cannot possibly be hindered by a mere satirist is not even published, or so the voice of its unknown author tells us in the end. We are all ‘rewarded’ with the future we seem to deserve. Brownjohn’s image of the future is forbidding. The Way You Tell Them, whether it be the truth and nothing but... or just a gloomy joke, is essential, both for understanding Brownjohn and for outlining a new Brownjohnian reader: the disappointed witness of a disappointed yet never disappointing text.