Pond Scum: Nunc Pro Tunc or We Should Be On By Now
By Steve Finbow
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As you read this, I am probably slumped over my desk unconscious after flying in on the red-eye from New York. I’m writing this week’s column a week before it’s due, so I may be in Sing-Sing Prison, or bobbing along bloated and stinking in the Hudson. Who knows? But, hopefully, I’m not. I hope that I’m in a London pub drinking Stella Artois and reading a book I bought from St Mark’s Bookshop. Flashback – I’m sitting in a bar in Manhattan meeting up with an old friend who I haven’t seen for 15 years. But that’s a flashback (analepsis) for you; for me, it’s a flashforward (prolepsis). I haven’t done it yet. But I will have done by the time the column is published. Or, if I am on form, and ended up completely pissed, I will not be able to finish the column and it will be inchoate and unlicked on my iBook and in my addled popcorn machine of a brain. Anyway, this bi-week’s column is about time and narrative. “You – just scream with boredom.”
By Nicholas Allanach
“Time – she flexes like a whore,” as David Bowie wrote: New York and London are five hours apart. When it’s noon in London, it’s 7am in New York City. I have been awake for six hours. Lola will not be awake for another two. When she wakes, I will have been awake eight hours and when we talk my day will be retrospective – “he speaks of senseless things” – and hers will be prospective – “in Quaaludes and red wine.” I live in flashback. She lives in flashforward. Britain is nostalgic – “I look at my watch it says 9:25 and I think ‘Oh God I’m still alive.’” And America is progressive – “Incestuous and vain, and many other last names.”
Let’s take a look at two novels published this year – Arthur & George by Julian Barnes and No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy. Arthur & George is a novel about the interconnecting lives of Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji. The setting is Edwardian London. The novel, painstakingly researched, is sometimes more biography and social history than fiction. The narrative is mostly bipartite and we learn about and inhabit the minds of Arthur and George. This is a novel about guilt, innocence, loyalty, prejudice, belief, and death. And so is No Country for Old Men: a story of Moss, a welder, who stumbles across a bag of money from a drug deal gone wrong, and Ed Tom Bell, a sheriff investigating the murders perpetrated at the site. Barnes’s novel is the story of a lost world: a world of imperialism, prejudice, a world that summons up London fog, Hackney carriages, capes, and deerstalker hats. McCarthy’s world is one of highways, motels, jeans, and random violence. Barnes’s language is liquid but stately. McCarthy’s is laconic but stealthy. Both novels are driven by dialogue – Barnes’s investigative and revealing, McCarthy’s terse and poetic. And both, in their own way, are detective novels. Barnes attempts to make past time reappear while McCarthy’s world is one of time invisible in the present. Barnes’s narrative is accretive: levels of consciousness revealed in layers of story – “Time – He’s waiting in the wings.” McCarthy’s is apocalyptic: the narrative surges towards the inevitable – “His script is you and me, boys.” Arthur & George is a flashforward to postcolonial discussions of empire, prejudice, and justice – the “regurgitating drain.” No Country for Old Men is a flashback waiting to happen – “The sniper in the brain.”
McCarthy’s use of “of” instead of “’ve” in the plupluperfect (or superpluperfect) tense – “if I had of found the money” not “if I had have found the money” – emphasises the modernity of the novel’s dialogue – it’s a shibboleth, dude. Barnes’s language is formal, poised – it is ironically urbane, old chap. Barnes uses both past tense (Arthur) and present tense (Arthur and George). The switch in tenses reminds us that Barnes is not writing a pastiche Edwardian novel (although his Sherlock Holmes pastiche is very good) but is writing a novel that is very (post)modern in its subject matter and stylistic bravado. “You – are not evicting time.” I don’t think it’s as good as Flaubert’s Parrot but then I love Flaubert and anything psittacine.
No Country for Old Men is as good as anything McCarthy has written. I must admit that when I first read All the Pretty Horses I thought it was set in the 19th century – Oops! Blood Meridian is my favourite McCarthy but No Country probably will be (after I’ve read it again – which I may have done by the time you read this). It’s Ernest Hemingway meets William Faulkner meets Elmore Leonard meets James Ellroy meets all-the-hardboiled-neo-noir-wannabes; McCarthy slaps ‘em around a bit and spits in the holes where their oh-so-jealous eyes used to be. “You – are not a victim.”
Right – it’s the next day and I’m 300 miles away from where I was when I started writing this – the column has moved in English space. To get a copy of the above, I emailed it to myself – that’s like… Oh, I have it… Remember when you were a kid and you walked along and threw a ball in the air and caught it but couldn’t work out how you could catch it if you were walking and how it didn’t drop behind you? Come on, some of you out there must be as ignorant about physics as I am. And, no, I wasn’t 16 at the time. “His trick is you and me, boy.” I threw the email up into cyberspace in Newcastle and then caught it in London and now I’m going to throw it up into cyberspace again and catch it when I get to New York.
This column is like a rocky relationship: I’ve given you time. I’ve given you space. What more do you want? “Falls wanking to the floor.”
Lyrics to Time © David Bowie
Click here to read previous Pond Scum columns.
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Click here for Steve Finbow's bio and a list of works published.
© 2005 Me Three
