She would smile and show no surprise, convinced as she was, the same as I, that casual meetings are apt to be just the opposite, and that people who make dates are the same kind who need lines on their writing paper, or who always squeeze up from the bottom on a tube of toothpaste.
He had begun to read the novel a few days before. He had put it aside because of some urgent business conferences, opened it again on his way back to the estate by train; he permitted himself a slowly growing interest in the plot, in the characterizations. That afternoon, after writing a letter giving his power of attorney and discussing a matter of joint ownership with the manager of his estate, he returned to the book in the tranquility of his study which looked out upon the park with its oaks. Sprawled in his favorite armchair, its back toward the door--even the possibility of an intrusion would have irritated him, had he thought of it--he let his left hand caress repeatedly the green velvet upholstery and set to reading the final chapters. He remembered effortlessly the names and his mental image of the characters; the novel spread its glamour over him almost at once. He tasted the almost perverse pleasure of disengaging himself line by line from the things around him, and at the same time feeling his head rest comfortably on the green velvet of the chair with its high back, sensing that the cigarettes rested within reach of his hand, that beyond the great windows the air of afternoon danced under the oak trees in the park. Word by word, licked up the sordid dilemma of the hero and heroine, letting himself be absorbed to the point where the images settled down and took on color and movement, he was witness to the final encounter in the mountain cabin. The woman arrived first, apprehensive; now the lover came in, his face cut by the backlash of a branch. Admirably, she stanched the blood with her kisses, but he rebuffed her caresses, he had not come to perform again the ceremonies of a secret passion, protected by a world of dry leaves and furtive paths through the forest. The dagger warmed itself against his chest, and underneath liberty pounded, hidden close. A lustful, panting dialogue raced down the pages like a rivulet of snakes, and one felt it had all been decided from eternity. Even to those caresses which writhed about the lover's body, as though wishing to keep him there, to dissuade him from it; they sketched abominably the fame of that other body it was necessary to destroy. Nothing had been forgotten: alibis, unforeseen hazards, possible mistakes. From this hour on, each instant had its use minutely assigned. The cold-blooded, twice-gone-over reexamination of the details was barely broken off so that a hand could caress a cheek. It was beginning to get dark.
Not looking at each other now, rigidly fixed upon the task which awaited them, they separated at the cabin door. She was to follow the trail that led north. On the path leading in the opposite direction, he turned for a moment to watch her running, her hair loosened and flying. He ran in turn, crouching among the trees and hedges until, in the yellowish fog of dusk, he could distinguish the avenue of trees which led up to the house. The dogs were not supposed to bark, and they did not bark. The estate manager would not be there at this hour, and he was not there. He went up the three porch steps and entered. The woman's words reached him over a thudding of blood in his ears: first a blue chamber, then a hall, then a carpeted stairway. At the top, two doors. No one in the first room, no one in the second. The door of the salon, and then, the knife in his hand, the light from the great windows, the high back of an armchair covered in green velvet, the head of the man in the chair reading a novel.
Nick Lake, author of There Will be Lies, selects his favourite fictional tricksters and tellers of untruths in books
Nick Lake Thursday 29 January 2015 08.00 GMT
Fiction is full of lies. Fiction is lies, in some sense anyway. Of course it’s not as simple as that, but the lines are blurred: authors of fiction are, fundamentally, making stuff up. Fiction is full of liars too. There are the unreliable narrators, and the lies as engines of plot – dissembling is a useful device for propelling a story, creating layers of awareness that rub against each other like tectonic plates. The reader knowing things that the characters don’t know. Characters knowing things other characters don’t know. Characters knowing things the reader doesn’t know. You could write a PhD thesis on it, but that sounds like a lot of work!
Here, instead, and with the proviso that you could pretty much pick one from every book, are my top 10 liars in fiction
1.Satan, in The Bible
Need I say more, really? Though it’s worth noting that storytellers – speaking perhaps to the overlaps between story and lies – like Blake, Milton and Philip Pullman have found very interesting things to do with Satan, as a character, playing with the complexity of his motivations. In times of Enlightenment and Revolution, he became a much less straightforward figure for us to focus our hatred on than he was perhaps initially intended to be.
The magician Prospero, exiled Duke of Milan, spins lies all around him – including his repeated promise to Ariel, repeatedly broken, that he will let his helper-spirit go. Indeed, the play begins with his undoing of an earlier lie, when he finally reveals his true history to his daughter Miranda – who until that point has believed he is a simple cave-dwelling island man. Miranda has just seen the ship bearing Prospero’s usurper go down in a terrible storm, conjured by her father, and is horrified. But he reassures her that no harm is done: “I have done nothing but in care of thee.” An insidious kind of lie: the white lie of parental protection. This is something that plays a big role in my own book There Will be Lies, though with a mother rather than a father. I can’t say more without spoilers.
In the end, anyway, Prospero – artificer, artist, and avatar for the playwright – breaks his magical staff and buries his book, abjuring his art, stripping away his lies. It’s a scene of colossal beauty, at the end of the master’s last play, and it’s hard not to read it as a direct farewell from author to audience.
Edmund meets the White White in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Photograph: theguardian.com
Edmund’s lie of omission, failing to tell his siblings about his encounter with the White Witch, drives much of the drama in the first Narnia story. Interestingly, though, he is probably judged more harshly by contemporary readers than Lewis intended. It is almost impossible, now, to imagine the feelings a child – used to the privations of wartime Britain – might experience on being offered some Turkish Delight. This is one of those occasions where some of the context is lost in the passage of history. If you had grown up with rationing, been shipped out to the country for protection, and found yourself in a magical land where you were offered extraordinary, rarefied sweet things, wouldn’t you lie too?
Rich playboy Gatsby lies about a lot of things. His romantic life; his past; the origins of his ostentatious wealth, actually amassed through grubby bootlegging. But the small, practical lie that has always stuck in my mind is the fact that the handsome books in his library have uncut pages, proving that he hasn’t ever opened them. F Scott Fitzgerald called the jazz age the “cut glass age”, for its glitter, outward beauty and inward emptiness. But I almost think the uncut books are a more resonant metaphor.
In Sally Gardner’s brilliantly original YA fable, it is not any one character who lies, but the government of an imagined country that may or may not be an alternate-history Britain. The story concerns Maggot, a boy who unwittingly finds himself drawn into a state conspiracy, and learns the truth about a proud public narrative. Propaganda, of course, is one of the areas where storytelling and lies intersect in interesting ways.
Perhaps my favourite ever book, and one I press on anyone who is willing to listen. It’s silly to make these kind of pronouncements, but I’m going to do it anyway: Marilynne Robinson is the finest prose writer in the world right now. The story revolves around Glory, the adult daughter of a preacher in the American South, who returns to live at home, and partly it’s about her dealing with this apparent failure; with reconciling herself to life as a spinster in the house she grew up in. But it’s also about her brother Jack, the wayward prodigal son who also returns to the family home for a while, and a ‘lie’ he tells. That is, we know that Jack has a wife and son, and that he is reluctant for them to visit, but Glory only learns why at the end of the book. It’s a final revelation, a lever de rideau on the whole sublot, that not only shows what Jack has been hiding, but also reveals the true purpose of the book: appearing on the outside to be a domestic drama, it is really a furious and utterly heartbreaking look at perhaps America’s greatest injustice. It’s amazing (and revelatory) how many Amazon reviewers don’t get it at all.
Colin Firth as Mr Darcy in the BBC’s Pride and Prejudice Photograph: BBC
The obvious liar in Pride and Prejudice is Wickham, but the more interesting from a plot perspective is Darcy. Because Darcy does something immensely noble, which if she knew about it would make Elizabeth deeply grateful to him, but doesn’t tell her. Lies about it. She only finds out indirectly. It’s a heart-stirring and deeply effective device, so much so that it has spread, meme-style, through countless other stories ever since. There’s a legend in Bookworld that when Helen Fielding was considering turning her Bridget Jones columns into a book, she saw the Colin Firth-starring TV adaptation and decided to lift the plot from Pride and Prejudice. Virtually every romantic novel ever since has done the same, includingTwilight.
A must-read for anyone interested in the not-quite-defined centre of the Venn diagram where branding, advertising, storytelling and propaganda meet, The Three-Arched Bridge is about how an idea can be employed as a weapon. Gjon, a Catholic monk in medieval times, is sent to oversee the building of a new stone bridge over a major river in Albania, essential for trade with the east. The owners of the existing boat-crossing monopoly attack his bridge with an idea – that the animist spirit of the river is offended by the bridge and it must be stopped or floods will ensue. But when a man is caught trying to destroy the bridge, Gjon seizes the opportunity to let off a thought-bomb of his own: taking inspiration from a local tradition of immuring animals in buildings to give them a soul, he walls the would-be saboteur inside the bridge, giving the structure itself a spirit. Now, to break it would be to break a taboo and a spell. Gjon knows it’s a superstition based on nothing, a lie, but it’s one powerful enough to secure his bridge forever.
Steerpike had a strong influence on me as a young teenager. His cleverness, his amorality, his Machiavellian willingness to plot and scheme and lie in order to rise through the ranks. His ruthlessness. In fact I’m ashamed to say I modelled myself on him for a while, finding his cruelty and quickness exciting. And it’s for that reason that I have never wholly subscribed to the notion that books represent an unalloyed force for good – yes, they are machines of empathy, letting us see through the eyes of others, but that also means that characters like Steerpike exert an incredibly seductive power. Still, I did ultimately come out of that phase, and as Milton says in his Areopagitica, there is no virtue that is meaningful if it hasn’t been tested by exposure to evil ideas. But I always remember Steerpike when writing for teenagers, and despite my books (hopefully) having an ambiguous moral landscape, I try to keep the narrators on a roughly even moral keel, keeping always in mind Kurt Vonnegut’s exhortation from God Bless You, Mr Rosewater: “there’s only one rule I know of, babies – God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
A particularly interesting book this one, in terms of the tricky border between fiction and lies. The novel tells the true story of the assassination of Nazi top-man Heydrich, one of the architects of the Final Solution, when he was ruling Prague as his private fiefdom. I say “true”: throughout the book, Binet is preoccupied with the fact that he doesn’t know everything about the story, every little detail, and so is forced to invent them. He is especially concerned that he doesn’t know the names of the villagers who sheltered one of the assassins after the deed, and were all slaughtered by the Nazis for it; he feels that he is doing these heroes a disservice by not naming them. He is an author of a “true” book who is gnawed by the fact that he keeps having to fabricate: to lie, essentially.
11. Coyote, Crow, Loki, Anansi, Prometheus, etc, in virtually every myth ever
LOOK I LIED. I said 10 and I’m doing 11. Trickster gods are notorious liars – Coyote, in Navajo myth, is known among other names as the First Liar. But these gods tend to negotiate between us humans and the gods, too, and often the lies they tell, and the tricks they play, ultimately benefit mankind. They steal fire and give it to the people (both Coyote and Prometheus do that). They create Death (both Coyote and the Inuit Crow do that.) If I mention Coyote a lot it’s only because he features in There Will Be Lies, taking Shelby, the narrator, into a strange world called the Dreaming where various things seem to mirror her own life. In my book, he plays his usual role. He lies to her, but he also brings about change and progress through the chaos he creates. He steals the stars that were meant to be arranged in neat rows across the sky, and scatters them. And wouldn’t we rather the stars were scattered and beautiful, rather than organized and boring?
There was a time when I thought a great deal about the axolotls. I went to see them in the aquarium at the Jardin des Plantesand stayed for hours watching them, observing their immobility, their faint movements. Now I am an axolotl. I got to them by chance one spring morning when Paris was spreading its peacock tail after a wintry Lent. I was heading down the boulevard Port Royal, then I took Saint-Marcel and L’Hôpital and saw green among all that grey and remembered the lions. I was friend of the lions and panthers, but had never gone into the dark, humid building that was the aquarium. I left my bike against the gratings and went to look at the tulips. The lions were sad and ugly and my panther was asleep. I decided on the aquarium, looked obliquely at banal fish until, unexpectedly, I hit it off with the axolotls. I stayed watching them for an hour and left, unable to think of anything else.
IT WAS THE dead of winter and yet a radiant sun was rising over the already active city. At the end of the jetty, sea and sky fused in a single dazzling light. But Yvars did not see them. He was cycling slowly along the boulevards above the harbor. On the fixed pedal of his cycle his crippled leg rested stiffly while the other labored to cope with the slippery pavement still wet with the night’s moisture. Without raising his head, a slight figure astride the saddle, he avoided the rails of the former car-line, suddenly turned the handlebars to let autos pass him, and occasionally elbowed back into place the musette bag in which Fernande had put his lunch. At such moments he would think bitterly of the bag’s contents. Between the two slices of coarse bread, instead of the Spanish omelet he liked or the beefsteak fried in oil, there was nothing but cheese.
Graham Greene’s moving tale of adultery and its aftermath ties together several vital strands in his work
Robert McCrum Monday 26 January 2015 05.45 GMT
'Greene's portrait of the agony of two people caught in an illicit love affair remains compelling': Julianne Moore and Ralph Fiennes in The End of the Affair (1999). Photograph: Sportsphoto/Allstar/Cinetext Collection
T
here are many Greenes, and almost all of them – the thriller writer (The Third Man), the entertainer (Our Man in Havana), the contemporary political novelist (The Quiet American), the polemicist (The Comedians) and the serious religious writer (The Power and the Glory) – deserve consideration in this series. I’ve chosen The End of the Affair because it blurs the line he drew between his “entertainments” and his more serious work. The novel owes its inspiration to the conventions of romantic fiction while at the same time transcending genre. Crucially, it dates from Greene’s best years, the age of postwar austerity that also nurtured the previous author (No 70) in this series, George Orwell.
Set in Clapham during the blitz (before the war, Greene owned a house in Clapham), it’s a story of adultery. Maurice Bendrix, a second-rank novelist, wants to write about a civil servant, and makes the acquaintance of his neighbour’s wife, Sarah. They fall in love and have an affair tortured by his jealousy and her guilt. When Bendrix is nearly killed by a bomb (Greene’s house was similarly wrecked during the blitz), his mistress suddenly breaks off relations. Only in retrospect will the meaning of this inexplicable act of rejection become apparent.
Guilt-edged: Graham Greene pouring a drink, 1954.Photograph: Kurt Hutton
Two years pass. Sarah’s husband, Henry, who is ignorant of the affair, approaches Bendrix about his wife’s infidelity with “a third man”. Intrigued, the novelist employs a private detective to investigate. Having said, at the outset, that “a story has no beginning or end”, Greene now employs a dizzy mix of flashback, stream-of consciousness and conventional narrative, partly based on Sarah’s diary, to relate how she, having prayed for a miracle, “catches belief like a disease”, and then subsequently dies. The “third man”, a recurrent figure with Greene, turns out to be God, for whom Sarah has become “a bride in Christ”. This supernatural, Roman Catholic element of the plot has not worn well, but the portrait of wartime London, and the agony of two people caught in an illicit love affair, remains compelling.
A note on the text
The best clue to the emotional freight carried by The End of the Affair is probably to be found in its differing dedication pages. The English edition, published by William Heinemann in September 1951, reads “To C”. But the American edition, much less cryptic, reads “To Catherine with love”. Catherine Walston, the wife of the Labour peer Harry Walston, had been quite explicitly Greene’s mistress for several years, in a relationship that tormented all concerned. Few women ever touched Greene as deeply, however, and his novel became the sad record of their ultimately doomed relationship. “It was,” writes Norman Sherry in his very unsatisfactory three-volume biography, “a love affair of dangerous proportions”, and one wracked, as the novel is, with Catholic guilt.
The End of the Affair is the fourth and final Greene novel with an overtly Roman Catholic dimension. (The others areBrighton Rock, The Power and the Glory and The Heart of the Matter.) About a year after its publication Greene told Evelyn Waugh that he wanted to write a political novel. It would be fun to deal with politics, he said, “and not always write about God”. Waugh’s response was characteristically sharp and practical. “I wouldn’t give up writing about God at this stage if I was you,” he replied. “It would be like PG Wodehouse dropping Jeeves halfway through the Wooster series.”
Waugh’s review of The End of the Affair of 6 September 1951 in the magazineMonth stands up well to the test of time. In his new novel, writes Waugh, “Mr Greene has chosen another contemporary form, domestic, romantic drama of the type of Brief Encounter, and has transformed that in his own inimitable way.” Waugh added that the story was “a singularly beautiful and moving one”.
This, perhaps, explains its continued appeal. The novel has been filmed twice (in1955 and 1999). William Golding, who has yet to appear in this series, ignored the religion and accurately described Greene as “the ultimate chronicler of 20th-century man’s consciousness and anxiety”.
Three more from Graham Greene
The Confidential Agent (1939); The Power and the Glory (1940); The Quiet American (1955).
The End of the Affair is available in Vintage (£8.99)
