The Purple Plain, H E Bates

H E Bates is a Fauvist! He loves describing colours and has an intense palette of purple, orange, scarlet, brown and cream. Cream seems to be his sensuality marker: he paints the subject of the chief protagonist Forrester’s growing love, Anna, with cream, over and over again. He calls the moon orange multiple times in a couple of sentences. Brilliant white is his colour for evil so you get the glare of the sun overpowering you with its constant, grating repetition. Stylistically it’s disturbing and arguably distracting. Perhaps he doesn’t think you’ve really got his descriptions until he’s pounded them into you…

Sadly he can’t get over the “almond eyes” of most of his Burmese characters, or their flat faces. With our heightened awareness of racism these days it’s hard not to feel uncomfortable with this. It’s fine to mention physical characteristics here and there as neutral description, but the repetition makes it look unsettlingly obsessive. His Scots and Irish characters also have jarringly exaggerated accents, though he brings out their admirable and even heroic sides too as the story progresses. The Scots missionary lady Miss McNab is presented as constantly screaming, incapable of conversing at a normal level. She appears to have a strange fixation with Forrester, whom she has never before met, addressing every remark to him alone in spite of all the other people present: but then she has to deal with the aftermath of a terrible bombing and becomes cool and courageous.

Sadly, for me, Anna doesn’t really emerge from her creaminess as a full character in her own right. Or is this just part of her dignity and reserve, something always held back? Her role seems more to be as Forrester’s reward for his heroism in surviving danger and rescuing a comrade, for his new attitude to life and especially to other people, for the new person he is becoming…

For this is in fact a novel of redemption. Forrester has arrived in Burma after the death of his newly married wife in the Blitz. He is traumatized – The Purple Plain can also be described as a book about PTSD avant la letter: almost every single person has endured the most terrible atrocities of wartime, and everyone is striving to cope with the legacy of this shatterment in their own individual way. Forrester’s is through his death wish: he has come out to Burma as an RAF pilot in order to put himself in the line of fire: his only future is to die. But then he witnesses a horrific crash on the air base. A man rushes out of the burning plane in flames and dies in agony in front of him. His colleagues arriving on the scene tell Forrester they thought this man was him. This “substitutionary” death acts on Forrester like a revelation: he suddenly discovers in himself that he wishes to live.

This new perspective leads to a change of heart towards other people. Up till now they have been nothing but irritations, reminders of the bitter gall sucked from the pointless processes of a meaningless life when you only want it to stop. Now he starts to wake up to the fact that they have struggles and inner lives too. By the time he sets off on his fateful flight into the interior he is ready to recognise the humanity of his previously hated comrades, Blore and Carrington.

The suicide of Blore marks the nadir of the desperate sufferings of the three of them as they attempt to make their way from the crash site back to civilisation. The terrain, the heat, the uncertainty, the hopelessness are crushing. Blore fails because he has sought to survive on his own, with his heaps of protective and ridiculous paraphernalia and constant disagreements over the best course to take. He’s afraid of appearing weak to the younger men and identifies himself apart from rather than with them. 

Forrester and Carrington by contrast save each other by their co-operation, ironic banter, and understated awareness of each other’s pain. A certain stiffness of the upper lip is always present, nonetheless Forrester is learning to be human again. He is becoming fit to be a companion for the beautiful Anna, in the way that love has been thought to make you a better person since the days of Dante and Chaucer. When they first met you wonder what on earth she saw in this embittered man.

Bates has bookmarked the redemptive aspect of his novel through his references to Easter. When he first goes to the Burmese Christian village where he meets Anna, Forrester is roped into a game of choosing hymns for the forthcoming Easter services. He takes part reluctantly and ironically. When he gets back there after his odyssey in the jungle, Easter has come. His experiences of the Burning Man, and of three days lost in the hell of the jungle, form a terrible Good Friday to this Easter.

Is the author then trying to tell us that suffering can lead to renewal? In ways that Christians have sought to grapple with for centuries? It seems a far cry from the easy hedonism of The Darling Buds Of May… But Bates seems to be telling us that we may be able to find hope even in our darkest experiences: it depends on how we respond to our pain, whether we retreat inwards like Blore, or Forrester as we find him at the start of the book, or turn outwards, to life and to others…