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…

 The Garden of Evening Mists - Tan Twan Eng

This novel has provoked the most searching of any discussion our book club has had so far. I feel I didn’t put my own views over terribly well at the time, so I’m making use of this review blog to articulate my perceptions a little better, or so I hope.

There was a lot to love about this book. The writing is mostly vivid with gripping descriptions and a powerful gift of evocation, with just a few lapses into cliché here and there. There’s a wonderful feeling for the Malaysian landscape and culture, and the political turbulence of the era. I really liked the characters, especially Teoh Yun Ling, the heroine / narrator, through whom the story’s outer and inner worlds are brought to us. Her doggedness, individualism and truth to her convictions are highly attractive. As may happen with people who have a strong sense of mission, she is often less than sweet with other people, for example to the municipal gardener she presumes to dictate to early on, or to Frederick, the lover she simply abandons when she meets Aritomo. She clearly has the implacability to be a prosecutor, then High Court judge, of war criminals. I also think Pretorius, the rugged Afrikaner tea planter, father of Frederick, who welcomes her into his family circle, is compellingly drawn.

I’m less convinced by Aritomo and his garden. Aritomo never discusses anything with anyone, he always commands and expects absolute obedience. Although he may have a rich inner world, this has to be deduced from his actions, because he never reveals himself or explains what he is about to anyone. He appears to come from a completely rigid culture which is only interested in total submission to those above you and total authority over those below you. Communion, communication do not exist in his spartan, and for me repellent, world.

The garden he is creating is therefore the manifestation of the imposition of his will on nature. Everything must be exactly as he decides. Unfortunately I am not convinced by his garden. To me there is a constant striving for effect which is about imposing a meaning upon it rather than communing with and expressing its own inner beauty. For example, there is a slightly unsettlingly trimmed lawn when viewed from nearby: but climb a certain hill and look through an old mill placed as a framing device and the lawn turns out to be the yin/yang Tao symbol. This is stagey. It’s not integral to the garden, it’s stuck on. It might as well be the Pepsi-Cola symbol. It’s not a Buddhist garden because it trades in illusion instead of trying to free us from it. Nor is it Tao because it showy effects are not about balance and harmony. Frankly I find it a bit of a sham. This is a pity for the book because of course the garden is where the title and the heart of the story are located. 

Interestingly the author puts a similar view of the garden into the mouth of Teo Yun Ling’s jilted lover who also considers the garden’s effects facile. Is this out of jealousy, or does the author really want to give us a chance to see Aritomo in a different light? H’mm.

Nor am I satisfied with Aritomo’s other demonstrations of his superiority over nature, his various feats of physical strength and training, for example, the ability to shoot a target dead centre while blindfolded. Aritomo can only do this because he is fictional. It is anti-rational to suppose that we can do better at archery without the use of our eyes. As far as I am aware, Japan has never entered a team of blind archers in the Olympics.

Unfortunately my representations to the club about these matters were challenged on the grounds that Aritomo’s feats are matters of spirituality and therefore perfectly to be expected. I was merely showing them how unspiritual I am. Gulp! This was such an unexpected line of argument that I just couldn’t think how to respond at the time. So here I am, sitting regally at my keyboard, dictating what I should have said. 

For me, spirituality is not about doing stunts, being mysterious and ordering lesser people about. Spirituality is about connection with God, forming a relationship with God in which it is God, not we, who takes the lead. Then our relationship with ourselves, others and the world can be reshaped in the light of our most fundamental relationship with God. The mindfulness of God embraces us, others and the world, so when we are connected with God we also reconnect in the fullest possible way with His world, with His people and with our own deepest but broken selves as His children. Unfortunately our connection with God is radically compromised by, in Christian shorthand, sin – fundamentally the orientation that the universe is actually all about me. But God offers healing from this by reorientating us in Jesus Christ. It’s a deeply painful healing requiring nothing less than death and resurrection:  but when we are re-connected with God in Christ we can start to achieve our potential to love and to be loved, and thus reach out to find our place in the universe. 

This is a million miles away from the flashy feats and dictatorial manners of an Aritomo. Yes he disappears up a mountain in the end, just like Moses, or even Jesus at the Ascension, and like them his body is never found. Thus in a work of fiction we can cast a spiritual glamour over the creations of our imagination. But Moses and Jesus worked out their spirituality in the much deeper labour of living with God, others, the world and themselves.

Finally I also took a different view of the conclusion of the story from everyone else, and again I didn’t articulate my thoughts particularly well. I was disappointed that the heroine’s quest to keep her promise to her sister, who was murdered by the Japanese during the occupation in World War 2, is simply abandoned in the end. It was objected that a novel hasn’t had to tie up all its loose ends since the Victorian era: Camus doesn’t resolve anything in L’Etranger. 

For me however this  betrays a failing in the novelist’s art: the artist has created this quest to form the basic emotional motor that propels the entire novel, therefore to just let it go suggests that he didn’t know what to do with his own material. But on reflection even this doesn’t go far enough. I was drawn to Teoh Yun Ling because of her gutsy commitment: she never gives in and takes no prisoners. To just roll over and let it be just isn’t like the person whose story has so powerfully engaged us.

Because in spite of these faults, this is still a powerfully engaging novel. That is why it produced such a stimulating and far reaching discussion. Thank you Tan Twan Eng for a bumpy but beautiful ride!