The Prince’s Boy
Paul Bailey
Bloomsbury, 160pp, £16.99
Other People’s Countries: a Journey into Memory
Patrick McGuinness
Jonathan Cape, 208pp, £14.99
In his recent memoir about Paris, Inside a Pearl, Edmund White recalls that a meeting he organised between the francophile English novelist Julian Barnes and the anglophile French novelist Marc Cholodenko turned out to be “stiff” because neither had any interest in the other’s country except as a source of “counter-examples” with which to mock compatriots. Cholodenko hasn’t been published in Britain but readers of Barnes’s work will be familiar with his manner of invoking the French – “The English don’t have cousins the way they do”, etc – and a variation of the strategy can be recognised in Evelyn Waugh’s use of Africans and Martin Amis’s use of Americans. It’s a kind of chauvinism that feigns engagement.
When the novelist Paul Bailey first visited Romania, at the end of the Ceausescu years, he went as a former south London grammar school boy and a novelist in a consciously English tradition. It has taken him a while to engage with the country on its own terms. In Kitty and Virgil (1998), the Romanian character was seen from the perspective of an Englishwoman. In Uncle Rudolf (2002), Romanian experience was recalled by a naturalised Englishman.
Bailey’s new novel, The Prince’s Boy, presents a rich man’s son named Dinu, who travels from Gara de Nord in Bucharest to the Gare du Nord in Paris in 1927 with a view to becoming a poet or novelist. Instead, partly thanks to his reading of Proust, he becomes an academic. More significantly, he meets a fellow Romanian, Razvan, a well-known prostitute and an alleged acquaintance of Proust, with whom he falls in love. The mood of Dinu’s reminiscences, composed in the late 1960s, is one of rapture shot through with loss, the latter emotion becoming stronger when the story reaches the 1930s and Dinu’s homeland starts to display its “talent for farcical brutality”.
To discover in the final pages that Dinu, “Romanian by birth, French by choice”, ended up as an accidental Englishman is a source less of disappointment than relief. It explains, if belatedly, the fussiness of the book’s prose: “green in the ways of the flesh”, “inspirational aspirations”, “What in God’s holy name was happening to me?”, “our mutual hunger once assuaged”. And it confirms Bailey’s reluctance to coddle the reader with an Anglocentric viewpoint.
When Julian Barnes wrote a story about a Romanian in exile, “One of a Kind”, he chose as his narrator an English novelist full of Barnesian glibness (“I always had this theory about Romania. Well, not a proper theory: more an observation, I suppose”). That Dinu eventually settles in England does little to diminish the thoroughness with which Bailey executes his central task – to evoke what it would be like not for an Englishman to be a Romanian, or for someone with the author’s English cast of mind to have been born in Romania, but for a Romanian to be a Romanian. If there is a limit to what Bailey achieves here, it has less to do with sympathy of imagination than exuberance of invention. Devoted Bailey readers, on finishing this slight successor to the slight Chapman’s Odyssey (2011), may find themselves yearning for his old untamed energy, the force behind earlier exercises in male befuddlement such as Gabriel’s Lament (1986).
Patrick McGuinness, an academic and poet and the author of a novel about the end of the Ceausescu regime, The Last Hundred Days, has also attempted a sort of Proust-in-miniature in Other People’s Countries. It’s a memoir in vignettes – part essay, part poetry, part prose poetry – concerned with Bouillon, a Belgian municipality near the French border where his mother’s family lived and where he partly grew up. McGuinness emerges as an insider with distance, able to note Bouillon’s “eccentricity and exoticism” while still considering it his home. Recalling how he used to think “Evenbrussels” was a place, because his awestruck relatives would refer to “Mêmebruxelles” (as in, “Lucie’s dresses are worn in Arlon, Namur and even Brussels”), he appears affectionate rather than condescending.
If the charm of McGuinness’s reminiscences helps to ward off self-indulgence, his weakness for theory – his desire to write meta-memoir as well as memoir – undoes much of the good work. Although Other People’s Countries is billed as an extension of the bedtime stories that McGuinness tells his son and daughter, it contains a great deal of intellectual rummaging that you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy’s children: “my idea of what the house remembers about itself”, “It seems important to distrust the material, maybe even to make distrust itself the material”, “those three stooges, the past, the present and the future”, “This house of mine, this house of mind”, and so on.
The stooge-like past being so hard to get straight, McGuinness is annoyed that the English language insists on not being good enough, forcing him to wrist-slap widely accepted metaphors. Of “takes place”, he writes, “Place can’t be taken”; “When we say ‘naturalised’,” he points out, “we actually mean ‘denaturalised’.” But McGuinness’s figurative language doesn’t always do what he wants it to, as when he writes that a speeded-up recording of his voice made him sound “like a breathlessly excited Charles Hawtree”, an image that combines a redundant simile, a tautology and a misspelling.
Towards the end, he plays his hand a little too aggressively. After recalling an “old lady” with a “lucky rabbit’s foot dyed in the national tricolour”, he writes, “I couldn’t have put it better myself” – presumptuously alluding to his own powers of eloquence and doing so with a cliché.
Leo Robson is the NS’s lead fiction reviewer
Content from our partners
Related
