The first novels of Lewis Nkosi and Catharine Arnold raise issues that have been in the news of late: racist oppression in South Africa and the ugly behaviour of the smart set at England’s oldest universities. Neither phenomenon is new, but that is not all they have in common: both can be regarded as symptoms of madness, which is always making news – this, at any rate, is the diagnosis favoured by Nkosi and Arnold. They discount the talk of journalists and are at pains to show how states of emergency or of madness come about, and how adversity in the world modifies concern for the self. Much emphasis is laid on the unconscious activity of the mind, which for Sibiya in Mating Birds as well as for Francesca in Lost Time means horrid imaginings, displacement and a fear of poltergeists. Capitulation is charted: Sibiya awaits execution in a Durban jail, although the Government is about to fall and from his cell he can hear street-singers announcing ‘the near-dawn of freedom’. Francesca, a famous concert cellist, suffers private madness – as opposed to the collective variety accountable for apartheid – in the form of a nervous breakdown. At the same time taboos are flouted by the characters and invoked by the authors as if they were the unconscious of society. Sibiya’s crime was to sleep with a white woman, while a revelation of incest, for which a neglectful father is held to be responsible, contributes to Lost Time. In each case the novelist has recourse to psychoanalytic theory, and a meaningful relationship would seem to be implied between free societies and the free association of ideas.
Lost Time describes a group of young people who enjoy certain advantages of the Arnoldian (no relation) training of mind: they have been brought up to read novels and casually to drop names in conversation. Allusions to literature proliferate, and the reader is expected to take as much pleasure in highbrow flourishes as the characters themselves do. Lost Time conforms stylishly to the requirements of the Varsity novel: a genre patronised by Dorothy Sayers and Frederic Raphael, and to be distinguished from the campus novels (more academic, not so upper-class) of, say, Malcolm Bradbury and David Lodge. Miles Tattershall lectures, with moderate success, in 17th-century literature at Cambridge. He, too, is conventional, in so far as conventions exist for fictional men of letters. Like Nick Jenkins in Anthony Powell’s sequence of novels – whose title has a similar Proustian evocativeness – Miles is preparing a fastidious study of the Anatomy of Melancholy. Like Jenkins, Miles has a propensity to quote from Burton’s ‘torrential passages’. But neither his temperate despair, identified by Burton as the scholar’s malady, nor his anxiety to avoid pain at all costs (according to a principle set down by that other doctor of melancholy, Sigmund Freud), precludes Miles’s infatuation with one of his students. Benjy wears a Barbour and an expression of aloof boyishness that makes Miles feel ‘like some East Anglian Aschenbach’.
The opening locations, Cambridge, Covent Garden and Campden Hill Square, are evacuated, and the action switches to the Old Vicarage at Bly, a place full of the appropriate Jamesian menace. At this point in the story Arnold appears to discover her subject, which is fetishism mainly and which is discussed with reference to some of James’s own interests – traumatic family life, sibling rivalry and the susceptibility of the masculine character. As if to accommodate such a discussion, the size of the household increases with the arrival of Francesca (Miles’s sister) to recuperate after her illness, and of Olivia (Benjy’s sister), who has been invited to spend the summer at Bly before going up to Cambridge. The screw turns and after 33 years of unblemished bookishness Miles turns to screwing. He sleeps with Benjy, which proves a revelation, and one night, when Benjy is away in London for a pop concert, Olivia seduces him. By the end of the novel the connotation of its title has changed. Lost time is now not so much remembered as made up for.
Although Arnold has written a ghost story lacking a ghost, her characters often claim to be haunted. The unfortunate Francesca falls for Olivia and has nightmares. At the same time rumours begin to circulate in the village to the effect that the church is possessed by sinister nocturnal spirits. These cease, however, after Miles discovers the cause of the disturbance – Benjy and Olivia’s incestuous liaison. Likewise his friendship with Benjy ends abruptly and cannot be resumed even after Olivia’s suicide, which Miles finds it hard not to attribute to a death-wish in contrast to his own self-preserving instincts.
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