Jibe Must Go on, or Modern English Fun in Fiction

Snickering, or, starting from the 20th century, jeering at themselves is an endearing British trait that found its way into literature a long time ago. We Russians are ardent admirers of Jerome K. Jerome, we have an army of P.G. Wodehouse’s fans (although understandably a smaller one), we are acquainted with novels penned by Richard Gordon, Tom Sharpe, Kingsley Amis. There are sure to be others whom I forgot to name or haven’t read yet. And here come a spate of modern-day authors aspiring for a place in the annals of British humour.

The dullest of them appears to be the routine-living fun-digger Jonathan Coe. There exists a Russian translation of his novel The Accidental Woman (1987), a book remarkable in more than one respect. Probably the most obvious one is the author’s distancing himself from his protagonist. I would say a chess player is more emotional over his chessmen than Coe over his leading female character. Consequently the author of this article found himself unable to fork up any emotional contact with the woman, even when her only beloved creature dies. At the end of the book Coe just drops his protagonist; being a writer, he makes some literary gestures, sort of rounds off the narration by throwing in some vague ruminations which are designed to pass for an ending but fail to do so.

Coe’s second gift is scrappiness. Yes, we understand that it can be used as a literary tool, when a certain disjointedness is brought in to embody the author’s perception of the modern life, yet the narration crumbles into pieces too easily. There are some characters who work towards sewing the scraps together, but they are as faulty in this as in everything else. As soon as Coe has palmed off the big joke of the episode, he pulls up his tackle and whisks his protagonist off to some other place where the next bit of fun is waiting for her. You won’t guess what the place will be; nor are you supposed to.

I will leave the third point out intentionally, because sense of humour is an acutely individual phenomenon. I did not laugh often during the perusal, whereas the supposedly funny situations often made me sad. Coe’s protagonist’s life is aimless and senseless, and one can easily assume the author used her only as a whipping girl. I couldn’t gather up enough sympathy for her, for, as I said, there is not enough life in her. Cardboard, mere cardboard.

A proponent of absurdity – which he tries, albeit not too hard, to disguise as reality – Geoff Nicholson is by far more skillful and engrossing. His novel Bedlam Burning (2000) is a solid affair not given to crumbling up, whereas the elements of madness, violence and unrestrained sex are offered in just the quantity and quality necessary for the flow of the narration. It was pleasant to find the novel laced with a modicum of classicism, it gives an amusing set-off to the absurdity of the plot. Expected turns of the plot are well juxtaposed with unexpected ones. The novel ends with a synopsis of what happens to the characters afterwards – a rare feature in a modern novel. I would be interested to read another Nicholson, which is more than I can say about Coe.

The most acerbic of them all proved to be the clever wisecracker Tibor Fischer. The unwary reader should be warned that his second novel, The Thought Gang (1994), will be a direct merciless hit. It is a truly funny novel, but the fun is somewhat suspicious, and, having laughed your way through the text, you may come to realize that you were served slops-out from two countries (and some from farther out). If you expect to get thought, you will get but little, the text being mostly cynical vaporing; the protagonist’s narration forms the basis of the book, while on the other hand you get so much of it that now and then you’re apt to lose the thread. Eventually, Fischer’s attempts to be invariably witty make him boring. There’s no gainsaying that his wit is bright, colorful, frilly, it is all that, but at the expense of the story – seeking to ridicule each subject under the sun, Fischer diverts from the plot in places where any other writer’s hand would dither to. Besides, it goes for what I can see only as padding.

I am hard put to it to aver that the novel is good or bad. Rather, the question is whether the reader is prepared to digest 400+ pages of sheer cynicism battened on a vulgar outlook. Amis’s one fat Englishman is no longer alone.

Naturally, time and again the author sends out hints that he doesn’t want the reader to think the protagonist is in any way like himself and the coffinese attitude to life has nothing in common with the author’s, but it is clear that he succumbed completely to the temptation of using an odious character. What’s more, Fischer plays into Coffin’s hands plentifully, so that in the end he comes out a sleek winner. It is not the first time when a negative protagonist performs like a positive protagonist; if you don’t mind it, Fischer is your writer.

Nowadays writers don’t seem to be able to eschew having life’s grime smeared all over their works, in all kinds of genres. British humour has also apparently diverged from its innocuous comic-relief origins. Critics can be expected to laud on over the ironic outlook of some author or other, but once-guaranteed simple pleasures are in the past. Taking on the features of modern cynicism and social diseases, British humour is probably losing its inherent traits to flow with the worldwide stream of ridiculing writers, a stream rather more turbid and feculent than one might be wanting.