On the
Liberation of Eastern Europe and the Execution of the European Novel: Nicolas
Rothwell’s Heaven and Earth.
Silke Hesse
Monash University
A friend of mine, an avid reader of newspapers and
voluminous history books, has an almost superstitious fear of fiction and refuses
to touch it. He is intelligent enough to know that history books too tell
stories and recreate characters, which means that the facts they present will
invariably be significantly modified by interpretation. But he manifests a
concern about factual ‘truth’, or better accuracy that perhaps indicates a
narrower understanding of truth than our forebears had. At the same time, his
children, also avid readers, are addicted to similarly voluminous fantasy
novels whose covers broadcast that they are inventions set in unreal parallel
worlds. All the same, their characters, which still encourage identification,
hardly differ from those of the realist novels, which these young people avoid.
Why this anxiousness about fact and fiction?
Australian readers generally seem to be struggling to
acclimatize to a literary culture in which fact and fiction, journalism and
literature intersect and tangle in sometimes disconcerting ways. While we are
obsessed with history of every kind and demand accuracy, we also realize that
mere factual accuracy usually does not open doors to the logic of another era
or culture. History is made by human beings; we need to hear them talking,
listen to them thinking, watch them living their lives in order to comprehend
the course of events. For this we need knowledgeable and imaginative guides,
writers who can breathe life into facts. But can we trust them? I should like
to investigate this question with reference to a specific novel which seems to
me to be particularly suited in that
it is a journalist’s admission of the limits of his fact-bound craft: it is
Nicolas Rothwell’s Heaven and Earth. Its subject-matter is the collapse of the
communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe during 1989, that most extraordinary
year of revolutions. The fall of the Iron Curtain is a topic for which there
are ready clichés - the demise of the evil empire, the victory of good over
bad, the triumph of freedom over oppression – which need, at the very least, to
be modified. In Rothwell’s account, accepted by most historians, the innovative
thinkers and liberators are mostly on the ‘wrong’ side: they are Russians. But
though Gorbachev had a decisive role, he could not control events; he could
only choose to let them happen. The changes were brought about by enormous
numbers of people in many countries who all played their part: politicians,
political envoys, ambassadors and press secretaries, dissidents of various
persuasions and talents, large numbers of courageous members of the public and,
mediating between them all, as they report, interpret and evaluate, the very
different individual personalities of the journalists of the international
press contingents. The novel shows that this year of change was the
extraordinary achievement of people from many countries and walks of life
co-operating almost like the cells of a great organism. But it was also brought
about by the new global information age that the journalists here represent.
The story is told around a youthful reporter, privileged to have a ring-side
seat during these events, someone with family connections that give him greater
access to the power-brokers than a young man his age would normally have,
someone intelligent enough to mostly understand the ideological weapons, the
cultural specificities, the diplomatic manoeuvrings and the ego-dominated
personalities of the more devious players, and someone who shares the author’s
detailed knowledge of the events and sites of that year, for Rothwell himself
had spent it working as a foreign correspondent in revolutionary Eastern
Europe. Novels are always most effective when they have a hero whose personal
integrity can orientate the reader and through whom he or she can live and
participate in an otherwise closed story. It is through the young reporter that
the reader is introduced to the great network of participants whose ultimate
success served as incontestable proof that the age of dictators was over. This
is one part of the story’s truth; it lies not in the factual detail which, on
the personal and day to day level, needed to be invented and then enhanced by
the writer. Novels can be more vivid and more pointed in their use of language
than real situations would allow. Rothwell’s style, though well adapted to his
speakers, is dense, poignant, highly intelligent and full of understated
humour; one is at times tempted to linger and ponder his formulations,
resisting the onrush of events in favour of the evolving meaning. Rothwell
writes for those interested enough to want to experience the complexity of
history in the making.
But the novel genre is not only a useful vessel for the
presentation of characters and events. It is an art form that developed at the
very heart of European culture and it can, consequently, give us insights into
the thinking and the view of life that go with this culture. In other words, it
can, with or without the conscious knowledge of the author, create a third
critical and illustrative dimension, over and above the original factual
material and its stylistically crafted presentation. We have long been familiar
with the illustrative use of form in poetry, but there is no reason why other
genres of literature should not have the potential to be similarly effective.
In this essay, I would like to concentrate on the contribution the novel form
has, in my reading, made to the dynamic depth of Rothwell’s great epic of 1989.
Heaven and Earth
is not an easy book to enter into. To me, the first pages were, as so often, a
narrow gateway but once I had passed through, my mind was alert and my concentration
honed and the more than five hundred pages that followed became captivatingly
real. Most novels are like that; they require the reader to migrate and settle
in their world for a period of time, usually days, and demand an act of
conscious commitment.
Rothwell’s book follows the pack of foreign correspondents
jostling to cover the stories of 1989 for the print and television media around
the world. It takes us from Ceausescu’s Bucharest, to Warsaw and the triumph of
the Solidarity Movement, from there to Hungary, besieged at the time by East
German fugitives, to New York, the headquarters of the newspaper for which the
protagonist works, on to East Berlin and the fall of the Wall, to Prague and
the inaugural drama of its Velvet Revolution, to the Malta summit with Bush and
Gorbachev and finally, back to Romania, now in the throes of its revolution:
all scenes familiar to the author.
Heaven and Earth
starts with the sudden and unexpected death
of the youthful reporter’s father, the Emeritus Editor-in-Chief of his
newspaper. Kilian senior had just arranged for his gifted young son, still new
to the role of the foreign correspondent, to have the rare and coveted
opportunity of an interview with one of the worst of the Eastern European
dictators, Nicolae Ceausescu of Romania. And when news of the death, which we,
the readers, were the first to receive and which his son has by now also been
told in a crackly private phone-call from New York, officially arrives towards
the end of the interview, its bearer Ceausescu, who has become the most
perverted of all political father-figures, feels a pang not so much of sympathy
as of cold interest and invites the self-controlled young man to a visit to his
palace at Snagov. There he waives security precautions to take him across the
lake to the grave of Count Dracula whom the dictator appears to regard as a
progenitor and model. One might say that the novel begins with the death of the
father in triple magnification. It ends just a year later with the summary
execution of Ceausescu and his wife by revolutionary dissidents, which occurs
just before the ‘ghost of his father’ appears to Caspar for the second and last
time. As we follow Caspar on his complex
emotional journey of nostalgic grieving, of trying to evaluate his father’s
life and character, of probing into the old man’s secrets, and of understanding
and emancipating himself from Alexander Kilian’s fame and pervasive influence,
we are not only given access to the mind of a unique and prepossessing young
man, but we also get a taste of what awaits the nations of Eastern Europe and
their peoples after liberation. That the author, for there are parallels
between Rothwell’s and Caspar’s stories, may occasionally be guilty of somewhat
distorting his own father’s personality to parallel other dictator figures, ‘a
profanation’ (24), is hinted at when Caspar responds to a question from
Ceausescu with the following assessment:
‘In youth,
Mr President, my father was a clear-sighted man, but he became ensnared in his own myths. [...] His will
was so strong it dimmed his consciousness.
He was losing his capacity to read the patterns of the outside world. Already, I had started
believing that the time had come for him to die.’ (24-5)[1]
One of the central themes of that historic year and
appropriately, of this novel is the death or abdication of father-figures.
There are few literary genres as well adapted to this topic as the novel, for
the narrative perspective of the traditional novel is the god-perspective.
Rothwell, too, adopts a version of this. In
the first chapter, where Caspar is trying hard to orientate himself and assess
the silent or dissembling people around him, this author-god still seems to be
darting into the minds of characters indiscriminately, partly by
thought-reading and partly by interpreting expressions and gestures, making him
resemble, we may register with a smile, an ideal KGB or Stasi official.
Tiny pupils floated in
Ceausescu’s eyes, as they flicked in their assessment up and down. The reporter’s
dispassionate response to his news [the death of Caspar’s father] pleased him
strangely. He had half expected the American’s face to crease and crumble [...]
Inside him [Caspar], only insignificant
emotions were stirring. He was annoyed that his father’s death should so
dominate the proceedings, and he was gratified to be the recipient of such
distinguished condolences. Only later did he imagine he had felt embarrassed by
Ceausescu’s sympathy. [...]
The interpreter detected Caspar’s
excitement, and was gripped with alarm. When would the president’s driving urge
to subjugate and lecture ever be stilled? How often had the old man launched
into fierce sermons, recalling his own toughness and resolve? The interpreter,
who occasionally dipped into French theorists of psychoanalysis, believed his
master was afflicted by a profound inferiority complex, which found its outlet
in an unconfessed desire to humiliate and crush.
In truth, it would have been
impossible to discern what was in Nicolae Ceausescu’s mind. The dictator’s
mental sphere was imprecise, impenetrable even to himself. Slogans and the
legends of propaganda echoed with hollow clamour there. Ceausescu welcomed a
degree of obscurity, the less he knew of his own promptings, the less conscious
he was, the harder he became for his enemies to second-guess, the more
arbitrary and majestic he appeared. (16f.)
As the novel progresses and we spend more time in the
company of the press group with their highly trained powers of observation, the
dialogue, and this is a novel predominantly of dialogue, makes such authorial
interventions less and less necessary. And of course, the author-god of this
novel, like a true father, is ultimately most interested in reading the mind of
his young protagonist, Caspar. While Rothwell’s narrator is an omniscient
author-god with regard to the minds of people, or perhaps one should say, of the
immature and insecure, he cannot predict events; that is left to the
intelligence and intuition of the journalists and other mature and emancipated,
though never infallible, players. On one level, Rothwell’s novel is about the
necessary abdication of the genre of the great European, author-dominated,
third person novel to make way, hopefully,
for a new democratic age of many voices, an age without
repression and tutelage, without domineering father figures.
After the death of the father, the paper for a while
provides a stringer, a collegial companion and team-mate for Caspar, his
father’s friend and former ‘aide-de-camp’ Avercamp, who hovers about the young
man like a guardian spirit: a gentle father, guiding, encouraging, protecting
and occasionally admonishing, till the young man is more ready to stand his
ground. All the same, the newly orphaned Caspar still acts like a magnet for
political father figures: most prominent among them are the American Special
Envoy and later Deputy Secretary of State Roger Maclennon, representing the
capitalist and imperial White House strand of American politics (Maclennon uses
a love interest to inveigle Caspar);
Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev’s confidant and envoy, the idealistic but
ultimately helpless reformer, Ignat Alexandrovich Severnayev; the
Editor-in-Chief of Munich’s Süddeutscher
Kurier, Hans Senckenberg, an experienced and intelligent man marred by his
nepotistic and national priorities; and most disturbing of the lot, the
newspaper’s owner and proprietor, Lawrence Lambourne, the prescient
representative of a global, capitalist age of information, about to go shopping
in the newly liberated satellite states of the Soviet Union and there revealing
his true nature with his interest in the Romanian dictator’s absurdly
over-dimensional marble palace. Each of these important and charismatic men
shows a genuine fatherly ‘love’ for Caspar and yet uses him to a greater or
lesser extent for his own purposes. And drawn into their magnetic fields in
consequence of the vacuum created by his recent loss, Caspar, in spite of
valiant attempts to hold his own, often ends up unwittingly doing their
bidding, something his stringer Avercamp and the paper’s senior correspondent
and at times his supervisor, Laurel Truly, are unable always to pre-empt and
control. (285) Thus their most gifted stylist, most intuitive reporter, and
most brilliant colour writer, who attracts readers to him like wasps to a
honey-pot, is also one of their great potential liabilities. The new editor,
David Faber, a power-broker whose empire, however, stands and falls with the
reputation of his newspaper as a great and reliably unbiased journal, would
love to banish this loose cannon of a reporter to some distant backwater of the
world, but that is impossible because his powerful patrons require him for
their own purposes, and because neither he nor his colleagues nor the paper’s
clientele would ever understand that such a move was considered and not merely
vindictive. All he can do is to surround and hopefully, constrict the young
journalist with rivals and minders.
Like Caspar’s own father, the author-god-father Rothwell has
created has his soft and tender sides. There can be no doubt that Caspar
maligned him in his conversation with Ceausescu. He does let people have their
say, particularly those that know their minds, he respects the individuals he
has created or, alternatively, if we want to uphold the parallel with the
Emeritus Editor, the journalists he worked with and trained for years, as well
as those in the wider world whom he listened to and influenced; over all of
them he still seems to hover as a guiding memory. In his final, ghostly
appearance to Caspar, he reminds him:
‘A good crew you had. [...] A
good strong team. Always enjoy your colleagues, Caspar. They define you. What
they think of you, that’s what survives, after all, that’s what lives on.’
(532)
In defiance of Lambourne and Maclennon, Alexander Kilian’s
reputation also gives his son access to Severnayev, the advocate of a moderate
reformed socialism with whose approach the older Kilian seems to have been most
in tune. Alexander had only recently visited Gorbachev’s envoy and exchanged
ideas. At the start of their acquaintance, Severnayev tells Caspar:
‘I had just such a conversation
with your father, last month, in Moscow, and he agreed with me - yet we must
still deal with Americans like your envoy, who thinks he is holding out to me
the hand of friendship, even though his closeness is the closeness of the
arm-wrestler sensing victory.’ (43)
When Caspar later accuses his father’s apparition of
neglecting to mention certain things to him, particularly those relating to Isabel
Capri, Maclennon’s ‘love interest’ for Caspar, the ghost answers:
‘Ah, Caspar, Caspar! What I
mention to you, always, is what you wish me to say. You needed the mystery, and
the silence, don’t you see? Had I told you what you know now, then where would
you have been? With no Siren - no darkness - no love. No love in your year of
wonders. Don’t you remember, I told you: I am your thoughts, and your ideas -
your dreams!’ (533)
This is the Czech side of Alexander Kilian, the heritage of
Caspar’s great-uncle with his love of beauty, romance and style, along with his
sadness, which led him to seek his death in the river: a figure that himself
makes a ghostly appearance, in a whimsically comic vein, giving advice at the
end of Caspar’s night with Isabel. The Kilian’s enigmatic Czech roots are also,
without doubt, the source of the gentle ironic humour that pervades the novel
and diffuses it with charm and light. It shines through in almost any
interaction between the characters.
Caspar’s intuitive gifts likewise have this source. In
Prague, Caspar can make a brief visit to the Kilian church of Saint Nicholas.
(Rothwell’s name, we note, is also Nicolas.) When he was a boy his father, of
Jewish background but no longer of the Jewish faith, had told him how he had
chosen this church as ‘my symbol, my secret home, [...] because I felt safe
here; safe, and full of insight. I felt uplifted.’
‘Always remember this, always
remember - this magic world is deep inside you. This is your secret. Rather
than seek outside, look in! Rather than act, feel! Promise me you will always
carry this inside you...’ (380)
This sensitivity is highly developed in Caspar. Much like a
medium, he can give voice to many spiritual influences. But it would be too
simple to say that Caspar was constantly under the spell of people plotting to
influence him, people like Maclennon who, incidentally, insists on calling him
his ‘ghost-writer’. His father’s voice will always predominate. (That Rothwell,
too, is grateful for his Czech gifts, is indicated in the closing words of his
acknowledgements, where he thanks his mother.)
There is a third ghost that comes to visit Caspar. It is
Arthur Koestler, another Central European and formerly Austro-Hungarian
‘ancestor’, a writer and journalist, who began, like so many intellectuals, as
a convinced communist only to become, later in life, the unequivocal opponent
of all totalitarian regimes. Koestler, moreover, is the author of The Roots of Coincidence, one of the
rare serious studies to have investigated whether esoteric phenomena can be
explained and proven scientifically, maybe through ‘quantum theory’. Caspar’s
conversation with the ghost alludes to this book.
‘Coincidence? You brought me
here! And you know I have complex ideas about chance and cause.’
[...]
‘Are you trying to tell me,’
said Caspar, sitting down in the armchair and stretching back carefully, ‘that
all your ideas about levels of existence were on the right track?’ He felt
inquisitorial, and watched the face with careful attention, noticing how dull
and lustreless its eyes seemed to be. ‘At the time, they sounded, frankly,
well, I have to say it, speculative!’ (206)
Whether the origins of Caspar’s intuitions are to be
explained spiritually, psychologically or scientifically, they exist as flashes
of brilliance - almost of madness in the eyes of people like Laurel Truly -
which are not subject to rational control and whose effects can not be gauged.
Considering the power for good and bad that newspaper headlines can have on
world politics, Caspar’s genius will always be a risky element in the equation.
Drama, beauty, romance, humour, spirituality are the things
that come to Caspar and Rothwell from their Czech ancestors. They are all
things that can and need to be saved from the funeral pyre of the novel. By a
fine coincidence, the Czech revolution was led by the playwright Vaclav Havel,
and it was prepared on a theatre stage, its props, in particular the mouth of
the Minotaur, amusingly becoming an integral part of the new political message,
even as dramatic, democratic dialogue was being turned into a political tool.
In Rothwell’s later Australian writing, beauty, spirituality, gentle ironic
humour, a European rootlessness, the search for new utopias, and human rights
issues would always remain strong elements.
But let us return to the novel. One of the most obvious
characteristics of its traditional realist manifestation is its length. It
seems to glory in the amount of time it can hold us imprisoned in its world
without us making serious attempts to escape. A story that could, at a pinch,
be told on a few pages, must be spun out to cover five hundred or even a
thousand. There are various ways of doing this, the windings of plot being
perhaps the most common. In Rothwell’s novel much of the length is created by
the hectic schedules of the foreign correspondents with their press
conferences, special interviews with important players, filing deadlines, and
their swift departures for the next theatre of unrest with its news coups. The
description of these schedules, repetitive and yet ever new, swelling and
subsiding like the thematic variations of a great symphony, perhaps like
Beethoven’s Eroica mentioned
somewhere in the novel, provide the impetus and emotional energy to carry us
through the seemingly endless pages. The Communist States here being demolished
also dreamed of living driven by the intoxication of work, though, towards the
end, work in the ‘workers’ paradises’ had lost most of its appeal. Another
great captivator of readers (and political subjects) is suspense or, to put it
more crudely, anxiety and fear, something at which the Eastern dictators were
experts. Rothwell too keeps his readers in some suspense. We worry about our
vulnerable hero, Caspar, and are never quite sure who his enemies are or when
his luck might desert him (though we are also often drawn into the fast
slip-stream of the sleep-walking certainty which seems to propel him much of
the time). As newspaper and history readers in our own right, we know the broad
outcomes of the political upheavals of 1989; but there is no telling what might
happen to individuals in times of violent or even just velvet revolution. Like
the journalists, we find it hard to work out who is pulling the strings, who is
plotting behind the scenes, who is being double-crossed, or who will win or
lose in the end. The rhythmic music of work, the suspense and fear whipped up
by the revolutionary struggles and, last but not least, the love interest, keep
us going.
We are in the first third of the novel when Maclennon
introduces his assistant, Isabel Capri, to Caspar, a woman of great beauty and
allure who remains mysterious, a daughter, apprentice and perhaps also mistress
to the older envoy, a siren who seems dangerous and yet innocent and vulnerable
and who is also an enigmatic memory from Caspar’s childhood when their fathers,
hers an American CIA man, were associates of some kind. A great love affair
seems to be developing between the two when suddenly, in spite of what we
believed to be Isabel’s deep attachment to Caspar which made her risk
everything to spend a night with him, she enters into what is apparently a
marriage of convenience with the staid and stolid young German diplomat Joachim
Senckenberg, the most unlikely of choices. Women, it seems, do not benefit from
the developing political emancipation to the extent that men do.
Novels live through their characters but character in this
novel, as in many others, is also a device to create suspense. If characters
are complex and ambiguous like Isabel, then we will find it hard to predict
their behaviour and the apprehensive thrill and thus, our tolerance of
captivation, will be enhanced. Many of the characters in this novel are not the
great and self-motivated individuals of the Renaissance dream, though they may
pretend they are, but the dissembling, inhibited, bullying or frightened,
confused, unpredictable subjects or former subjects of dictators, or these
dictators themselves in various guises. Even our hero, the intelligent, responsible
and highly intuitive Caspar, is, for all his brightness, of course not always
in control. In the last pages, we then catch glimpses of the Romanian
interpreter, Madame Danieli, taking her first halting steps out of captivity
and victimhood into vivaciousness, flirtation and personal opinion. Western
journalists like Laurel Truly (whose name could suggest that she truly deserves
a laurel wreath, something Caspar might not always have been willing to
concede) are perhaps exceptions; but Laurel is so job-focused and job-consumed
that her womanly charm remains hidden beneath square glasses and for much of
the time her individuality can only express itself in permanent fury, leaving
her too an enigma. The hale-fellow-well-met personas of other American reporters,
in turn, are hard to predict. In this world, Gorbachev’s envoy Severnayev, and
by implication Gorbachev himself, are perhaps the last true ‘characters’,
lifted straight out of Shakespearian drama and strangers to the world of the
novel. Neither communism nor capitalism, nor, for that matter, the global
information age has room for them. They have, it is clear, lost out to history:
tragic, honourable, but also flawed and broken giants. As a genre that glories
in the hold it has over its readers, the novel has affinities with both
totalitarianism and capitalism.
Rothwell’s Heaven and
Earth must be categorized as a historical novel, a large subset of the
genre, though in this instance history has nudged as close as it can to the
contemporary, and that is, of course, incompatible with the past tense of third
person novelistic narrative and its closed world. (To give a sense of
immediacy, the action in Heaven and Earth
is driven along largely through dramatic dialogue.) The historic events in
Rothwell’s novel are real and told with a reporter’s accuracy wherever the
story permits; (it is, of course, ultimately, the story of a ‘hero’ in whom all
threads are drawn together). So are we entitled to read Heaven and Earth as a snapshot of those times or should we be
guided by caution? I must admit, I often felt tempted to take it for real. I
was actually in Berlin for the weeks before the Wall came down, crossing over
the eerie border with its frightening, dramatic scenes, shunned by Easterners
when I asked for directions, honoured by the openness with which our new
friends, whom I had brought the obligatory bananas as a gift, discussed their
people’s situation behind closed windows but in our presence. I had felt
comfortable with the Gorki Theatre people in their canteen where New Forum
material was discreetly passed around, a great hope in those days - till a man
who looked vaguely different entered and the evidence disappeared. On the
ground, as a member of the public, I would have known much less than Rothwell and
the other foreign correspondents who were presumably also present in the city
at that time. The journalists’ predictions and the breaking news stories, some
of which I would have read, so important for the daily press, of course no
longer have any but historical interest for us today. They can rest in the
newspaper’s archives which also hold the breaking news reports of Caspar’s
father about, for example, the 1953 workers’ uprising in East Berlin and its
cruel suppression by Soviet tanks. But the ‘colour stories’, at which Caspar
excelled, and the political, ideological and psychological analyses, also among
his strong points, which echo through the novel, are. With their help, flimsy
memories rise to the surface, gain substance and reveal their relevance for the
present age. What becomes blatantly clear in Rothwell’s novel is that
ideologies matter little, that they are no more than vehicles for the on-going
struggles between human beings.
The psychology of human beings has, of course, always been
the province of the novel. But its focus on characters can be both strength and
weakness. It can help us to observe the people at the centre of political
events - the dictators, the power brokers, the diplomats, the politicians - but
by doing so, it is in danger of misleading us in more than one way: in the
first place by surreptitiously taking us back to an era which believed that
history was made by ‘great men’, a belief strong in the communist dictatorships
with their emphasis on leaders and earlier, in Europe’s feudal and absolutist
monarchies; secondly, by suggesting that nations and nationalities are
distinguished by their ‘characters’ - the Russians, the Czechs, the Germans,
the Hungarians, the Romanians, the Americans - an assumption that rigidifies
international politics and facilitates nationalist rivalry; and thirdly, by
highlighting certain characters as representative of their nations - Severnayev
of Russia, Senckenberg of Germany, Maclennon of America, and even Ceausescu of
Romania - representations which will almost inevitably be biased. Maclennon is
by no means the only American the novel introduces us to, but he sticks in our
mind because he reinforces clichés, as do the other ‘representatives’ to some
extent. They are, of course, all older men whose time in the limelight is
almost over. Rothwell’s novel is about the ineffectiveness and ultimately fall
of dictators and the rise of a global age. The latter is represented by the
great variety of hard-working and intelligently observant international reporters
travelling from country to country and facilitating change, but also by the
somewhat sinister figure of Lawrence Lambourne, potentially the new
‘dictator’. We need to be aware that the
personifications the novel requires can lead to undue simplifications of world
politics in a modern era. Rothwell tries to counteract these by including
plenty of political analyses from the mouths of the reporters and their
informants. But the novel’s insistence on working with characters is, without
doubt, the area in which it is hardest for an author to both expose and
supersede this deeply ideological genre successfully.
In our current global age, information has become the driver
of world politics. Lawrence Lambourne, the owner of Caspar’s paper and a whole
portfolio of newspapers all around the world and, even as the communist regimes
are toppling, the leaser of news satellites to convey capitalism’s tempting
messages to Eastern Europe, is very aware of this. During a rare meeting he
asks his young reporter: ‘Tell me. What is the specific, defining difference
between the present age, and the time of your past empires?’ And he goes on to
answer his own question:
‘Information [...] The
technology of knowledge! The fate of Hitler’ - and here he betrayed his excitement
with a quiver of his voice, but hastened on – ‘one might almost say, were it
not obscene to do so, of course, his tragedy was to be born on the very edge of
the communications age. Dimly, he glimpsed what would be possible in our day, a
whole empire founded upon control of image and information, rather than on the
sharing of allegiance or the spread of some convincing, yet all too perishable
ideology. Yes, the first communists in Moscow grasped the principle also; that
an idea could have enslaving potential - but sadly for them, they chose the
wrong one. For us in the West, the choice has been simpler because we know the
seductions of individual licence - the joys of liberty are what we trumpet to
ourselves, and we believe in them. Why is the Kremlin fearful today? Not
because of first-strike missiles! Not because of Star Wars! No! Because of our
transponders and our direct broadcast satellites! [...] Information, the
greatest anarchist and revolutionary of them all! I give you information! It’s
a cannibal, feeding on the whole world, and on itself. There’s nothing that can
stay hidden from the television camera and the news crew, nothing that can’t be
transmitted a thousand times a second around the globe. No more secrets, no
more dictators controlling the truth, because there’s nowhere for them to hide
from us! That’s why the empire of Eastern Europe is shaking and crumbling.
Soon, everyone will have equality of information. Everyone! Now, how’s that for
a revolution?” (239)
There is a paradox in Lambourne’s
triumphant proclamation. If Hitler and ‘the first communists in Moscow’, the
ancestors of all totalitarian dictators, envisaged information as the highroad
to power, why should its impact be more humane and liberating in the modern
world? Caspar, knowing that his boss ‘needed a certain show of resistance to
kick down’, counters Lambourne’s proclamation with ‘the joke the dissidents
tell the visiting correspondents in Czechoslovakia. In the East, nothing is
free, and everything matters; in the West, everything is free, and nothing
matters - nothing at all.’ (239) Once all national uniqueness has been
surrendered and all confrontation overcome, there is a danger that life could
become meaningless. This is probably the best justification of the political
solution both Caspar and his father, and presumably the author too, seem to
favour, the vision that Gorbachev and Severnayev were unable to realize, where
western consumerism still faces the challenge of a humane and open socialism
that will force it to question and occasionally modify itself.
Since Lambourne’s
utopian/dystopian vision hovers over Rothwell’s novel as a prophetic outlook
upon the future, it is important that we examine and evaluate the whole process
of news-making that is here the central subject. The journalists of the various
western press corps, in this novel foremost among them Laurel Truly, are
extremely hard-working and their intentions are honourable. They are careful
observers, they feel guilty when they make informed guesses, they often have to
rely on their hunches, they are rarely duped though they can be carried away by
the mood of the day, and they interpret to the best of their abilities; they
want to get it right but they need, above all, access to be able to report
accurately. They cannot look behind locked doors. Like them, the novelist has
access only to uncertain truth. The novel’s second tier of actors, Maclennon
and Severnayev among them, are, as their concealing names suggest,
semi-fictional figures. Today’s German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, sends us a
signal as the half-true, half-invented Marianne Merkel with her unfamiliar beak
nose and straight black hair. But in spite of its doubtful reliability,
fiction, and it stands here for freedom of thought and imagination, has its
strong points. It allows us to envisage situations to which we could never have
real access and it allows us to talk and write about people and events without
fear of legal repercussions. Just as there is no such thing as incontestable
truth that has not been modified by the minds of individual reporters, the
borders between real life and fiction will remain indistinct or frayed. Fiction
forces us to acknowledge the unreliability of our sources but it also gives us
the opportunity to ask the big, speculative questions. Rothwell’s great
panorama of the year of revolutions and its reporters with their various angles
on events serves as support and extension of the news record and our historical
memory, without forcing opinions on us or constricting our discussion. Like the
news and like history, novels are there to be interpreted. It is the diversity
of perception and opinion that matters. People like Lambourne, however, who are
intent on smuggling their ‘capitalist’ perspectives into the news through inexperienced
reporters like Caspar, tread in the footsteps of Hitler and the other
dictators.
There is a last little province in this realm between fact
and fiction that should be mentioned in conclusion. What is the relationship
between Rothwell the author and Caspar the foreign correspondent? Both were
young in 1989, Rothwell just 30, Caspar 28, both had fathers high in the
hierarchy of the newspapers for which they worked who died suddenly and
unexpectedly, both had family connections to Czechoslovakia, (Rothwell’s mother
was Czech, as was Caspar’s father), Rothwell is Australian but born in the USA;
Caspar is American. Could they share, for instance, some of the childhood
memories the novel recalls? In many of its passages, this novel has the freshness
of a memoir, Rothwell’s memoir, rather than the invented artifice of fiction.
The author is and is not his own protagonist. It is of course probably right to
say that this is to some extent the case even in novels where the real-life
parallels are less obvious. We have to accept that as readers we cannot sort
such things out and are not intended to. But the unease between fiction and
reality remains. It can, perhaps, be seen best in connection with a pivotal
chapter in the centre of the book: Some months after his father’s death, Caspar
is ordered back to headquarters in New York for a briefing and comes into an
arena tense with rivalries and unexplained, dictatorial decisions, an arena
that nevertheless defines itself as his family and thereby forces him into the
helpless role of the dependant, both loved and violated child. Following some
natural parental instinct (I am here creating a little scenario), we, the
readers, fling out our arms to embrace him, but almost immediately become aware
that this is an inappropriate role for us and retaliate by suspecting the
author of narcissistic sentimentality towards his youthful self. A little
later, however, we are forced to admit we have fallen into a trap that has,
perhaps, been teasingly set for us. The description we are given, far from
being self-indulgent, is essential for our understanding of the vulnerability
of the protagonist of which he himself is quite unaware (that central, though
for long stretches hidden theme in the novel). This vulnerability can only
become visible to us when he is at home and among his father’s former
colleagues who have known him since he was a child. The confusion between real
and fictional worlds, to which Rothwell playfully draws attention in his mixing
and matching of biographies, points to another characteristic of the novel as
genre. It exploits the sleights of hand that go with fiction, confusing the
reader into taking inventions for realities or, to transpose this to the worlds
of the media or politics: taking spin and propaganda for truth. We no longer
know quite what to believe and what not to believe. This can happen to us
because, at least with regard to Rothwell’s biography, we have been captured in
the closed world of the novel and our view into the wider real world has been
partly, though not completely blocked, much like the view of Romanians was
blocked and rendered uncertain by their closed society. The European realist
novel imprisons us in an imaginary world, which may, of course, appear to be a
pleasant or fascinating world. As long as nothing reminds us of its
artificiality, we can relax and enjoy a holiday experience.
The difficulty of keeping a clear head and an unbiased eye
on the truth is very much at the heart of Heaven
and Earth, the title here standing for the utopian imaginary versus the
real. In a powerful scene late in Rothwell’s novel, Laurel Truly wakes Caspar
up one night to summon him to her room. He comes dressed in his black suit, too
sleepy to have found a shirt to brighten the funereal look, expecting to be
told of his demotion or sacking by David Faber, the ‘dictator’ of the newspaper
for which he works. It becomes a powerful scene of unexpected revelations which
turns the novel on its head, for us too. For Laurel explains to Caspar that
those he took to be his friends and rescuers, namely Lambourne, Maclennon and
Isabel Capri, have been using him all along:
‘Didn’t you ever stop to think
what they were doing? Why Maclennon and his assistant - oh yes, his beautiful
assistant,’ she nodded, her voice had fallen to a momentary, seducing whisper,
‘why they were interested in you?’
‘Could it have been because I
was the correspondent for a great New York newspaper? Because they thought I
had good connections? Maybe - I know it’s a wild idea - they even liked me,
they found my opinions worth listening to, they enjoyed my company ....’
‘Oh, Caspar! They wanted things.
They had you in a power game. We just saw him in action today! He’s some kind
of monster, and she - she’s ...’
‘Stop!’ He lunged over. His hand
leaped across, as if he could stop the flow of her words. ‘That’s enough,’ he
began to shout, ‘more than enough!’ - but her voice had already turned into a
yelp of fear.
She jumped up.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’m not going
to stop. I should have said all this long before. If I’d cared enough, if I’d
been thinking of you, I would have. Do you have any idea how far it goes? No!
Of course you don’t. It never occurs to you! You wouldn’t even dream that
Maclennan knew you were going to be in New York for that boardroom conference!’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘Because he asked Lambourne for
you to be there! Just like he asked him for you to be sent to cover Germany and
Prague!’
[...]
‘And what makes you think that?’
Caspar was sounding like a
bitter, futile echo.
‘I don’t think! I know! Faber
found out afterwards and he told me everything.’
‘Faber! An unbiased source!’
‘Oh, Caspar - I know you think
he’s against you, but it’s not true. He can see these people, crawling like
flies all over the newspaper, steering, pushing, infiltrating. He just wants to
keep control. He’s doing what any editor would do.’
(451-2)
The gifted young reporter, convinced of the clarity of his
vision, has in reality often simply slid into the opinions of others. This
becomes obvious when Caspar files late one night from Ambassador Cardinale’s
office in Bucharest while the older man listens and realizes, with ‘a certain
excitement’ that Caspar has ‘borrowed his own ideas, extended his own thinking,
even made use of his beloved metaphors. “Is that the way you usually operate?”
he asked, and made a wry face.’ (528)
To sum up, we might say: Rothwell’s Heaven and Earth, which triumphantly uses itself to expose the
European novel - and with it the cultural heritage of Europe - in so far as it
is a genre that exploits the tyranny of the god-author, and fearful suspense,
and the captive mind, and the dangerous personifications of politics, and the
brokenness of people subjected to the heroic story, and the half truths and
lies but also the inventiveness of fiction is, nevertheless, I believe, a great
novel that is important for our times. It clears the way for the search for new
and more appropriate and liberating genres, a search which Rothwell himself
declared timely in his later essay ‘The Language of Nature and the Language of
Man’ where he writes:
The energy wave is always moving
on; it flows on; it passes from the novel to other forms of writing; forms
collapse upon themselves and are reborn. There is always a place where the
fervour of creation sits, and I suspect a clear view of the century just passed
would trace the movement of the shock wave of artistic energy in writing away
from the novel form and into genre, into memoir, perhaps into hybrid narrative,
just as it has moved from stage to film to video game; from impressionism in
painting into and past modernism; from photography into the swelling murk of
digital creation, and on, towards a looming future for the visual arts that I
find hard to discern. (Journeys to the
Interior, 25)
Heaven and Earth
ends with the protagonist’s escape, and at this moment he does become ‘the
hero’ in the old-fashioned sense. As the ambassador calls after him: ‘Mr
Kilian, you shouldn’t do this!’ he throws off the chains of the dictatorship
the father-figures of the commercial world of the press had exerted over him.
But by now Caspar was on the verge
of running; from tension, and the desolation of excitement, and the wild,
burning energy of instincts freed at last. He reached the stairs and clattered
down them, his eyes bathed by the glints of marble. He rushed towards the
entrance, out into the snow and the day’s unfolding whiteness. (541)
Thus the novel ends with the pristine white of a new blank
page: not just this particular novel Heaven
and Earth, one could say, but the great European realist novel which has
moulded our habits of thought and experience.
No comments:
Post a Comment