286
PEARL
K.
BELL
As he informs us in his afterword, Amis leaned heavily on Primo
Levi's
Survival in Auschwitz
in writing
Time's Arrow, or The Nature of the
Offense.
The subtitle is in fact Levi's phrase. Indeed, the only genuinely
chilling words in this novel - "Here there is no why," which begin the
Auschwitz chapter - have also been appropriated from Levi. In his mem–
oir of the camp, Levi recalls plucking an icicle from a window only to
have it snatched away by a guard. When he asked"
Warum?"
the guard
replied
"Hier ist kein warum."
Those four simple words convey more
about the Holocaust than all of Amis's backward-running narrative,
which, in violating the order of cause and effect, trivializes what he has
exploited but failed to comprehend. And that is the nature of his offense.
Three years ago Julian Barnes slyly pretended to take on a very big
subject and polished it off with characteristically witty finesse in
A History
of the World in
10
112 Chapters.
Of course it wasn't really a history, nor
did it have a great deal to say about "the world." Starting with Noah's
Ark, Barnes proceeded to hop, skip, and jump through the centuries by
means of an eccentric omnium-gatherum of narrators: movie star,
woodworm, terrorist victim, religious astronaut, Americans, etc. As the
illiterate dustman in Dickens'
Our Mutual Friend
remarked about the
man he hired to read to him, "He do the police in different voices," and
Julian Barnes, an even more nimble ventriloquist, can do any voice he
fancies. In
Flaubert's Parrot
he could "do" Flaubert as effortlessly as he
could become the voice of the doctor obsessed with Flaubert. And in his
new novel,
Talking It Over,
he has given this ventriloquial talent the freest
rein yet.
History, in one or ten or less than half a chapter, has now been left
behind as the three principal characters, in alternating monologues, tell
their sad and very English story. Oliver and Stuart have been friends since
schooldays, though they are as different as wine and water. Oliver is a
flamboyant cynic, hiding massive self-doubt behind his glittering verbal
facade, a clever non-stop talker of dazzling virtuosity who likes to
"scatter
bon mots
like sunflower seeds." Incurably ironic, mocking every–
thing other people take seriously, he is forever shamelessly cadging money
and drinks from salt-of-the-earth types like Stuart. Though Oliver has a
university degree, the only job he's been able to hang on to - and that
only barely - is teaching English to foreigners at a grubby third-rate
language school. What he is good at is the staccato rattle of clever
words that quickly melt into air:
Have
I
told you my Theory of Life, by the way? Life is like invading
Russia. A blitz start, massed shakos, plumes dancing like a flustered
