The Porcupine

National Review, Dec 14, 1992 by Anthony Lejeune

THE so-called "literary novel" is a curious kind of artifact. You might think that all novels were, by definition, "literary," but the term actually excludes most novels. To read one of these highly revered and much reviewed volumes for the story (which is surely what novels are primarily about) would entail the urgent need of a fast-forward button. For colorful characters then? But very few modern novelists seem even to have entered themselves in the Dickens Stakes. Should we read them, as the Church of England says we should read the Apocrypha, "for example of life and instruction of manners," or for a social and political message? Perhaps: but there must be more efficient and quicker methods of study. In fact, much "literary" writing appears to be phrase-making for its own sake.

Julian Barnes is unquestionably a skilled manipulator of words. His new book, The Porcupine, can indeed be described as a literary novel (or novella, since it is very short), but, although many sentences are conspicuously and imaginatively well-turned, there is little of the tricksiness and jokiness for which his writing has been admired. Of plot development narrative--there is almost none: the only potential twist is allowed to escape virtually unexplored. Effectively, there are just two characters, protagonist and antagonist, mere animate arguments with little flesh on them, backed by an occasional burst of comment from a chorus of observers.

What we are offered is an exercise in political imagination. Mr. Barnes has taken for his subject the changes in Eastern Europe, the transformation from Communism to whatever you wish to call the passionate, confused, ambivalent regimes which now prevail. Bulgaria was his rough model--indeed, the book was first published in Bulgarian. Todor Zhivkov, the deposed head of state, sent for a copy to read in his prison cell.

It describes succinctly the show-trial (under the new democratic' guise, which proves not so very different from the old totalitarian guise) of just such a fallen Communist leader. Mr. Barnes has made an intense effort to understand, from inside, the positions both of the prosecutor and of the defendant. The exposition is fair and emotionally sympathetic. If it reveals nothing unexpected or brilliantly illuminating, the reason may simply be that those positions are familiar, painfully familiar, to anyone who has lived through, and thought about, the history of our times.

The Communist, Petkanov, is allowed to have the best of it, perhaps because Mr. Barnes thinks the less fashionable cause the more interesting to expound. Petkanov still thinks it the nobler cause: "What do people want? They want stability and hope. We gave them that. Things might not have been perfect, but with Socialism people could dream that one day they might be. You have only given them instability and hopelessness. A crime wave. The black market. Pornography. Prostitution .... We gave them sausage and higher things. You do not believe in higher things, and you do not even give them sausage. There is none in the shops."

Petkanov plays with the court, as a master musician tunes and plays a long-practiced instrument. He lists the honors which the outside world once piled on him, recalls the praise he once received from Western leaders seeking to ingratiate themselves and do business with the Communist bloc. And he remains, in his own mind, chillingly confident of the future. "You don't get to Heaven on the first jump .... What was happening was that just for a brief historical moment the old system was being allowed a last little hop in its slimy frog-pond. But then, inevitably, the spirit of Socialism will shake itself again, and in our next jump we shall squelch the capitalists down into the mud until they expire beneath our boots."

The prosecutor, meanwhile, finds what had seemed to be his quarry's obvious guilt running through his fingers like sand. A "moral trial," without the need for specific provable charges, being judged impossible and anyway incompatible with new ideas about the rule of law, and a Ceausescu-type killing (which some of the young would prefer) also having been excluded, the best he can manage is an unconvincing, inadequate, predetermined verdict. After which, like the old man at the beginning of Plato's Republic, though with less confidence, he goes off to church, while an old woman in the street outside holds up a picture of Lenin.

That The Porcupine is extremely well written hardly needs saying; Mr. Barnes has earned his reputation. The constant sprinkling of obscenities may be considered obligatory in a literary novel. The political analysis rings true and is often shrewd. The narrative, however, lacks warmth or, in the end, any particular moral force. It is a purely intellectual construction.

This in turn provokes a question. Why does this theme--the collapse, ideological as well as practical, of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe hold such fascination for Western intellectuals? One clear answer is that the Western intellectuals were themselves morally involved. They had their own investment in the regimes that have collapsed. At the very least, they felt themselves to be part of the argument: its vocabulary and ideology were not altogether alien to them, as that way of thinking was and is quite alien to many of us.