Contemporary British Novel: Spring 2004

There are two questions.

Question One (75%).

            Identify the source of the following quotations. They have not been picked randomly and should enable you to discuss salient aspects of the themes, characters, plot developments and symbolism in the respective novels. Feel free to add to this list of “salient aspects” when necessary. If you can, identify the page numbers–especially difficult with Bridget Jones’s Diary!--but remember that a simple identification counts for less than for your ability to discuss the novels with subtlety and precision. Even an ingenious mistake will score some points.

            Please answer the questions in sequence (that is, if you are uncertain about one ID leave a suitable space so that you can go back and answer the that section of the question. Your answers will thus run 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 etc.) Please write on the right hand page of each “opening” of the blue book so that I can write commentary on the left hand page. If you feel there is a connection between different quotations, please point them out briefly. Thank you. Good luck.

1. There are never more than five in my dining room or at the table on the terrace when we choose to dine outside.

2 The palace was Buckingham Palace, the king was King George the fifth, the woman outside the palace was French, and the time was shortly after the Great War. She had traveled to England on a number of occasions and wanted nothing more than to stand outside the palace gates in the hope of catching sight of the king, with whom she was in love. She had never met him and never would, but her every waking thought was of him . . . He sent her signals that she alone could read, and he let her know that however inconvenient it was, however embarrassing and inappropriate, he loved herm and always would. He used the curtains of Buckingham Palace to communicate with her.

3          Schizophrenia was the diagnosis. And mild erotomania.

4           (Marie is drunk, T-Bone’s looking over her shoulder at someone–Caroline!–that he’s obviously interested in)

5          They lunched well at an Indonesian restaurant where dark-skinned waiters in white turbans brought to their table a seemingly endless supply of spicy aromatic dishes of chicken, prawn, pork, and vegetables . . . “This is peanut sauce,” he said, eating greedily. “This is meat stewed in coconut milk, these are pieces of barbecued sucking pig. Have a prawn cracker.”

6          11:45 p.m. Have just been sick, and as I slumped over the loo trying to do it quietly so Daniel wouldn’t hear, he suddenly yelled out from the bedroom, “There goes your inner poise, my plumptious. Best place for it, I say.”

7          “I’m right please myself. Right pleased!” Her teeth were in proportion to the rest of her. When she addressed anyone she opened her mouth very wide, which might have contributed to the loudness of her voice. You could see all the way to the back of her molars.

8          “Johnny B. Well!” the man said. He had a shaved head and a small waxed mustache dyed with henna. “What are you doing here?”

9          (Actually, it is the only sort of birthday a brand-new thirty-six-year-old could have–the sort of thirty-six-year-old with no wife, family, girlfriend, or money, anyway. Kettle Chips! Fuck off!)

10        Just nipped out for fags prior to getting ready for BBC Pride and Prejudice. Hard to believe there are so many cars on the roads. Shouldn’t they be at home getting ready? Love the nation being so addicted. The basis of my own addiction, I know, is my simple human need for Darcy to get off with Elizabeth. Tom says football guru Nick Hornby says in his book that men’s obsession with football is not vicarious.

11        Although nobody understands more than I the necessity that caused those people of a Wall of Death to act as they did, to this day I fear abandonment, and have instinctively avoided it as a fictional subject. The girls of my romances were never left by lovers who took from them what they would. Mothers did not turn their backs on little children. Wives did not plead or in bitterness cuckold their husbands. The sombre side of things did not appeal to me; in my works I dealt in happiness ever after.

12        “Hallo, naughty boy, this is Marlene. What’s on your mind?”

13        “Duck noires, right?”

14        Extraordinary. After spoke to Jude could not face shopping or similar lighthearted things. Thought this might be the perfect day to do the Feng Shui so went out and bought Cosmopolitan. Carefully, using the drawing in Cosmo, I mapped the ba-gua of the flat. Had a flash of horrified realization. There was a wastepaper basket in my Helpful Friends Corner. No wonder bloody Tom had disappeared.

15        We shook hands and said our names. The professor was hardly older than me, fifty perhaps, and rather plump. He introduced the student as Bonnie Deedes, and as I took her hand I could imagine how an older man might risk everything.

16        [He] has heard rumours that this is the usual climax to a beach party. He imagines the participation in such an exercise of Sandra Dix, the buxom blonde from England who always sits in the front row of English 351 . . .

17        “The biggest price ever paid in the town,” he was saying now.

18        It’s easier in the house. You can feel that the worst is over, and there’s a tired calm in the room, like the tired calm you get in your stomach after you’ve been sick. You even hear people talking about other stuff, although it’s all big stuff–work, children, life. Nobody’s talking about their Volvo’s fuel consumption, or the names they’d choose for dogs.

19        Mouths retched. Eyes stared distractedly. Cats, as thin as razors, scavenged among human entrails; the flesh was plucked from dogs and horses. Birds lay in their own blood; rabbits were devoured by maggots.

20        His one concession to a source beyond himself was a couple of references to the story of Job, and even here it was not obvious he had read the primary material.

21        “You’re not gonna chicken out of the boat-ride, are you, Mr Maxwell?” Mrs Finklepearl taunted him.

22        We were twelve or thirteen and had recently discovered irony–or at least, what I later understood to be irony: we only allowed ourselves to play on the swings and the roundabout and the other kids’ stuff rusting away in there if we could do it with a sort of self-conscious ironic detachment . . . We had no irony when it came to girls, though. There was just no time to develop it.

23        ‘Do you know what she said? “Professor Tardieu, it is not what you say that impresses me the most, it is what you are silent about: ideas, morality, love, death, things . . . This notebook”–she fluttered its vacant pages–“is the record of your profound silences. Vos silences profonds. She speaks excellent French. I went away glowing with pride. Later I wondered if she was mocking me What do you think?’

24        Mark Darcy went back to London in small hours. I left a message on his answerphone saying thank you for helping and everything but he has not rung me back. Cannot blame him. Bet Natasha and similar would not feed him blue soup and turn out to be the daughter of a criminal.

25        “You’ve heard about the watch?” He lifted it from his jacket pocket. They were standing low on the bank of the stream he’d spoken of. If Mary Louise kept watching, she’d see tiny trout swimming by.

26        Luke has offered me his old Camden Square place until he finds new tenants. I don’t know where this takes us. We’ve been so happy together, We’ve loved each other passionately and loyally. I always thought our love was the kind that was meant to go on and on. Perhaps it will. I just don’t know.

27        On the way back to the Piazza del Campo I noticed Quinty and Rosa Crivelli loitering in a doorway. They were smoking and leafing through a photographic magazine, giggling as Quinty turned the pages. I was glad they didn’t see us and that no one happened to be looking in their direction. You could tell by the cover the kind of magazine it was.

28        The victims of de Clerambault patients may endure harassment, stress, physical and sexual assault, even death. While in this case R and M were reconciled . . .

29        He smiles, recalling how she giggled when she told him that she had never opened the Rodenkil. Still giggling, she said she had once written I must not be mischievous a hundred times. She bought the Rodenkil from her husband’s friend on purpose. She stained the rissoles green with the Stephens’ ink she’d taken from he cousin’s bedroom. “People think the worst of you,” she added when she’d said all that, and added that you could hardly blame them.

30        Except to write about that summer I have never since sat down at my black Olympia, and never shall again. I haven’t learnt much, only that love is different among survivors. The caravan passed by, because we hesitated, but that is how things are.

31        “I’m the lucky man,” Elmer declared in a speech. “There’s no one from ten miles around wouldn’t agree on that.”

32        But this pinprick is as notional as a point in Euclidean geometry . . .

33        She turned her head away when she said she was head over heels with him, and had been from the first time he took her out.

34        While I crouched there, with my pants around my ankles, I tried to soothe myself by parting the crackly old leaves and scooping up a handful of soil. Some people find their long perspectives in the stars and galaxies; I prefer the earthbound scale of the biological. I brought my palm close to my face and peered. In the rich black crumbly mulch I saw two black ants . . .

35        “Your ants are interesting too, Tom.”

36        She walks in the garden. She likes it best in the garden and always has, ever since she came to the house. She knows the name of every flower, she has a flowerbed of her own.

37        I was awake at dawn. I slipped out of the bed, put on my dressing gown, and without disturbing the night staff went and stood by the window . . . The twigs at the top are tangled against the sky, like the insides of some machine with wires. I wasn’t thinking about that, because it was a cloudless day and what rose up above the treetops ten minutes later was nothing less than the resplendence of God’s glory and love.

38        Memory is sometimes perfect, clear as a light. First thing when she wakes she wallows in it, assisted by the dusky tranquillity of dawn. The morning after the visit she wallows in the favourite year of all her life, the year the Russians put a dog into space, the year of Bill Haley, the year de Valera proclaimed a state of emergency. A nun in the Sacred Heart convent, expected to live to be a hundred, died at ninety-nine. A sewage problem occurred in Conlon Street necessitating pneumatic drilling, new pipes, and re-surfacing. A fawn-coloured tomcat, property of the gasworks manager, attacked a neighbour’s birdcage, detaching it from the hook and provoking threats of legal action. Tyrell’s the vegetable shop closed.

39        Number of New Year’s Resolutions kept 1 (v.g.)

            An excellent year’s progress.

Question Two (25%)

            Choose four of the fifty categories that David Lodge uses in The Art of Fiction and show briefly how they have helped you to understand and to appreciate short passages of the novels we have read during the semester.