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BURIED TREASURE ALERT: the works of Paul Scott. he is perhaps most famous for his excellent The Raj Quartet and its 1977 Booker Prize winning follow up novel Staying On (in my opinion, a gentle and wise novel but clearly a lesser work). outside of those classics, it feels like he is practically unknown. i never come across references to him and reviews for his other novels are rather impossible to find. this is a real surprise; his novels are filled with expert characterization, topical & timeless themes (particularly in terms of class conflict, racial tension, and i suppose the always relevant What Makes A Man? and Can Men Ever Truly Be Brothers?) and - because they draw upon his years of experience in India - they are filled with absorbing historical detail. maybe i am making a mountain out of molehill; although i often feel like i am living in my own personal version of the UK, i actually am not... so maybe his name has more currency over yonder.

The Corrida at San Feliu is written with the seriousness of intent and all the confidence, depth of emotion, and ironic humor of a master-class writer. it is a rather short novel, and overall may be considered a minor work. but ah, the riches buried within!

i've been avoiding giving a synopsis of Corrida because it is hard to give a quick description of all the things going on in this little book. its size is compact - but it is larger on the inside than the outside. i suppose, in a long-winded nutshell, you could say it is about some of my favorite literary themes... the gap between reality and true understanding, the distance between individuals, the way we humans mold our memories and perceptions to better deal with the troubling things in our lives, the way we fool ourselves, how the past will always haunt the present and impact the future. it is about a man who is not just at an impasse in his life, he is breaking down, a slow-burning kind of collapse. it is about the power of storytelling and its dangers as well. it is the story of a man and a woman and all the possible, potential permutations of that relationship. it is about a relationship ending. it is about new ways of seeing old things and the flexibility of perspective. it is a tale of death and of love. it is about how you can't go home again and how that home - whatever "home" even means - maybe never existed in the first place.

the structure is purposely distancing. it forces the reader to pay attention, to take their time in getting to the heart of this novel's reason for being. the first section is a straightforward biography of an imaginary writer. that is followed by four very short tales: the first appears to be a little fable about an ill-conceived leopard hunt in africa, the second is about an ill-fated romance in India, the third is about an arrival of a couple at a Spanish villa, the fourth is about a version of that couple arriving at an Indian estate. the second half of the book (sequentially, the sixth "tale") gets to the heart of the matter. a man and his much younger wife are in Spain. he is a writer and she is a trophy. he feels distance between them; he is obsessed with a possible affair she may be having. he thinks upon his life and loves, his family, his wife's past life, the people who have haunted them both. full of dread, he thinks upon the bullfighting at the San Feliu Corrida. characters appear and reappear, they live throughout all the tales in the book, they change and transform and are given different motivations, different outcomes, different perspectives. the narrator's grasping & unimaginative uncle becomes a vindictive leopard hunter in one tale. a virginal young woman is a cold but rather sad object of lust in one story and then her story is retold in another tale... we get to understand her frustrations and anger from different angles, her motivations become clear, her story becomes a genuine tragedy. we see the main couple in question in different forms: young, old, full of hope, full of fear & resentment, glamorous & beautiful, sad & deeply flawed, haunted by their past, looking to their future, locked in stasis. we see all the possibilities of a relationship ending, of life ending - and why this must inevitably come to pass.

the novel ends with a long passage regarding a bullfight at the Corrida. i must admit to having a good deal of trepidation about this sequence. personally, i'm of an opinion that bullfighting is about as tasteful & interesting as fox-hunting. or hunting children. but nevertheless, i stuck with it, and was rewarded with profundity. the narrator imagines the confrontation between bull and tormenters from all angles: from a young bullfighter, from an old one, from the lady that the bullfight is dedicated to, from the bullfighter's assistants, and - most tragically, most empathetically - from the bull itself. and it not all about supplying multiple angles, telling different tales. everything exists on both the level of story and in how these perspectives reflect the lives of the novel's characters. this passage - well the novel itself as a whole, the way that actions and perspectives and meaning change, flow into each other, become interpreted as story, become transformed... it is all such a remarkably multi-leveled accomplishment.

here is a relatively minor passage concerning a relatively minor character... note the fluidity of perspective, the collapsing of time, the startling movement from a life about to happen to sudden death and finally a terribly unknowable portrait of futility and sorrow:

Alone with Leela he said, 'Will you be my wife?' And she replied, 'I will be whatever you want me to be,' and knelt in front of him so that he experienced a sensation of being both mocked and worshipped, and wondered whether God too was alive to the ambiguity of such gestures. She had her mother's, not her father's bones. The creamy, only slightly tinted flesh was stretched fine, almost transparently over them. It seemed to Craddock that like so many Indian women she was built for burning. Dry and brittle in the body she would be gone in the first lick of flame, all except her eyes through which so far she had seen nothing of the world; through which, now, looking up at him, she conveyed to him something of her great, untapped capacity for living. Through those eyes he was aware of a similar capacity in himself and of immense reserves of energy.

All my life, he thought, I have conserved, stored up against an occasion of expenditure on some act I could be proud of and thankful for. He made her rise and keeping hold her small hands kissed them, as six months later, far away in their place of exile of their short marriage he kissed them as they were clenched, cold, sickly-sweet smelling, in the room where she lay dead of a cup of milk into which she had poured powdered glass, as if only the most agonizing end could adequately settle the reckoning of her brief encounter with the cruel world beyond the walls and garden of old Lady Brague's embattled, haunted bungalow. To die she had put on a simple cotton saree, made a pyre of the European clothes she had tried so hard to grace, and set light to them. The ashes, like her body, were cold, the bungalow deserted, the servants fled, the Mahwari Hills silent behind veils of mist that had melted on his eye-lids as he climbed the path calling her name and getting no answer, so that entering the darkened room he was already aware of the need to weep.