Bowen After the Rain

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30512-4
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 204 Seiten

First published in 1958 After the Rain was described by Angus Wilson as a 'cataclysmic novel . . . as exciting as any deluge you can hope to find; but if you think deluges are too trivial, John Bowen has a surprise for you: his novel turns out to be satire of the first order.' Beginning in the basement of Foyle's bookshop in the Charing Cross Road in London and moving to rainmaking in Texas, love in Chew Magna, a camp in the Mendips, a storm at sea, sharks, sunstroke, a giant squid and a fight to the death on a raft, After the Rain is an adventure story that will keep you gripped to the very last page. An exhilarating, brilliantly conceived, sharply intelligent and often-funny story, it is a compassionate and well-imagined fable that makes a serious comment on the human situation and established John Bowen as a novelist of depth and skill, drawing comparisons with George Orwell and William Golding.

John Bowen was born in India, sent 'home' to England at the age of four and a half, and was reared by aunts. He served in the Indian Army from 1943-47, then went to Oxford to read Modern History. After graduating he spent a year in the USA as a Fulbright Scholar, much of it hitch-hiking. He worked for a while in glossy journalism, then in advertising, before turning freelance when the BBC commissioned a six-part adventure-serial for Children`s Television. Between 1956 and 1965 he published six novels to excellent reviews and modest sales, then forsook the novel for nineteen years to concentrate on writing television drama (Heil Caesar: Robin Redbreast) and plays for the stage (After the Rain: Little Boxes: The Disorderly Women). He returned to writing novels in 1984 with The McGuffin: there were four more thereafter. Reviewers have likened his prose to that of Proust and P. G. Wodehouse, of E. M. Forster and the young John Buchan: it may be fair to say that he resists compartmentalisation. He has worked as a television producer for both the BBC and ITV, directed plays at Hampstead and Pitlochry and taught at the London Academy of Dramatic Art. He lives in a house on a hill among fields between Banbury and Stratford-on-Avon.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bowen, John

Leseproben

CHAPTER ONE

There are no beginnings in history; all that belongs to pre-history and imagination. Chains of events and ideas stretch backwards and forwards through time, and can be traced in either direction by people who have a fancy for that sort of thing, but traced to no beginnings, and each end is a different question mark.

History is too big for beginnings that we can apprehend, but men are not big. Men are small, and each man has a beginning when he is conceived, an end when he dies; the before and after of events are not comprehensible by his understanding, and so have no part in his life as a man. And, just as each man has his own beginning, so the chain of events and ideas of which I have spoken have a beginning ; that is the moment when they come within his own personal experience.

So that, while for some folk the Flood began at the seventh (eighth? ninth? thirtieth?) day of steady rain, for others only when the level of the water reached the top of the television set or the turkey carpet, for still others at that very moment when the water itself reached out for them to overwhelm them with cold and suffocation, for me it began in the basement of Foyle’s Book Shop in the Charing Cross Road, almost a year before Mr. Uppingham detonated whatever it was he detonated, and covered the earth in rain.

The Book Buying Department was in Foyle’s basement. A little counter was set off from the girls who sorted or despatched the new books that lay about in profusion elsewhere in the basement, and behind this counter there was a room to the right where the Buyer lived when he was not buying, along with the confidential dusty catalogues that told him whether a textbook was out of date or not. He seemed to me an incongruously cheerful man. I always expected a Buyer to be sympathetically depressed; so many of his clients had come down in the world.

He was a very useful barometer, that Buyer. I could tell which literary reputations were still sound as I watched him going through a suitcase of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century authors, discarding perhaps a third of the books. “No good taking Scott nowadays,” he would say cheerfully, “Bulwer Lytton?—oh, my dear chap! George Eliot—we get that kind of stuff by the ton. Froude … Grote— a lot of copies Everyman must have printed of Grote! Dickens, yes. Trollope, yes. Peacock, yes. Fielding, yes—oh no; it’s , I’m afraid. Not Thackeray. Not Smollet. Not Gissing. I’ll give you twenty-five shillings for the lot.”—and so they would begin a journey through whatever processes were necessary before they reached their final end on the Sixpenny Shelf.

I was selling review copies to Foyle’s at that time, and went pretty regularly to the Buying Department every fortnight or so, and I grew to recognize most of the other regular clients. I myself was of the aristocracy; all the books I brought were new, and I had a good price for them. This put me in a class with the elderly Kensington lady in a purple hat, who used to come in with a string bag full of detective stories, which she had bought to read and sell again; books from the libraries, she said, were full of germs. I remember that I once told her that even Foyle’s books were handled by somebody before she bought them, but she said that one found a better class of customer at Foyle’s than the people who went to libraries.

Below this lady and myself in the scale there were the students in corduroys with Oxford histories and textbooks on mathematics. Below them were those who were students no longer—iddle-aged folk in reduced circumstances, who were hurt when the Buyer told them that their textbooks were out of date, but so much had hurt them already that the news did not make much of a dent in what was already so depressed. Below them again were the thin-nosed men, their cheeks bestubbled, their raincoats dirty, their grey flannel shirts collarless, who brought the suitcases full of standard authors. Some of them would stand mute while the Buyer made his literary judgements; one man invariably grumbled. “Thought I might get thirty-five for this lot,” he would say.

“Twenty-five.”

“There’s some good books there; there’s some fine reading. I thought I might get a shilling each for those Everymans.”

“They’ll all go on the Sixpenny Shelf, I’m afraid.”

So the grumbling man would stuff the Froude, Grote and Bulwer Lytton back into his suitcase, and go off remarking scornfully that he could sell the lot easily enough at the Chancery Lane Bookshop.

Mr. Uppingham had a suitcase when I met him in Foyle’s, but it contained no standard authors—or not, at any rate, standard to me—and his raincoat was perfectly clean. He had shaved; he wore rimless spectacles; he looked like an American, but he was not—I never knew where he hailed from, because his speech had been so refined that not a trace of regional accent remained. He opened his suitcase on the counter of the Buying Department, and he took from it a damp pair of nylon bathing trunks, which had spoiled the dust-jacket of the book that lay beneath. This was . Most of the other books in the suitcase were similar in subject— and at least a dozen others. The pages of some of the books had been removed, arid Mr. Uppingham very properly pointed this out to the Buyer. “Ay tore out those pages,” he said, “Ay tore them out mayself. Ay found them delusive”.

“I suppose they’ll be in the catalogue,” said the Buyer, “Those of them in English at any rate. I’m not sure we can do anything with this.” He handed back to Mr. Uppingham a very filthy copy of .

“But it is part-new,” said Mr. Uppingham. “Not all the pages are cut.”

“A pound for the lot?” The Buyer pushed aside those books from which pages had been torn. “After all, it’s a specialized field.”

I said, “I didn’t know it had a literature at all.”

“Oh, may dear fellow,” said Mr. Uppingham. “It hasn’t. Those books are worthless, quaite worthless. Really you maight say that the only valuable information in them are the marginilia that Ay have mayself contributed.”

“I can’t take these books if you’ve written in them,” said the Buyer.

“As Ay see it,” said Mr. Uppingham, “the contract between us has already been completed, may good man,” and he tucked the credit slip the Buyer had given him into the top pocket of his jacket. “Good-bay, and thank you.”

I said, “I’ll go with you, sir, if I may. There are one or two questions I should like to ask you.”

“You are not from the po-lice?”

“No, I’m a journalist.”

“Bay all means then,” said Mr. Uppingham, “Ay should not care at this stage of may career to be at loggerheads with the Press.”

*

I was at that time a journalist of the superior, ill-paid sort, working for , a magazine intended to be an equivalent to and as successful as . We worked very closely to the formula. Several pages of liberal comment would be followed by some tenuous short stories, essays in nostalgia, and poems that were either funny or intellectually intense. The text was interspersed with joke drawings and unintentionally comic bits cut out of other magazines. Our critics wrote of the Arts in a tone of urbane irritation, and we laid great stress on features distinguished for their objective reporting; I had been hired as one of the objective reporters at a flat salary of fifteen pounds a week. As it happened, Londoners who liked that kind of thing continued to subscribe to , and our magazine barely lasted a year. It folded, in fact, a couple of months after my meeting with Mr. Uppingham, and was mourned at great length (“the contraction of any market at all for good writing”, “the imminent death of the little magazines”, “the menace of television”) by those people who might have saved it by buying the magazine instead of whining about it after it was gone. However, they were paid for their elegies, I suppose, whereas a subscription to would have cost three guineas a year.

It had been my thought that Mr. Uppingham might serve as copy for our “On the Spot” columns, as indeed he did to the tune of four long paragraphs under the heading “Undampened”, which began, “It was our pleasure yesterday to drink coffee with a professional rain-maker,” and ended, “Water polo, anyone?” I sent a copy of these paragraphs, together with my own much longer version of the story, to a friend who knew the Science Editor of the , and landed a job as a Special Correspondent, accompanying Mr. Uppingham to Texas.

The principle on which the State of Texas engaged Mr. Uppingham was simple: it couldn’t do any harm to try him, and he would not be paid unless he were successful. A certain number of inches of rain must fall within two days of the conclusion of his attempt; the State of Texas had had truck with rain-makers before. The principle on which Mr. Uppingham proposed to make the rain was just as simple in its essence, but much more difficult to understand. “Ay dare say,” he had explained at that first meeting, “Ay dare say you did Chemistry at school?”

“Yes.”

“And Ay dare say you remember that if...