Some people say that nothing happens to them, but everything happens to the writer who sees the world around him as material for fiction. Francis King is such a writer, which explains why he has been able to go on writing novels and stories for longer than many of his readers and indeed publishers have been alive.
When someone who brought out his first book in 1946 while an Oxford undergraduate publishes a novel as good, fresh, intelligent and moving as Cold Snap more than 60 years later, it is almost inevitable that reviewers should remark on his extraordinary literary longevity and his seemingly inexhaustible vitality. And yet this is, in all ways but one, beside the point. To dwell on his age is invidious and misleading. This is not a remarkable novel for a man in his middle eighties to have written. It is quite simply a remarkable novel.
There is indeed only one good reason to draw attention to his age. Though his books have generally been well and widely reviewed — I remember Auberon Waugh insisting that Act of Darkness was the outstanding novel of 1984 — and though one trusts that he has a wide circle of devoted readers, his admirers believe that he has never been given his full due. Perhaps his failure to receive this may be accounted for by his refusal to play to the gallery, to strike attitudes or become a public figure seeking and enjoying modish celebrity.
Instead he has simply got on with his job, transmuting what he has experienced, observed and imagined into fictional form. It may be too that his versatility has told against him. He has written fine comedies like The Firewalkers and The Ant Colony and dark, sometimes chilling studies of obsession and betrayal, such as The Man on the Rock and A Domestic Animal. Though themes of one novel may echo those of an earlier one, he doesn’t repeat himself, and this may mitigate against widespread popularity. Reputations are often based on predictability, and Francis King’s fiction has never been that. It has always been a fiction of detailed observation and sympathetic imagination, offering us the chance to intensify our experience of men and women, manners and morals.
Cold Snap, set, mostly in Oxford, in the years immediately after the second world war, gives the impression of having been long pondered, matured like a fine claret; there are echoes also of his 1989 novel, Punishments, now available in the Faber Finds editions. Most of the action takes place in the bitter winter of 1947 and the novel opens with Christine, a brilliant Classics student, calling on her cousin, Michael, a don who flew bombers over Germany. To her surprise, she finds him entertaining three German prisoners-of-war. Resentment, even hatred, of Germans and everything German, is still common, and Christine’s own fiancé, Ben, was killed in the war. So she is furious, and, when alone with her cousin, says indignantly, ‘Just as long as I can think of them as Huns and not as Klaus, Ludwig and Thomas, I can treat them as they ought to be treated. But, having crossed that line…’ she sat down and tried to be charming.
What follows is a love story — or rather two: Michael’s hopeless love for the simple, tubercular Klaus, and Christine’s for Thomas that starts when she allows Michael to persuade her to let Thomas, a talented musician, play her piano. The slow ripening of their love, edgy, uncertain, beset with failures of understanding and the difficulties of their situation, is wonderfully well done, quite without sentimentality. It is not easy. Thomas resents his dependence, Christine his resentment of it. King has the gift of allowing his readers to see, and fill, the spaces between people.
The weather in the novel is very good. King uses weather as it should be used, not simply as description but as a means of evoking mood. Almost two years after the end of the war with Germany, attitudes remain frozen. Then, as a thaw begins, and Christine and Thomas walk through slush and melting snow and ice on their way from the town to the camp, the treacherous footing becomes an image of the difficulties and uncertainties of their developing relationship. This isn’t spelled out. There is no need for that. But only a dull reader could miss it.
Cold Snap is a well-peopled novel, all the minor characters fleshed out: Margaret, with whom Christine shares lodgings, the endlessly obliging and often irritating plain-girl best friend; Bill, cheerful, even genial, one-legged war veteran, unable to settle to university life; Christine’s demanding, but surprisingly sympathetic tutor; her difficult father and failing aunt; and the other German POWs. All are so thoroughly observed and imagined that they come to complex and convincing life.
Good novels are not merely lifelike — though making fiction lifelike is itself difficult enough; but they transform life, giving events and people a significance not always apparent in everyday existence. The art of fiction is selective. It does not, as Stevenson wrote, ‘compete with life’. Instead, ‘it substitutes a certain artificial series of impressions … all aiming at the same effect, all eloquent of the same idea, all chiming together like consonant notes in music or like the graduated tints in a good painting’.
Because a good novel does not compete with life, but extracts its material from life, it enables us to see more clearly and feel more deeply, and so to come to a truer appreciation of conduct, emotions and thought. And this appreciation is what, in this novel, as in so many others, King triumphantly achieves. It is a book which extends and deepens our understanding. Perhaps it is necessary to add that it is also very enjoyable. Francis King has often — too often perhaps — been called ‘a writer’s writer’. No doubt he is that, if only because other novelists are best able to recognise his mastery of technique and the difficulties he has surmounted. But he is surely a reader’s writer too, if the reader is one who seeks from fiction not only entertainment, which he certainly provides, but also enlightenment.
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