On Thursday afternoon, by an incredible coincidence, I
finished two very long books that I have been reading for a very long time.
They are Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (or ‘In Search of
Lost Time’) and Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time. Proust’s is
considered one of the greatest works of modern literature; Jordan ’s
a great work of fantasy. In nearly every respect they are the total opposite of
one another. In one respect though, they are the same – length.
Oh, and they both have the word ‘time’ in their titles.
I started reading The Wheel of Time (or WoT as its
hoards of devotees call it) when it came out in 1990, twenty-three fucking
years ago. Robert Jordan actually died in 2007 and they had to get another guy
to finish it, which he did in January this year. It ran to 14 volumes and a
touch over 4 million words. In contrast, In Search of Lost Time clocks
up only 1.2 million (War and Peace, for comparison, totals 587,000)
across a mere seven volumes. Strangely, I read the first volume, Swann’s Way
at university, counted myself lucky that was all I had to persevere through,
had it itch at me for a while, then started the whole thing again in around
2008.
So, were they any good? They were, but they’re so different
I can make no real comparison between them. ‘Exile on Main
Street ’ compared with Beethoven’s Ninth?
‘Terminator’ compared to Kieslowski’s ‘Blue?’ Jordan himself was an Episcopalian
nuclear engineer who served two tours of Vietnam
as a helicopter gunner (aside: Michael Herr to a door gunner in Dispatches:
“How do you kill women and children?” Answer: “Just don’t lead ‘em so much”).
Proust was an asthmatic social climber who spent the last three years of his
life confined to his cork-lined bedroom.
The Wheel of Time was epic fantasy of a sort I don’t
really read any more – I barely read fantasy at all these days. It was done
very well with a big cast of nicely drawn characters, an interesting world,
neat descriptions of sword fighting, a novel conception of magic and a
satisfying resolution. There was a certain amount of disconnect as the years
between each book meant that I started each one with the plot for the previous
volume as a dim memory. I do remember that some of the latter ones penned by
Jordan, say volumes 8-10, were pretty dull, and having a new author brought in
after Jordan died (possibly from RSI after all that typing?) was a definite
breath of fresh air to get the whole thing moving and finished.
In Search of Lost Time was vast and infrequently
rewarding. It forced me to read slowly and carefully due to its dense, multiply
compounded sentences, sometimes running to more than a page. It drew me in with
accessible portraits of, and ruminations on, obsessive love, then pushed me
away with the tedious minutiae at play between the aristocracy and the
bourgeoisie at the world’s longest and most boring dinner party. It left me
with an impression of Proust as an expert on memory (and what a fantastic thing
on which to be an expert), modestly possessing a huge vocabulary, preoccupied
with class and with homosexuality (or ‘inversion’ as he calls it), a pettily
jealous mummy’s boy, a tender child filled with love for his grandmother, and someone
deeply affected by flowers, particularly hawthorn blossom.
So, let me cheerfully roll out the usual clichés regarding
high and low culture. The Wheel of Time was a plot-driven, fun read populated
by shallow characters and showing a shallow conception of the world. In
Search of Lost Time was disdainful of plot; a difficult book populated by
multifaceted characters and displaying an almost painful engagement with
existence. I mentioned before that besides being long they also have the word
‘time’ in their titles. A good summation then is the thesis put forward by each
about the nature of time:
The Wheel of Time: ages come and pass, history occurs
in cycles.
In Search of Lost Time: people change so radically
from day to day and throughout their lives that there is no consistent ‘person’
left by the passage of time and the process of forgetting. This is only
counteracted occasionally when some chance moment throws us back to the memory
of an earlier time in our lives – this gives birth to a new being who briefly
exists outside time who can look at the past and the present simultaneously
from an atemporal perspective.