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www.ATIBOOK.irFiction 105Papa is leaning out of a steam train window in a brilliant white shirt, anovercoat slung over his waving arm. The smoke rises like cold-morningbreath around his face. And he is backlit by a rising sun. He is smiling hisgap-toothed smile, though his eyes are intense. Mama stands on theplatform, the fingers of one hand slightly raised, as if she is afraid to wavehim goodbye. She is impossibly young and utterly bereft, her long chiffondupetta is frozen in mid-curl, lifted by the wind. Even in such a smallphotograph her longing is palpable, the way her fingers say what hermouth cannot.This was always one of my favourites, this image of my parents asepic, glamorous figures, touched by romantic tragedy. … My parents in alove story!… But when I confronted mama about her courtship adventuresher face closed up like a fan. Don’t be so silly!’ she sniffed. ‘We wereintroduced by an uncle. It was all done through the proper channels.’ Andthat was that(Syal, 1997:31–2)A love story or an arranged marriage? Meena experiences life in England as a clash ofworlds: the world of her parents with the world of her friends in a village outsideBirmingham:Our gang, which we named the Wenches Brigade, soon established aroutine of sorts; we would begin with a leisurely meeting in an old pigsty,the one nearest the park, in which Anita and I would leaf through thecurrent issue of Jackie, doing the quizzes on each other, How Do YouKnow If He Fancies You?… Then we would do the rounds of ourkingdom, Anita leading, me at her side, and the rest of the minions in adisorganised chattering crocodile behind us… There Anita and I wouldfind a space in the long grass clear of dog-shit and insects, and munch onsweets and talk, whilst our lackeys amused themselves with teasing thehorses with ears of corn and conducting interesting experiments such ashow far a two-day-old cow pat would travel when thrown by a smallsnotty-nosed child.(Ibid.: 138)At the end of the novel, Meena is the witness of an incident. She must tell the truth to thepolice. Her strict Asian parents insist on it, but can they ever trust what they hear fromher? Now she really is in a story, and for once she resists the temptation to exaggerate. Totell a story, to hear one, are events in the lives of the characters.As a contemporary Asian writer, Syal’s recreation of contrasting worlds depends onthe techniques of realist fiction, but still leaves room for experiment. Meena’s Indianfamily background and Midlands accent, her British teenage experience and sense ofoutsiderhood, enable her to take as yet unplotted tracks through our cultural life. For her,and for the novelist, the issue of representation, self, voice and identity will be achallenge, a new kind of complexity. The narrative culture Meena inherits mixes stories
www.ATIBOOK.irThe routledge creative writing coursebook 106of British experience with those of her Indian grandmother’s generation, stories ofviolence and genocide.Uncertainties of narrative evaluation, of self and identity in fiction, surely figure in thenew (or comparatively new) assessment of cultural shifts which the term post-modernaddresses. The ‘inner room’ of the self is less a space where drives and needs converge orare in conflict as a place where products are on display. Consumerism itself is a form offiction-making. The narratives of advertising show people emotionally bound to theproducts that they use—whether to a Corvette car or a brand of powderball for adishwasher. In Brett Easton Ellis’s novel Less Than Zero, the self becomes both productand consumer. The novelist Umberto Eco has written about Disneyland (America’s‘Sistine Chapel’) with a fascination for its perfect fakes. Here is where we ‘consume’ thepast, re-invent it as glamorous commodity. We enter Adventureland, the Pirates of theCaribbean:Each was devised by observing the expressions of a real actor, thenbuilding models, then developing skeletons of absolute precision,authentic computers in human form, to be dressed in ‘flesh’ and ‘skin’made by craftsmen, whose command of realism is incredible. Each robotobeys a program, can synchronise the movements of mouth and eyes withthe words and sounds of the audio, repeating, ad infinitum all day long hisestablished part (a sentence, one or two gestures) and the visitor; caughtoff guard by the succession of events, obliged to see several things atonce, to left and right and straight ahead, has not time to look back andobserve that the robot he has just seen is already repeating his eternalscenario.(Eco, in Docherty, 1993:204)The Pirate scenario described here parodies that of fiction. A traf-ficker in illusions, thewriter of fiction also creates worlds in authentic detail, a matter of craftsmanship,absolute precision, by observing the expressions of real people together in real settings.But as we have seen that makes up only a part of what fiction does. A text endlesslydetailed and precision tooled like the ‘authentic’ wrought-iron balcony of a New Orleanscoffee house (another of the Disneyland attractions), wouldn’t produce the qualities offiction people enjoy it for. They need a Who, a consciousness, a character participating.In the case of Disneyland, however, the only Who implied or actually present is aconsumer.RetellingsThe retelling of existing fiction using new settings and characters is another way forwriters to experiment with the narrative process. Writers make use of other stories byrecasting them in a contemporary context. It is as if the books themselves are speaking toeach other. An example of this method is Jackie Kay’s short story ‘Shell’, from the samecollection as ‘Trout Friday’ (see page 129). In ‘Shell’, the main character, a single parentliving with her son Louis who is black, undergoes physical changes that appear to beconnected with overweight and exhaustion. The narrator stays faithfully inside the main
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www.ATIBOOK.irFirst published 2006
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www.ATIBOOK.irGlossary 190a piece o
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