Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

 “LA FORTUNE DES ROUGON” by Emile Zola (first published 1871)

Four times before on this blog I have ear-bashed you about novels in Emile Zola’s 20-volume Rougon-Macquart series by giving you postings on La Curee, Le Ventre de Paris, La Conquete de Plassans and Son Excellence Eugene Rougon. But it occurs to me that I have never dealt with the novel that sets up the whole series and that announces very clearly both Zola’s naturalistic creed and the political and social views from which he never wavered. This is La Fortune des Rougon which, understandably, first appeared in 1871, one year after France’s defeat by the Prussians, the fall of Napoleon III, the crushing of the Paris commune and the establishment of the Third Republic. Free from imperial censorship, Zola was now able to launch on the project that would reveal his perspective on what life had really been like under the Second Empire.

            La Fortune des Rougon opens twenty years before Zola was writing, in December 1851. Silvere, a lower-class youth, and Miette, an orphan, meet by moonlight in the timberyard of the Provencal town of Plassans (based closely on Zola’s hometown of Aix-en-Provence). They are rushing off together to join the people’s militias, which are forming in the countryside to defend the Second Republic against the immanent coup d’etat engineered by Louis Napoleon. This long first chapter gives Zola the chance to describe in detail the social nature of the town – mainly middle-class with only a minority of working people. Some of the middle-classes claim to be republican, but in fact all of them jockey for favour and are often led in their opinions by conspiratorial clergy or members of what remains of the old nobility. While these latter don’t necessarily like Louis Napoleon, they prefer him to the republic. The chapter ends with Miette and Silvere being welcomed into the republican militias.

            In the subsequent chapters, Zola goes back a couple of generations to explain the origins of the Rougon and Macquart branches of the same family, and how they achieved their social positions. Adelaide Fouque (sometimes known later in the novel as “Tante Dide”), an emotionally unstable young woman and apparently descended from the lower nobility, married the labourer Jean Rougon. They had one son, Pierre Rougon. Then Jean Rougon died of sunstroke. Adelaide rather scandalously took up with the poacher and smuggler Macquart, whom she never married, but by whom she had two children, Antoine and Ursule Macquart. Macquart lived a wild life and was eventually shot by the gendarmerie while carrying out his illegal exploits.

            Pierre Rougon detested his half-brother Antoine Macquart, and when Antoine was away as a conscript in Napoleon’s armies, Pierre managed to cheat him out of his inheritance from their mother Adelaide. Meanwhile Ursule moved away to Marseilles, and had three children – Helene, Francois and Silvere [the young man in the first chapter], by her respectable working-man husband Mouret, who died.

            So we are essentially set up with two competing branches of the family: the grasping, social-climbing middle class Rougons and the disorderly, drunken lower class Macquarts.

            Pierre Rougon marries Felicite Puech, who is even more ambitious in her social climbing than he. They have five children. One of them, Eugene, moves to Paris and schemes and intrigues on behalf of Louis Napoleon. (He will be the protagonist of a later novel in the series, Son Excellence Eugene Rougon). By letter, he urges his parents to do become Bonapartists in Plassans if they want to pick up the spoils of the coup. By contrast, Aristide (who marries Angele) professes to be an ardent republican and writes fiery republican articles in the local republican paper. Pascal becomes a very thoughtful doctor, coolly observing human nature and taking no part in political intrigue. (In the 20^th and final novel in the series, Le Docteur Pascal, he will survey ironically the wreckage left behind after Napoleon III’s fall.) The Rougons also have two daughters, Sidonie and Marthe. Marthe marries her respectable working cousin Francois Mouret.

            Meanwhile, Antoine Macquart, the former Napoleonic soldier, returns to Plassans to become a layabout, drunkard and sponger. In taverns he loudly proclaims his republican principles and contempt for the bourgeoisie, but this is because he wants to live a life of ease and have some of the money and position his brother enjoys. Purely because he wants somebody to support him and cook for him, he marries the ferocious muscular working-class woman Josephine Gavaudan (sometimes known as “Fine”). Before “Fine” dies, they have three children, Lisa, Gervaise (who marries a man called Lantier) and Jean.

            This whole family history then, recounted in considerable detail with much incident, takes us up to the state of things in Plassans in 1851. Pushed on by his wife Felicite, Pierre Rougon hosts soirees in his “salon jaune” for the town’s right-wingers and reactionaries – bourgeois mainly, with some clergy and a few nobles – who detest the republic and would welcome its demise. He is embarrassed by his son Aristide’s republicanism, and the enmity of his half-brother Antoine Macquart.

            Zola then indulges in a very long chapter describing in detail the sensual and yet chaste love of Silvere, who is about nineteen, and Miette, who is only thirteen or fourteen. Miette and he talked to each other in their reflections in the communal well. They sometimes met through the overgrown door in the wall where Silvere’s grandmother Adelaide had scandalously made her rendezvous with her lover Macquart. Miette is innocent and yet determined. She is the daughter of a man (Chantegreil) who spent time in jail and she is often teased as a thief’s daughter. She is idealistic. So is Silvere, who has elevated hopes for the republic, which have more to do with his reading than with any objective and observable reality. Silvere has taken with him, to the republican militia, his grandfather’s rifle, which had hung on the wall of “Tante Dide”, the slightly deranged matriarch who is still alive.

            This idyllic chapter of Silvere and Miette goes on so long that I began to wonder why Zola was indulging in it. The answer comes in the chapter’s payoff. Miette, marching ahead and carrying the red flag of revolution, rapidly becomes a symbol of republican hopes. Silvere is filled with dreams of their future together when she is old enough to marry. This is all a set-up for the fact that Miette is shot dead when the militia is fired upon by soldiers supporting the new Bonapartist order.

            In the last two chapters, Zola then returns to his account of Plassans under the impact of the coup d’etat. There are conflicting rumours arriving of whether the coup has succeeded in Paris or not. At first the bourgeoisie is able to take over the town hall. Then three thousand of the rag-tag republican militia pass through. They are fed, they briefly take charge and they leave a few republicans behind at the town hall before marching off. Among those left in charge at the town hall is Antoine Macquart, who searches for his half-brother Pierre Rougon to exact some revenge on him, but can’t find him, as Pierre has wisely gone into hiding, along with other reactionaries. But after the republican militia has marched away, and urged on by Felicite [who knows from secret letters from Eugene that the coup has triumphed in Paris], Pierre is able to scrape together some supporters, and play the hero by taking over the town hall (which he knows is hardly defended) and having Antoine imprisoned. Some sceptics doubt that this action was as heroic as some of Pierre’s followers said it was. So to confirm his hero status, Pierre is able to bribe Antoine into attacking the town hall with some gullible republican followers, who are easily beaten off, leaving the impression that Pierre has won a real battle and is a real hero. Just as Antoine Macquart’s republicanism is shown to be skin-deep and easily bought-off, so too is the republicanism of Aristide, who judiciously writes nothing one way or the other when the coup is in doubt, and then produces a Bonapartist editorial once he sees which way the wind is blowing.

            The novel ends with the anti-republican forces in control and the Bonapartist regime established as the regular troops arrive and the rewards are handed out. Zola presents the victorious bourgeoisie and their allies as grasping, vulgar, pretentious, hypocritical (the bookseller Vuillet – who wants to get a contract providing religious books to the local Catholic college – sells pornography on the side) and totally self-interested. Pierre Rougon is promised the Legion d’Honneur and there is a celebration of the reactionaries. Meanwhile, Silvere, who had blacked the eye of a policemen in the fighting, is taken out and shot by the troops for his part in the republican uprising. With both Silvere and Miette dead, implies Zola, idealism has been crushed.

There is no doubt that Zola is a brilliant storyteller. Reading this in French, and hence missing about one word in thirty, I nevertheless followed the story easily. It presents great blocks of action, strong contrasts etc. What it has to say, however, is very much on the surface, and cannot be accused of subtlety. Zola hates the church, the nobility and the enemies of the republic. He believes biology is destiny (the essence of “naturalism” really), and hence is clearly setting us up for a world in which characters will be predetermined by the fact that they are descended from a mentally-unstable woman (Adelaide), a criminal rogue (her lover Macquart) and various brutalised alcoholics. What is interesting, however, is that Zola’s depiction of the lower orders is as unsympathetic and condemnatory as his depiction of the social climbers. The professed republicans Antoine Macquart and Aristide are as self-interested and easily bought-off as their antagonists. Silvere and Miette are idealised, but they are also so innocent that they clearly don’t know how the world really works. It is almost as if Zola is saying that real republicanism requires a middle-class intellectual like him to make it work properly, while the lower orders are mere canaille. This isn’t exactly the democratic principle.

            Given the simplified and often melodramatic characterisation, together with the vigorous action, this novel reminded me very much of the likes of And Quiet Flows the Don – big-action literature with broad-stroke social commentary. I felt I had read its denouement (the obvious irony of cutting between the smug feasting of the victors and the brutal execution of Silvere) many times before. But that may be because Zola’s technique has been copied so often in similar novels and films. What I did not doubt, however, was that Zola was a man who had already made up his mind on just about everything. In this novel we get the whole inflexible determinist view of human beings that would inform every novel in the series. While his narrative powers remained strong and intact, did he ever grow or develop as a novelist? I recall that Balzac didn’t plan out his Comedie Humaine until he was halfway through writing the novels that would eventually compose that cycle. Balzac’s views changed and developed as his writing career progressed.  Zola, by contrast, knew exactly what he had to say in his twenty novels when he planned the first one. That he did not modify his views in over twenty years of writing comes close to suggesting a closed mind.

Some quotations from my notebooks to conclude with:

Here is a description of Pascal from Chapter Two, setting up the theme of heredity:

“Depuis deux ou trois ans, il s’occupait du grand probleme de l’heredite, comparant les races animals a la race humaine, et il s’absorbait dans les curieux resultants qu’il obtenait. Les observations qu’il avait fait sur lui et sur sa famille avaient ete comme le point de depart de ses etudes. Le peuple comprenait si bien, avec son intuition inconsciente, a quel point il differait de Rougon, qu’il le nommait M.Pascal, sans jamais ajouter le nom de famille.”

Here, from Chapter Four, is a description of Antoine Macquart, suggesting the really base motives of some people who supported the republic:

“Chaque parti a ses infames et ses grotesques. Antoine Macquart, ronge d’envie et de haine, revant des vengeances contre la société entiere, accueillit la republique comme une ere bienheureuse ou il lui serait permis d’emplir ses poches dans la caisse du voisin, et meme d’etrangler le voisin s’il temoignait le moindre mecontentement…..”

And here, from Chapter Seven is what Dr.Pascal makes of his family as he observes them:

“Il etudiait cette mere et ses fils, avec l’attention d’un naturaliste surprenant les metamorphoses d’un insecte…. Il crut entrevoir un instant, comme au milieu d’un éclair, l’avenir des Rougon-Macquart, une meute d’appetits laches et assouvis, dans un flamboiement d’or et de sang.”

Not only does this last quotation set out the whole course of the twenty novels, but it also shows the place which Zola believed human beings inhabited in the order of nature.

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

 

AMERICA’S HINDENBURG-HITLER ELECTION

Melancholy times.

I have never, ever believed that in making political choices we are choosing between the good and the bad; between the sunny upland future promised in political propaganda and the very Hell that is presented as its alternative.

 When we cast our votes in a general election, we are always choosing between the competent and the less competent, between the mediocre and the sub-mediocre, between the bad and the worse. In voting, I hope my preferred candidates will implement at least some of the policies they have promised, but I am more concerned with warding off the bad rather than trying to bring on the desirable. I am not acting under the illusion that my preferred party will achieve the Millennium. Six months back, in a posting on Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy, I quoted four lines from C. Day Lewis’s “Where Are The War Poets?”, expressing a British view of the Second World War: “It is the logic of our times,/ no subject for immortal verse - / that we who lived by honest dreams / defend the bad against the worse.”

That is how I, and I hope other thinking voters, approach any election.

But there are times when the choice is so extreme and bizarre that it requires special comment.

As I write this editorial, it seems clear that Hillary Clinton will be the official Democrat candidate in America’s forthcoming presidential elections, and Donald Trump will be the official Republican candidate. I am fully aware that extremists (e.g. Barry Goldwater) have previously run for the office of American president; and that complete incompetents (e.g. Warren Harding) have previously held it. But I am finding it hard to think of any two opposing candidates, in recent times, more risible than these two and less fit for such high office.

Hillary Clinton was, as Secretary of State, as hawkish as any Republicans who preceded her. She has an unenviable track record of being economic with the truth (like her silly – and easily disproven – claim to have landed in Bosnia under sniper fire in the 1990s). She is very clearly Wall Street’s Baby, with uncomfortably close links to billionaire lobbyists. Slogans notwithstanding, she is as determined to continue on the destructive neo-liberal course as all presidents (Democrat and Republican) in the last three decades. Some of her stated ideas on social engineering border on the fanatical. And I haven’t even entered into the muddy personal business of her destroying other women to protect her husband’s wayward penis.

Of course there are those who argue that her being the First Woman President would have great symbolic value, like Barack Obama’s being the First Black President. As a principle, I’m in no way opposed to a woman holding America’s supreme executive power, if only because the experience of having a woman as president will smartly educate people in the fact that a woman at the top will not usher in an era of humane, caring-sharing-holistic values, but will essentially be business as usual. (America is way behind other countries in mooting a woman as boss – but while you ponder that fact, please ask yourself how much the premierships of Margaret Thatcher, Helen Clark or Angela Merkel have made the world a better place…)

I am heartened to find a number of feminist ideologues saying in effect: “It would be good to have a woman as president. But what a pity that it has to be this woman.”  

In any other year, Hillary Clinton would be a candidate to oppose.

Unfortunately, standing against her is a man who almost makes her look good.

The “policies” of Donald Trump (if they can be honoured with that word) are so extreme, demagogic, crude and aggressive that I still reel at the thought that he has become the official candidate of a major political party. Before you click in with your stereotypes (mainly fostered by late-night American satire shows) on what the Republican Party is, please remember that there was a time when it appealed to the mainstream, supported the welfare state and proposed mature candidates capable of nuanced thought. It has apparently lost all of these things and degenerated into what Noam Chomsky has called an “insurgency”. Donald Trump is a walking parody of all America’s worst impulses – blind worship of excessive wealth, xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, a populism which plays politics like a game show and a sense that an aggressive foreign policy will ensure American primacy. He is the 21^st century equivalent of the 19^th century “Know Nothing” Party.

I think hard about this unpalatable choice being put to a functioning democracy, and I come up with an obvious comparison.

The last democratic presidential election to be held in Weimar Germany was in 1932. The incumbent candidate was Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, was born in 1847 so was nearly 85 in 1932. He had already been president for seven years. He was an arch-conservative, in bad health, reactionary, militarist, well past it and verging on senility. In any other year he would have been a dead duck as presidential candidate.

The problem was, the opposing candidate was Adolf Hitler.

Most centrist and centre-left Germans didn’t want Hindenburg and they didn’t want the Communists’ candidate Ernst Thalmann either. But to keep Hitler out, they had no choice but to vote for the reactionary, near-senile Hindenburg. The result (in the run-off election of 10 April 1932) was that Hindenburg won with 53% of the vote, Hitler was kept out of office as he had won only 36.8% of the vote, and Thalmann trailed with a mere 10.2%. [To give you the figures in terms of number of votes: Hindenburg 19,359,983; Hitler 13,418,547; Thalmann 3,706,759]. In later years, some Germans could console themselves with the thought that Hitler had never been voted into office. Unfortunately, this particular story had a bad ending. The following year, unwise conservative politicians weaselled Hitler into a coalition government; senile old Hindenburg died; Hitler abolished the office of president and made himself sole Fuhrer, and the nightmare happened anyway.

Even so, the election of 1932 showed centrist and centre-left voters (as well as many real conservatives, of course) choosing the very bad to ward off the even worse.

This is the choice that the United States now faces. Clinton and Trump make for a Hindenburg-Hitler election. I recall that in the 1990s, left-wing French voters chose to vote for the conservative Jacques Chirac in order to head off the xenophobic extremism of the Le Pen movement, which then had some political traction. But they registered their distaste by holding their noses while casting their votes.

So here’s my advice to American voters – hold your nose, try not to vomit, and vote for Clinton.

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MIRROR WORLD – AN INVITATION

All readers of this blog are most welcome to attend the launch of Nicholas Reid’s second collection of poetry, Mirror World.

It is being launched at the Gus Fisher Gallery – top of Shortland Street, Auckland – on the evening of Thursday 14 July.

Be there for drink and nibbles at 6pm with the formal part of the launch at 6:30.

Dr Iain Sharp will act as MC and a good time will be had by all.

Something New

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We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

“MYSTERIOUS MYSTERIES OF THE ARO VALLEY” by Danyl McLauchlan (Victoria University Press, $NZ30)

Reviewing Danyl McLauchlin’s Unspeakable Secrets of theAro Valley nearly three years ago, I did note its witty and playful tampering with the Gothic horror genre, and its sharp evocation of a dusty and fusty corner of Wellington; but I also registered my view that its pratfall-laden fun-and-games did go on a bit. For all my misgivings, I was chuffed to receive a nice note from the author saying that he enjoyed the review and thought I’d picked up on points of the novel other reviewers had missed.

Now with the sequel, Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley to review, I almost feel that I’m going to repeat the same praise and the same misgivings. From the deliberately inept title onwards, you know that this one is as much founded on gigantic leg-pull as the first novel was. It’s great fun; it shows great skill in the telling; when it wants to do moments of Gothic fantasy “seriously” it does them as capably as the experts do…. and at 370 pages it does go on a bit. One more chase through a threatening tunnel, one more dorkish mishap, and my patience would have snapped.

For the record, the set-up has Danyl McLauchlin (yes, the hero has the same name as the author) released from psychiatric care, returning to Wellington’s faded bohemian enclave the Aro Valley to find his missing girlfriend Verity, and in short order discovering a dark and daunting secret that threatens the entire universe, no less. Danyl is an unreliable narrator, a loser, a bit of a twit, paranoid – in other words, more than a little like the heroes of conspiracy novels that take themselves seriously. Little does Danyl know that, independently, his old mate Steve (who coincidentally has the same name as one of the author’s best mates) is delving into the same dark and daunting secrets as Danyl is, but coming from an entirely different direction. Inevitably their paths will cross – and their parallel delvings give the author the chance to show his narrative skill by sometimes interlocking the same events as seen from different viewpoints.

So.

In we plunge to a world in which apparently harmless archivists are really agents of demonic power, and ancient second-hand bookshops are portals to a hellish underworld, and an uncompleted real estate project is the refuge for malign destructive forces, and running under the Aro Valley are huge tunnels which either could lead to universal enlightenment or could enable huge forces to break through and destroy our cosmos as we know it. A Spiral-shaped symbol warns our intrepid (and idiotic) hero of the extent to which the other world has impinged upon the Aro Valley. Well you always do get dark portents and “codes” understood only by initiates in Gothic horror, don’t you? Said idiotic hero is often chased by a giant capable of tearing him limb from limb. There is a drug called DoorWay, which zonks out unsuspecting citizens who wander into the nether world, allowing them to enter into the Real City (which may not be real) but also making them manipulable by malign cosmic forces. A group called the Cartographers are apparently at war with something (or someone) called the Gorgon, which may or may not have supernatural powers. Mind you, the Gorgon at one point gets voted onto the Te Aro community council.

And this reminds you that it is all going on under the streets of a Wellington suburb. As an early declaration warns us: “Te Aro, where nothing was as it seemed. Beneath the city’s quirky superficial charm lurked depths of madness.” (p.29)

I admit I enjoyed most the parts where the author makes satire out of the Wellington suburb and its bohemian pretensions, in such phrases as:

“Rush hour. Even in the depths of winter there would have been people getting up and going out to teach yoga classes, or to beg change from commuters in the Capital.” (p.56)

Or:

“He made his way over to the shelves on his hands and knees and examined the record player. They were a dead technology everywhere else in the world, but the subculture of Te Aro had formed a deep emotional attachment to these devices and they were standard issue in most homes.” (p.85)

Or (referencing student radicals and alternative lifestylers):

“Anarchist cells were broken up and revolutionary demagogues returned to their anxious parents. Much-loved tenement buildings were deemed unfit for human habitation and condemned; their inhabitants were dragged blinking and screaming from their lightless interiors by child welfare agencies. It was a disaster for the culture and economy of the valley.” (p.145)

Or the point where the fictitious Danyl declares:

“People see the residents of Te Aro as pot-addled, new-age dreamers. But that’s just a lazy stereotype. Only about sixty or seventy percent of the population falls into that category.” (p.286)

When a community archive is run by people who never, ever, ever want anybody to access its contents, you understand that this is only a smidgeon away from the reality of many community services, the obstruction of petty bureaucrats and so forth. So Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley has its quota of deadpan satire.

There’s another interesting level to it.

Danyl, just out of psychiatric care, not sure whether he should go back on his medication of not, is really like the Sleepwalker Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari and this is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury”. For at least the first half of Mysterious Mysteries of the Aro Valley, it would be reasonable to read it as the distorted hallucinations of a troubled (or post-medicated) mind misinterpreting harmless reality. Only later (once the narrative of Steve gets going) does this fruitful ambiguity dissipate.

Once past the unreliable narrator aspect of it, the accommodating gormlessness of Danyl is engaging. Pick him out in this scene where he is in danger of being beaten to death by his nemesis the giant, and note his attitude:

“Danyl lay on the concrete and the giant lay on Danyl, a vast warm bulk pressing down on him. It felt quite nice, actually: being pinned to the ground, face down, completely powerless. Not in a sexual way. It was more that while he was trapped beneath the giant Danyl didn’t have to make any decisions about what to do or say. He felt safe.” (p.117)

As for the chase-and-slapstick element of it (a very large part of the novel consists of either Danyl or Steve pursuing or being pursued by enemies), it certainly has its high points. As a piece of clever imbecility, I relished the sequence when the idiots make their escape from a bathroom using a bathtub for protection, and then having to hide beneath the bathtub when they attract the unwelcome attentions of a savage dog. This has the same sort of surreal inevitability as the ancient movie sequence where Laurel and Hardy try to carry a piano over a rope bridge and meet a gorilla halfway.

Ah yes, but there is quite a lot of it, and it will be entirely depending on your own taste whether you can take a great deal of this.

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ: A LIFE by Gerald Martin (first published 2008)

Twice before on this blog I have waxed eloquent about the difficulties involved in writing biographies. (Look up the posts WhyWrite a New Biography? and The Toilof Biography). My most consistent theme has been that, once a good biography of somebody has been published, it is pointless to write a new biography unless important new material has come to light or unless the new biographer has a radically different interpretation of the life under review. Another issue I should have dealt with was the question of how close the biographer is to the person being examined. This is a special problem when we come to the biographies of the still-living or the only-recently-dead. The biographer may be a friend, colleague or frequent companion of the person being written about. Immediately we have the problem of “objectivity”. How much can we trust the word of somebody who may have the inside goss, but who doesn’t have the distance to deal with it rationally?

I think a good (or bad) example of this is Gerald Martin’s Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life. I have already told (see the posts on The General in His Labyrinth and Autumn of the Patriarch) the story of how the Sunday Star-Times commissioned me, seven years ago, to review this huge volume. I accepted, and I then went into a crash programme, over about seven weeks, of reading all Garcia Marquez’s major novels and some of his reportage. This was because I hadn’t hitherto read his works. When I read Gerald Martin’s book I found it fascinating, but was troubled by the lack of distance between author and subject.

Anyway here, unaltered from its original appearance, is the review I wrote for the Sunday Star-Times (1 March 2009).

 

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How prudent is it to write a man’s life when that man is still alive? And how much is a biographer compromised if he is also a friend of his subject?

These two questions began buzzing through my mind almost as soon as I started reading the nearly 600 large pages of this blockbuster.

That Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s life is worth telling there can be no doubt. Now in his 80s, the Colombian novelist is one of the world’s few genuine literary superstars. When he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, it was a rare occasion in the history of that contentious award, because the win was universally applauded. Although I’d personally beg to differ (I’m not the greatest Garcia Marquez fan), many have cited his One Hundred Years of Solitude as the most influential Spanish-language novel since Don Quixote. Rare for a Nobel laureate, his huge international readership consistently makes him a bestseller. In Latin America, he’s famous enough to be universally recognised by his nickname “Gabo”. His political pronouncements, hobnobbing with the great and the famous, and deliberate clowning for the press are as well known in that part of the world as his novels and stories.

A former journalist himself, Garcia Marquez is always good for a headline and treats journalists with the type of deadpan wit I’d associate with Alfred Hitchcock’s press conferences. He once impishly told an audience that he preferred to read his own novels in their English translations. Later he claimed that his wife Mercedes really wrote all his books, but thought they were so bad that she let him sign his name to them. Apparently some listeners were dozy enough to believe him for a while.

But here’s the rub. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is still alive, and much that is most intimate about him cannot and will not be told until he’s safely dead. Think of all those inaccessible files of letters by enemies, friends and former friends, like the great Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. Mario used to be Garcia Marquez’s best buddy, but ended up thumping him in the nose when he thought Garcia Marquez had been fooling around with his wife. The two men didn’t speak for 30 years. The biography of a living person will always be a provisional record at best.

Gerald Martin has been actively researching his subject for 18 years. He has been admitted into the Garcia Marquez family circle, where he is known as the gringo “Yeral”. He has interviewed nearly every living person who has known Garcia Marquez, from Fidel Castro to obscure drinking mates from his apprentice years. He regularly socialises with Garcia Marquez’s friends. His documentation is both scrupulous and copious. Martin aspires to be Gabo’s Boswell, recording all the things the great man has said or done. In a preface he disconcertingly tells us that this very large book is only a smaller version of a work that will eventually run to more than 2500 pages. Presumably this will be published when Garcia Marquez is in his grave.

Yet the tone is far from consistent.

Martin is a respected academic, and does offer fruitful insights into the genesis of the novelist’s works. They range from the straight social protest of In an Evil Hour to the modernist experimentalism of The Autumn of the Patriarch (in my view Garcia Marquez’s best book) to the severe historical reconstruction of the Simon Bolivar novel The General in his Labyrinth. The great turning point was, of course, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Martin smartly reminds us that although its “magical realism” is the best-known thing about it, “magical realism” was a short-lived phenomenon both in the novelist’s oeuvre, and in Latin American literature as a whole.

When he chooses to play Freud, Martin also offers worthwhile analysis of Gabo’s life.  Deserted by a feckless father, and with a mother who had a large family to raise, the novelist as a boy bonded most closely with his crotchety old soldier of a grandfather, who was his role model perhaps in more ways than Garcia Marquez ever realised.

So far, so enlightening. But then there are those cringe-worthy moments when Gerald Martin introduces himself into the narrative in the first-person, and tells us about the gatherings of glitterati, honouring Garcia Marquez, that he has attended. The book ends with a “Bradford’s Hollywood” account of Gabo’s 80^th birthday party. It leaves me with the heretical thought that if Bill Clinton and Oprah Winfrey both gush over a writer, then there really must be something seriously questionable about him.

What is being played out in this book, and in Martin himself, is the conflict between the fan and the scholar, the buddy and the sober biographer. There are time when Martin seems to wilfully soft-pedal his hero’s faults. The worst is his long account of Garcia Marquez’s long pre-marital affair, in the 1950s, with a young woman whom he then abandoned and yet who later became a sort of unofficial mistress. Clearly, Martin hasn’t been able to get all the facts of the case (again the problem of writing about living people). But reading between the lines, the young novelist seems to have been more of a swine than Martin wants to admit.

Most interestingly, Martin’s own patience begins to wear a little thin late in this narrative. In the last 100 pages, he does actually question some of Gabo’s political statements. The Latin American’s resentment of interference by the United States is fully understandable, especially in the light of the horrendous recent history of Colombia, which Martin gives us in detail. But Gabo’s dogged defence of Fidel Castro has led him to make some decidedly dodgy judgements of his own.

Martin also gets to criticise the macho sexual element in Garcia Marquez’s work, especially in the overrated Love in the Time of Cholera and in the silly old goat’s fantasy Memories of my Melancholy Whores.

Frankly, Garcia Marquez’s inability to differentiate love from sexual fantasising is what most repels me from some of his work, and I sense that Martin unwillingly comes to the same conclusion.

Let’s be fair about this, though.

The tone is uneven, the evasions stick out like a sore thumb and the fandom parts are obnoxious. But there is enough solid scholarship in this biography to make it indispensible to interpreters of Garcia Marquez. And the entertaining anecdotes make it a page-turner, despite its formidable length.

It’s the first draft of an important life.

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Up-Date Footnote: Obviously the above review was written five years before Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s death (in April 2014). Though Gerald Martin (an expert on South American literature, who has written books about other authors including Vargas Llosa) has produced The Cambridge Introduction to Gabriel Garcia Marquez (2012) he has not yet produced the 2500 page work he promised in his 600-page biography of Gabo. Perhaps it is still in progress.