Steve Braunias
Steve Braunias gets in too deep with a classic novel
Iflew to Wellington with Madame Bovary. The sexy, crazy, dark-eyed heroine of Flaubert’s classic 1856 novel was very good company, also very disturbing; I’d been reading it throughout lockdown and had about 100 pages to go when I slipped it into my suitcase. Things were beginning to take a bad turn for Emma Bovary.
I flew to Wellington as soon as the all-clear sirens wailed over our heads. You can leave your house. You can leave your town. At Auckland airport, a husky Big Brother voiceover the PA system repeated the same message every five minutes: “Attention. Attention, all guests. Covid-19 is still out there.” Emma Bovary is constantly on the move in her dreary provincial town, often on foot. There she is, creeping into a garden after dark (“In the cold of the night they clasped each other the more tightly”); and there she is again, in secret, at the edge of a pond (“She leaned back her head, her white throat swelled in a sigh ... with a long shudder she gave herself to him.”)
I flew to Wellington on Air New Zealand. The only flights to Wellington are on Air New Zealand. The only flights anywhere are on Air New Zealand. Its little fleet of jets, its few remaining planes ... Madame Bovary ,asa perfect novel, a novel that does everything — comedy, tragedy, psychology, finance, science, romance — includes one of the greatest passages of travel writing ever published, when Emma and the callow Leon ride a carriage for hours and hours. Flaubert details every neighbourhood, every street; the journey is made at hectic speed and with incredible abandon; he doesn’t mention anything that goes on inside the carriage but it’s also one of the greatest passages of erotic writing — hectic, abandoned, all of it inferred — ever published.
I flew to Wellington and stayed at the James Cook Hotel. This is my favourite hotel in New Zealand, a beautiful historical monument — a shining plaque in the lobby registers that it was opened on March 1, 1972, by Prime Minister Keith Holyoake. It’s on The Terrace, that famous avenue of power which rolls up and down towards Parliament. There’s also access from Lambton Quay, the grandest shopping street in the country, a zone set aside for the bourgeoisie. Emma Bovary, in secret, stays at the Hotel de Boulogne (“their room was strewn with flowers and iced fruit drinks were brought up to them all day long”) and shops for leather and lace.
I flew to Wellington and we watched the most amazing sight at twilight each evening from our suite on the 24th floor of the James Cook Hotel: starlings, flocking. It began in the same exact manner at the same exact minute. At 5pm on the dot, about 100 starlings arrived on the roof of the ANZ tower. They roosted for five minutes while about another 200 starlings arrived. All at once they swept off and were joined by about a thousand more starlings, moving above the city and the harbour in a dense, mesmerising flock, making such sensual patterns. It was a wondrous spectacle, the kind to inspire sighs swelling in the white throat of Emma Bovary, that hopeless romantic, forever wanting life to imitate melodrama.
I flew to Wellington with a 1957 edition of Madame Bovary translated by the Flaubert scholar Francis Steegmuller, who is so capable with a semi-colon, so fond of making Emma shudder: “She could hardly wait to undress; she pulled so savagely at her corset string that it hissed around her hips like a gliding snake. Then she would tiptoe barefoot to see once again that the door was locked, and in a single movement let fall all her clothes; and, pale, silent, solemn, she would fling herself against his body with a long shudder.” At night, with the curtains open, the office towers of downtown Wellington filled our suite on the 24th floor at the James Cook Hotel with a shimmering blue light.
I flew to Wellington and finished Madame Bovary.
All throughout the novel, Flaubert seems to take such enormous delight in the sufferings, woes, anguishes, disappointments and failings he inflicts on his characters; in the final, incredibly cruel pages, you can sense him holding his sides and weeping with laughter. What a masterpiece. Every sentence is a detailed work of art. I flew back to Auckland, to a dark airport, the lights turned off in the daytime, everything closed, even Mcdonald’s. “Covid-19,” chanted that old nag, “is still out there.” Poor Emma.