The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Why a 100-year-old narrator is the oldest trick in the book
Two new novels use this nifty device. Only one (sorry, Allende) is a masterclass
ALATE CITY
Robert Olen Butler 256pp, No Exit, T £9.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £10.99, ebook £4.99
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lthough living to 100 isn’t quite the startling achievement it once was – centenarians abound on the obituaries page these days – we still project a supernatural aura of wisdom and fascination on to those who make it to three figures. I doubt that Jonas Jonasson’s novel The Hundred-YearOld Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared would have been an international bestseller had the Man been a mere 95.
No wonder that so many novelists have employed the formula of a centenarian narrator trying to make sense of their life: such books can combine the intimacy of a David Copperfield-style “Personal History” with a greatest-hits catalogue of a century’s worth of juicy world events. The earliest one I know of is WC Falkner’s The Little Brick Church (1882), in which the 100-year-old narrator fondly recalls the prelapsarian days of his youth when slaves didn’t make a fuss.
Other notable examples include Stephen King’s The Green Mile and Ernest J Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. The greatest of them all is Thomas Berger’s cheeky revisionary Western Little Big Man (1964), in which the 111-year-old Jack Crabb tells us what really happened at Little Bighorn and so on. (I’d also like to put in a good word for James Lever’s Hollywood satire Me Cheeta, the narrator of which must be more than 100 in chimpanzee years.)
Now this hoary formula is deployed in two new novels. The more conventional of the two is Violeta, Isabel Allende’s 25th novel, which takes the form of a 100-yearold woman’s dying “testimony” written for the edification of her grandson Camilo, a radical priest – much of the final part of the book is taken up with the events of his own life, which his grandmother takes the trouble to remind him about in great detail. Before that, however, there are more than 90 years to get through, beginning with Violeta’s birth in an unnamed country – Allende’s customary lightly fictionalised version of Chile – in 1920, when Spanish flu is wreaking havoc. (“It is a strange symmetry that I was born in one pandemic and will die during another.”)
This is really the story of Violeta’s political and feminist awakening. She has a privileged upbringing – until her dodgy businessman father blows his brains out, and the family has to move to a remote farmstead, where she thrives. As she grows up, she has the courage to take her life into her own hands to an extent unusual for a woman of her generation, ditching her decent but dull husband and building up a lucrative business.
Allende has said that the book imagines what her mother’s life might have been like had she been able to exercise more autonomy, but Violeta is not entirely master of her fate: she wastes years shacked up with a scoundrel called Julián, who abuses her and mistreats their children, because he is too sexy to resist (“Lust can hold us hostage for so long!”). She eventually gains her freedom, and, radicalised by her firebrand son, ploughs her wealth into the women’s rights movement.
As always with Allende, the novel is fluent and very readable – what, if it were a Chilean red, you would call quaffable. She maintains, for all the succession of small- and largescale tragedies, a sense of warmth and fun. But ultimately the novel lacks the emotional intensity one would expect to accrue. With all those years to cover, Allende is always in a hurry, and has time to give us only tantalising glimpses of characters who clearly exist more richly and deeply in her head.
The obvious solution would have been to make the book longer, but that is given the lie by Late City, Robert Olen Butler’s 18th novel, which is a fair bit shorter than Violeta but far more affecting. Again, it’s the narrative of an expiring centenarian – Sam Cunningham, once an underage sniper in the Great War, and later a Chicago crime reporter who became a confidant of Al Capone, now dying on the day of the 2016 presidential election.
Sam is not offering a Violeta-style testimony so much as reluctantly undertaking an exit interview: the premise of the book is that he is being visited on his deathbed by a benign but unexpectedly foulmouthed and wisecracking God, who wants him to review his life and work out what sins he has to repent. It’s an imaginative touch that helps the Pulitzer-winning Butler – lamentably under-read in Britain – transcend the clichés of this subgenre. He has a better grasp of pacing than Allende, dwelling for longer on the key scenes, concentrating on fewer characters and giving them space to breathe.
He takes the time to make his way into the thickety territory of how people really think and feel. “Because I feel something doesn’t mean I believe it,” says Sam’s wife, Colleen, apologetically, after blaming him for encouraging their son to enlist in the Navy during the Second World War. “If only, instead, you believed it but did not feel it,” thinks Sam. There’s an unshowy, deadpan quality to Butler’s prose that works equally well in the comic to and fro between Sam and God, and in the more touching passages. Every word seems right, as in the description of the “imperturbable detachment” with which the BBC newsreader Alvar Liddell details wartime atrocities.
The paradox is that Late City seems much more real than Violeta, and yet is a more cunning artifice, its emotional impact owing much to Butler’s architectonic skill. This marvellous novel has just what you want from a fictional centenarian memoir: the art that conceals art, giving meaning to the story while maintaining the illusion of a long life lived in all its messiness.