Guilt trips galore
Madeleine Bunting’s new novel is an unconvincing mix of family Aga-saga and Le Carré’s later thrillers.
Ceremony of Innocence by Madeleine Bunting
Madeleine Bunting was formerly a columnist for the Guardian and I admired two of her previous books, Labours of Love: The Crisis of Care and Love of Country: A Hebridean Journey. Both were non-fiction, and I wish I could be as enthusiastic about Ceremony of Innocence, her second novel. When I finished it, my first thought was “Why is this a novel?”
It opens in London in 2018, where journalist Fauzia receives a slightly garbled phone call saying a family friend and Cambridge researcher, Reem, has most likely been killed in Cairo. There are lots of references to WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook so that the reader knows that these are savvy, technologically literate people. Fauzia’s narrative bookends the novel, which then flits to Tehran in 196970. We are introduced to Phoebe, a slight ingénue, who is collecting Persian textiles and helping with the organisation of an extravagant reception hosted by the Shah’s wife. When her Iranian lover is spirited away by SAVAK, the secret police, she falls willingly into the arms of an older British diplomat, Martin Wilcox Smith.
In time they will get married, and she listens patiently to his polemics about the decline of the Empire and Britain’s new role in the world. He quits the civil service and sets up a company, aided by some extremely dubious contacts, including an Englishman who has trained the police force in Bahrain. Let us say they had some unconventional procedures.
The bulk of the novel takes place in 2012-13. Fauzia, we learn, is the daughterin-law of Phoebe, who now presides over a stately pile, Lodsbourne, where Middle Eastern and former Soviet oligarchs can enjoy blasting a pheasant out of the sky. We also meet Kate, a divorcee and charity worker, who also happens to be Phoebe and Martin’s niece, as well as her son, Art, a sensitive soul. She is struggling to make ends meet, and takes in a lodger, Hussain, who has fled from Bahrain. Kate is offered a tumbledown cottage on the Lodsbourne estate for weekend holidays, and of course all the family are brought together. But something happens with dramatic consequences, as one could easily predict it would.
This is a chimera of a novel, a sort of hybrid between family Aga-saga and the later thrillers of Le Carré. It is all descriptions of begonias, rural romps, dinners and dynastic feuds one minute and then shady shenanigans, corporate arms deals and possible murders the next. But there are more significant problems.
Firstly, it is a novel that very much tells rather than shows. A lot of the detail is extraneous to the action, and is merely “colour”. It also has a tendency to introduce finger-wagging information bombs. Hussain, of course, is mortified by the English not knowing about colonial oppression, and so we have copious downloads on the history of Bahrain, Iran, collusion by government and generally the perfidious nature of Albion.
But it is also rather morally Manichean. Almost everyone is either a paragon or a scoundrel. In some ways, Phoebe is the most interesting, a combination of weaponised politeness and selective amnesia. We are given the moral messages in the equivalent of block capitals, as when Art blurts out “being a Muslim made people kind”. You can’t in some ways take the columnist out of the novelist. Hence my initial question, rephrased: why not write about colonialism, empire, the arms trade and all the other topics as non-fiction?
Bunting gives herself a clever-ish “get out of jail free” card. After all the revelations,
one character suggests to another that the whole story might be written up, with the caveat “lightly fictionalized, of course, change a few identifying details to dodge the libel lawyers”. It even continues that “this is not a tidy story with a clear ending… publishers won’t like that”. As I have said many a time, books do tend to have Freudian slips and guilty consciences.
I noticed that the Waverton Good Read Award for her previous novel. “Good read” is a phrase I dislike intensely, and it has a whiff of condescension. This is certainly not a bad novel, it is just all a bit of a muddle. It seems like a steak tartare served with marshmallow.