Life through an accountant’s averted eyes

Charles CHADWICK has just published his first novel at age 72. He began “It’s All Right Now” in 1974, while serving with the British Foreign Council in Nigeria, and over three decades of weekends, in the course of postings to Brazil, Canada and Poland, he created this enormous fictional journal of one Tom Ripple, a remarkably unremarkable English accountant who hardly ventures any farther than County Suffolk. The novel’s success can be measured by the speed with which you forget the superficially interesting story behind its publication and come to believe in the superficially dull story of its narrator. A meek, gray being -- “I’ve noted before, I think, that the impression I seem to give is one of neutrality. I feel pretty neutral about that” -- Tom Ripple is nevertheless one of the most vivid and robust characters in recent British fiction.

Part 1 establishes the pattern of Ripple’s diffident relationship with the universe. An absurdly private man, he avoids human contact -- which is to say conflict -- wherever possible. Living in an “unnoteworthy north London suburb where to try to keep to oneself is to draw attention to oneself,” Ripple sucks up to the boss he can’t stand, mumbles agreement with every pronouncement uttered by his sanctimonious social worker wife and discovers as little as he can about the lives of his two children. But the world will not keep to itself.

The house on one side of Ripple’s belongs to a pederast with designs on Ripple’s son, while the house on the other side shelters a stoically miserable elderly couple. The great event in the first part of the novel is a picnic of the three households at which Ripple encounters the elderly Hambles’ misery up close. When Mrs. Hamble, who is terminally ill, begins to cry at the sight of her husband sporting innocently with the Ripple children (a part of the couple’s grief is to be childless), our hero reacts like this:

“ ‘Here,’ I said, giving her my handkerchief. ‘Who’d understand why you are crying? I mean, you’re all right now, aren’t you?’

“I’ve tried since to think up two questions stupider than those but haven’t got anywhere near it.”

Ripple’s chief ambition is to believe that he and others are “all right.” Later, he sees the freshly widowed Mr. Hamble tending his garden and “looking from a distance like a contented man.” This is the distance from which Ripple likes to view things.

Over the course of the novel, Ripple is left by his wife, briefly acquires a new girlfriend, inhabits a series of modest dwellings, follows at a distance the progress of his children, comes reluctantly to know several more groups of neighbors, watches a lot of TV, listens to some classical music and mainly grows old. Meanwhile, there is England: “tins of corned beef and asparagus tips” in the cupboard and “the same old messy passage of clouds” across the sky. The trick of “It’s All Right Now” is to make this seem momentous as well as commonplace. Ripple campaigns to comprehend the meaning of an ordinary middle-class life in a prosperous nation. The defeat of his effort speaks to its honesty.

Yet Chadwick has draped Ripple’s sheets of plotless musing over a definite repeated shape. In each of the book’s four parts, Ripple first resists any knowledge of those around him, is then lured by his politeness and complacency into witnessing his neighbors’ sorrows, and finally resumes his troubled solitude. His reaction to a dinner invitation can stand as typical: “A friendship loomed, making me feel decidedly unfriendly. I accepted of course.” If his disposition changes at all, it is through an unconscious enlargement of his sympathies. Our gradual recognition of this and other themes (which to Ripple go undetected) resembles his account of listening to Beethoven: “I waited for the infrequent tunes, so much thick and impenetrable stuff around them, like streams suddenly emerging down the side of high, wooded mountains.”

Chadwick excels at the description of music and faces, and a few of Ripple’s glances at others tell us everything about him. In the mother of a schizophrenic girl he sees “the look of someone accustomed to hurt who is trying to talk herself out of it.” In his son, he has observed “the contented but incredulous expression of a man in love.” And then there is the memory of his dying father’s eyes: “There was anger within them suddenly and a disciplined pity for himself and a terrible envy of which he was ashamed.” Ripple’s gaze is so intensely sympathetic that he often averts it. Or, you might say, his feelings remain so tender because they are so little used.

Ripple comes to seem so real that we doubt there is an author behind him. Yet Ripple’s baffled, ingenuous narration should not deceive us as to Chadwick’s cunning. A reader might note how a strolling Ripple first glances up at “lit bedrooms” on Page 7, employs binoculars on Page 331 in the hope of a glimpse of female flesh and then, on Page 477, sees something at last: “It was all so fleeting, the instant before she drew the curtains, that I couldn’t be sure if she was naked.”

At once modest and epic, “It’s All Right Now” is funny, moving, astute even in its narrator’s confusions, and rather casually magnificent. Sometimes it is also, it must be said, very boring. The life of a fictional character tends to flourish at the expense of plot, while too intricate a plan of events is hostile to a breathing human life. Chadwick has plainly determined to err on the side of reality. The ultimate effect is of the enormous, inarticulate and finally private significance of a single life. Or as Ripple says of Mozart: “He almost seems to be saying something but if we knew what it was there’d be nothing more to say.” *