A Heart's Journey in Winter - John Buchan
All hail the jump-cut...
What to make of James Buchan? That's what I found myself asking after finishing his novel Heart's Journey in Winter. Buchan, in the tradition of Graham Greene and John Le Carre, writes novels that add a stylish, literary polish to popular forms like the thriller and the espionage tale. This approach has met with widespread approval: Buchan accumulates literary prizes like nobody's business. Yes, some people sniff disdainfully at the very notion of literary prizes, yet following the theory that where there's smoke there's fire, Buchan must be doing something right. In fact, having read Heart's Journey in Winter and A Good Place To Die, I can confirm that what he does well he does extraordinarily well. However, what interests me most about Buchan is how his strengths are so inextricably linked to his weaknesses.
But first things first…
Heart's Journey in Winter, which won the Guardian Fiction Award in 1995, is an espionage novel set in Germany in 1983. In this pre-Gorbachev world, the Cold War has yet to end, and the Berlin Wall has yet to fall. Richard Fisher, the protagonist, is writing a book on the Red Brigades. Polina Mertz is an up-and-comer in the US diplomatic service in Berlin. They meet. They fall in love. Or at least, Richard falls in love with Polina. Whether his love is reciprocated is… well, who knows?
And this is the problem with Heart's Journey in Winter. Reading it is like stumbling upon a half-completed chess match—a match in which each piece is an identical shape and colour. Which pieces are on which side? What direction are they going? What are their powers? Who's moving them? After reading the entire novel, I still wasn't sure who was doing what to whom, and why. Polina is spying for the Russians, and Richard for the English, right? But what are they trying to do? Good question... Something about Polina trying to stall the deployment of Pershing missiles, the American counterweight to Soviet missiles. This, I think, is meant to give the Soviets a decade-long breather from the arms race, a race they're losing, a race that's crippling them. But it's all so nebulous that, honestly, who the fuck would know?
This incoherence arises from Buchan's narrative technique. Buchan, you see, belongs to the same school as Toni Morrison and William Faulkner: the "jump-cut" (for lack of a better term) school of narrative. Namely, instead of offering a narrative that progresses from A to B to C to D, Buchan jumps from A to D. Meanwhile, readers are left flailing, wondering how the hell they got from A to D, and feeling a bit nostalgic for good old B and C.
I've concocted a sample of the jump-cut technique:
Jim walked into the lounge. Tracy lifted the vodka bottle: "Do you want any?"
Jim looked away. "No."
He turned and walked out onto the verandah. Occasionally a car passed, sending shadows slanting along the housefront.
He could sense Tracy at his shoulder. "Why do you hate me so much?" she asks, flatly.
OK, this passage is riven of the context you get in a novel. But it gives a sense, I think, of the narrative jump-cutting Buchan uses constantly. Compulsively.
Jump-cutting means earthshattering exchanges materialise from nowhere, much to the bafflement of readers. In the sample above, there's nothing that prepares the reader for Tracy's question. Nothing in the preceding sentences hints at something as ferocious as hatred. That's why it's effective. This startling question endows the prose that precedes it with a new suggestiveness; the reader returns to it and tries to detect hints of the hatred that must, surely, have been percolating through it.
That's how jump-cutting works: it eschews connectives. It dispenses with the buffers that ease the transition from paragraph to paragraph, scene to scene, chapter to chapter. What's left on the cutting-room floor is orienting prose. This prose situates the reader, and the story, in a time and a place. It connects the story to what has gone before and what is to come. It eases transitions, lubricates plot advancement. Leave this orienting prose out and what you've got is jump-cutting.
Well, in Heart's Journey in Winter, Buchan's constant recourse to jump-cutting is baffling. Even with hindsight, readers scan previously read pages in vain for the missed clues, for the inadvertantly skipped chapters. You know, the chapters that explain Richard and Polina are spies, that explain what they are trying to do, and how, and why. The chapters—known hereabouts as chapters B and C—that explain why others suspect them and what those others will do if they catch them. Trivial plot stuff like that.
There's something shabby in the way Buchan parcels out plot information—usually retrospectively, after the readers have been bushwhacked by the latest unexplained, unprepared plot revelation. (Actually, "revelation" is too grand a word; they're usually too confusing to be truly revelatory.) Richard's love for Polina, all the political manoeuvrings—all the plot twists—seem capricious and disproportionate, because they're never foreshadowed and never adequately explained. Which reminds me of something TS Eliot said about Prince Hamlet. Eliot said Hamlet's emotions are in "excess of the facts as they appear". Well, I'd say the same thing about Heart's Journey in Winter. Everything is in excess of the facts. How can it be otherwise when readers don't know what the facts are?
But let's give the jump-cut its due: it can be thrilling. Who said disorientation is always bad? What about The Sound and the Fury? In fact, what about practically any novel written by Faulkner or Morrison? Jumping from A to D can produce vivid and satisfying juxtapositions. What reader doesn't feel a hermeneutic thrill when so deposited at D? It's like the literary equivalent of the gameshow Jeopardy: work your way backwards from the answer to its source. This appeals to the detective in every reader. Reconstruct C and B until you're back at A, the holes have been filled in, and the plot explained.
The jump-cut has other advantages. One is that its discontinuity mimicks real life. After all, real life is often ragged and perplexing, rarely is it linear and perfectly comprehensible. Another is that it creates a world-weary, disconsolate tone. Jump-cutting means conflict, plot twists, or resolutions are always presented as things that have already happened. Always a fait accompli. You never get to see anticipation or preparation for these things. Consequently, there's no sense of agency imbuing the characters. Choice is elided. Aftermath and outcome are substituted for action.
Even Buchan's greatest strength as a writer, the depiction of romantic love, is moulded by his choice of jump-cutting as a narrative technique. In both Heart's Journey in Winter and his latest novel, A Good Place to Die (titled The Persian Wife in some markets), Buchan excels at depicting romantic love in part because so much of it happens "offstage". The very under-elaboration that, at times, makes Buchan's writing frustratingly difficult to follow comes to his aid here. The burgeoning of love, its agonies and its rewards, never overwhelm the reader. How could it? We perceive only its tip. So much of it remains submerged beneath the surface. So much of it happens in the white spaces between words, paragraphs, and chapters.
And this is Buchan's greatest strength, his greatest weakness. All hail the jump-cut.
-- Simon Williamson
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