Reading Note:
The Small Back Room
26 January 2015

Is there anything more perverse than the pleasure of gripping an exciting book with two hands as it rises to its climax, of galloping toward the last page with a mounting desire never to reach it? The book is so thrilling that you cast aside all obligations, sunk in the spell of the ripping yarn. When at last you reach the end, panting and exhausted by the sustained brush with potential disaster, there is nothing to do — nothing, it really does seem, to live for. There is, of course, plenty to do: all the things that you’ve neglected while in thrall. But it is unbearable to think of them, they are so grossly trivial in the wake of your adventure. Now you really are in danger.

The first thing that I did after reaching THE END of Nigel Balchin’s 1943 novel, The Small Back Room — when did novelists stop marking finis? when did journalists revive the practice with their little boxes? — I returned to the source of the tip that it might be worth reading. At the end of that Paris Review interview that I mentioned a while back, Shirley Hazzard answers, interestingly, I think, an interesting question by JD McClatchy:

INTERVIEWER

What novel from the past do you wish you had written?

HAZZARD

I don’t think I can answer this. Rather, I might speak with a joyful envy of passages that I myself would not have conceivably written. I would say that Great Expectations may be the most greatly realized novel in English (though I steer clear of that sort of competitive judgment). Conrad’s Victory, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse . . . Wuthering Heights . . . Ulysses . . . I can line them up forever–especially scenes to which I feel very near. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is an extraordinary novel that often comes to mind, yet I have no feeling that I could have imagined it or set about writing it. Tess is just about unbearable, a wonderful book in which I participate almost as if I created it. Such a disparate range of books your question summons up! A little masterpiece like Nigel Balchin’s The Small Back Room speaks to our own time, but with so much literary experience behind it. Then there is nonfiction so personal as to be novelistic–Sebald’s Rings of Saturn, for instance. There are passages in many good novels that I feel affinity for. In responsive reading, one participates, so to speak, in the rainbow of creation.

I had never heard of Nigel Balchin, but if Hazzard recommended him, and did so in a way that made a “little” masterpiece sound like a bigger achievement than a great one, then I should have to give him a try. So I found a used copy at Amazon. The book was reprinted fifteen years ago, as a “Cassell Military Paperback” — I want to come back to that — and on the cover is a still image from the 1948 British Lion film of the same name, which I’ve just now ordered from Amazuke. You have to know the book or the movie to get any excitement out of the still, which shows a man on a pebbly beach fiddling with something. He is defusing a bomb.

The bomb plot — the Germans have been dropping “booby traps” that look more like large flashlights than explosives, and curious passers-by, including several children, have been “blown to glory” by them — is one of the two narrative strands that Balchin weaves to great effect. Our hero, Sammy Rice, is detailed to one Captain Stuart, the Army man who is trying to get to the bottom of this menace — at the outset, Stuart has no idea what the things look like, much less how they’re constructed. Sammy is a physicist working at a Whitehall unit of civilian eggheads, brought in by “the Minister” to advise on weapons projects, and he knows a thing or two about fuses. Together, he and Stuart try to reverse engineer the booby trap, working from the very little that they’ve learned about how it detonates. Sammy, although not very heroic, is readily engaged by the project, partly because he likes and admires Stuart, but partly also because it gets him out of the office.

The office plot is much bulkier, in terms of sheer word count, than the bomb plot, but if we were to compare the novel to the booby trap, we should have to say that the office plot is the explosive material, while the bomb plot acts as the detonator. Midway through The Small Back Room, it occurred to me that I was reading an example of that mythically rare genre, the “work” novel. The Small Back Room is also very much an “office politics” novel — that, as you may imagine, is where the explosives come from — but the absurdities of office life are grounded in judiciously described work. Sammy has his “stuff” (cold-weather lubricants), but there are also reports to crank out and a team to oversee. There are two occasions in which Sammy goes out to a place called Graveley to observe weapons tests. Balchin does not stint on detail.

Perhaps the “work” makes for rewarding reading because of the war background. By now, the dizzying juxtaposition of time scales that characterizes so much writing about the early years of World War II in Britain is familiar enough for me to compare it to the telescoping corridor in The Shining. Everything is an emergency, now now now, but everything takes forever. While the kingdom is under siege, committees respond with glacial caution. The dissonance is quite literally nightmarish.

I am dimly aware that there is a robust British tradition of “action” novels, written for men, and especially for military men, that combine a scrupulous if streamlined literacy with difficult moral questions. Nothing is ever belabored in these books — that’s the one thing that readers wouldn’t tolerate — but the effort to get things right is striking. The romantic impulse that inspired John Buchan, if never extinguished, is tamed, controlled, and restricted. The third movement of A Dance to the Music of Time belongs very much to this line of work. Its guiding principle seems to be that, while essentially absurd, war is too serious to be dismissed as “absurd.”

I am familiar with at least one writer who is keeping this tradition alive, Paul Torday, whose Salmon Fishing in the Yemen I have not read (yet) but whose More Than You Can Say made a favorable impression a few years ago. If this tradition has an American counterpart, I am altogether unaware of it. Writers such as Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut do not share the English take on absurdity. American novelists are reluctant humanists at best.

Two excerpts from The Small Back Room. The first is the quietly brilliant opening paragraph, which explains why the narrator is not in Service, while announcing that he his going to say very little — barely more than what’s in these sentences — about his past. That’s to say that he will resist the urge to explain himself.

In 1928 my foot was hurting all the time, so they took it off and gave me an aluminium one that only hurt about three-quarters of the time. It would be all right for a bit, and then any one of about fifty things would start it off and it would give me hell.

This establishes the particular note of manliness that runs through the entire novel, as well as a harmonizing note of self-pity. The tension between character and woundedness has reduced Sammy to regarding himself as worthless, but the possibility of redemption is heralded by his growing mastery of a drinking problem, which is also reflected in his relationship with Susan, a woman whom he has clearly met at the office. The love interest in The Small Back Room is by no means negligible, but it is elegantly subsumed to what, in the modest framework of this kind of book — a framework of modesty, really — is clearly an epic struggle.

The following passage comes from the other end of the book, or very nearly. Sammy is on the beach, straining to defuse a booby trap. Worn out after a great deal of grueling, terrifying work, he has just discovered the most discouraging thing: the most difficult task of the job so far will have to be repeated at another part of the device. Meanwhile, far down the beach, in field-telephone contact, stands a cluster of Army personnel: Sammy is being watched.

It stuck, just as the other had done; and that finished me. It was the fact that the strain came on exactly the same places as before. I don’t suppose it was as stiff as all that really, and if I’d been fresh I dare say one big heave would have done it. But my hand and arm muscles were all to hell, and instead of giving one big heave I had to keep giving a series of little heaves, which did no good at all and just took what little guts I’d got clean out of me. If I’d had any sense I should have stopped and rested, or thought of another way of doing it; but that never occurred to me. I just went on pulling at the damned wrench, never even believing it was going to move.

I don’t know how long this went on, or why I didn’t shake the thing so much that it went up. I remember hearing myself sobbing with each pull, and that I kept my eyes shut because the sweat made  them smart so much. Finally my hand grip just packed up, my hand slipped off the wrench, and I half fell backwards. I made a sort of half-hearted effort to get up, and then just lay there sobbing and panting with my eyes shut.

You’ll have to read the book yourself to see what happens next.