Elizabeth Costello полностью

Realism has never been comfortable with ideas. It could not be otherwise: realism is premised on the idea that ideas have no autonomous existence, can exist only in things. So when it needs to debate ideas, as here, realism is driven to invent situations – walks in the countryside, conversations – in which characters give voice to contending ideas and thereby in a certain sense embody them. The notion of embodying turns out to be pivotal. In such debates ideas do not and indeed cannot float free: they are tied to the speakers by whom they are enounced, and generated from the matrix of individual interests out of which their speakers act in the world – for instance, the son's concern that his mother not be treated as a Mickey Mouse post-colonial writer, or Wheatley's concern not to seem an old-fashioned absolutist.

At eleven he taps at the door of her room. She has a long day before her: an interview, a session at the college radio station, then, in the evening, the presentation ceremony and the speech that goes with it.

Her strategy with interviewers is to take control of the exchange, presenting them with blocks of dialogue that have been rehearsed so often he wonders they have not solidified in her mind and become some kind of truth. A long paragraph on childhood in the suburbs of Melbourne (cockatoos screeching at the bottom of the garden) with a sub-paragraph on the danger to the imagination of middle-class security. A paragraph on the death of her father of enteric fever in Malaya, with her mother somewhere in the background playing Chopin waltzes on the piano, followed by a sequence of what sound like impromptu ruminations on the influence of music on her own prose. A paragraph about her adolescent reading (voracious, unselective), then a jump to Virginia Woolf, whom she first read as a student, and the impact Woolf had on her. A passage on her spell at art school, another on her year and a half at post-war Cambridge ('What I mainly remember is the struggle to keep warm'), another on her years in London ('I could have made a living as a translator, I suppose, but my best language was German, and German wasn't popular in those days, as you can imagine'). Her first novel, which she modestly disparages, though as a first novel it stood head and shoulders above the competition, then her years in France ('heady times'), with an oblique glance at her first marriage. Then her return to Australia with her young son. Him.

All in all, he judges, listening in, a workmanlike performance, if one can still use that word, eating up most of the hour, as intended, leaving only a few minutes to skirt the questions that begin 'What do you think…?'What does she think about neolib-eralism, the woman question, Aboriginal rights, the Australian novel today? He has lived around her for nearly four decades, on and off, and is still not sure what she thinks about the big questions. Not sure and, on the whole, thankful not to have to hear. For her thoughts would be, he suspects, as uninteresting as most people's. A writer, not a thinker. Writers and thinkers: chalk and cheese. No, not chalk and cheese: fish and fowl. But which is she, the fish or the fowl? Which is her medium: water or air?

This morning's interviewer, who has come up from Boston for the occasion, is young, and his mother is usually indulgent towards the young. But this one is thick-skinned and refuses to be fobbed off. 'What would you say your main message is?' she persists.

'My message? Am I obliged to carry a message?'

Not a strong counter; the interviewer presses her advantage. 'In The House on Eccles Street your lead character, Marion Bloom, refuses to have sex with her husband until he has worked out who he is. Is that what you are saying: that until men have worked out a new, post-patriarchal identity, women should hold themselves apart?'

His mother casts him a glance. Help! it is meant to say, in a droll way.

'Intriguing idea,' she murmurs. 'Of course in the case of Marion 's husband there would be a particular severity in demanding that he work out a new identity, since he is a man of – what shall I say? – of infirm identity, of many shapes.'

Eccles Street is a great novel; it will live, perhaps, as long as Ulysses; it will certainly be around long after its maker is in the grave. He was only a child when she wrote it. It unsettles and dizzies him to think that the same being that engendered Eccles Street engendered him. It is time to step in, save her from an inquisition that promises to become tedious. He rises. 'Mother, I am afraid we are going to have to call a halt,' he says. 'We're being fetched for the radio session.' To the interviewer: 'Thank you, but that will have to be all.'

The interviewer pouts with annoyance. Will she find a part for him in the story she files: the novelist of failing powers and her bossy son?