Rates of Exchange Read online

  Introduction by Giles Foden

  In 1983, Angela Carter found herself writing in the New Statesman the now traditional confessions of a Booker Prize judge. She dubbed Rates of Exchange, which was shortlisted for the prize in that year and written by her colleague at the University of East Anglia, Malcolm Bradbury, ‘an exercise in imaginary linguistics’. The other books included The Life and Times of Michael K by J. M. Coetzee, Shame by Salman Rushdie, Waterland by Graham Swift, The Illusionist by Anita Mason, and Flying to Nowhere by John Fuller. Coetzee won.

  Imaginary linguistics. A good description of all novels perhaps, but particularly of this one. Its plot turns on a politically dictated change in the language of Slaka, the totalitarian east or central European country which is the book’s principal fiction. In this command economy, a vowel-shift is commanded: ‘i’ is exchanged for ‘u’. The party newspaper P’rtyii Populatiii becomes P’rtyuu Populatuuu and the Slakan word for thankyou, slibob, becomes slubob.

  Into this distorted world, an amalgam maybe of the former Yugoslavia, Romania, Albania, and one or other of the Baltic states, is pitched Dr Angus Petworth, university lecturer and ‘a practised cultural traveller, a man who has had diarrhoea for the British council in almost all parts of the civilized or partcivilized world’. Practised as he may be, in Slaka Petworth will meet with personalities and eventualities which challenge all his preconceptions. Even his very name (Petwurt, Petwit, Pervert) becomes subject to comic transformation; subject to, in fact, the mechanism of exchange within and between systems that is both this novel’s theme and the operating principle behind its narrative situations.

  Rates of Exchange presents a classic fictional scenario: the adventures of an Englishman abroad, away from home, translated. He responds to rather than shapes events; he is subject to circumstance rather than destiny; he is laughable but still sympathetic; he is, in this book’s customary grammatical parlance, ‘object rather than subject’. This narrative type goes back to the dawn of the English novel in Fielding’s Tom Jones and other seminal eighteenth-century titles. What is, in fact, most remarkable about Bradbury’s novel is the way it’s in dialogue with so many other novels across British, European and American literary history, as well as with many of the critical theories that seek to explicate the novel form across all languages, chief among them Mikhail Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination (first published as a whole in 1975). An introduction can only pay heed to a few of the titles and theories to which this book calls out across time; readers will spot many other echoes and allusions.

  Petworth, him being so practised and all, one might expect to be a man of the world. But continually throughout the book we are alerted to his expertise only being in teaching and in travelling between places where he teaches. In sexual, emotional and political intrigue he is an ingénu. Like Jones, he is interestingly pitched between innocence and experience.

  This is what locates Rates of Exchange generically within a very particular tradition of comic adventure overseas. In modern times, primarily determined by a colonial and postcolonial context, it stretches from Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop (1938) to William Boyd’s A Good Man in Africa (1981), with an American wing comprising another Boyd novel, Stars and Bars (1984), and David Lodge’s Changing Places (1975). This last is actually mentioned in passing in Rates of Exchange, comically conflated by a Slakan academic with another Bradbury novel, Stepping Westwards (1968):

  ‘Do you know also a campus writer Brodge?’ asks a lady to his left. ‘Who writes Changing Westward? I think he is very funny but sometimes his ideological position is not clear.’

  The campus novel is the most obvious generic template for Rates of Exchange, though in this case the campus moves from place to place across Slaka, as if acting out the exchange principle itself; in this respect the book is a direct response to Changing Places (where two academics, Maurice Zapp and Philip Swallow, swap campuses). Lodge’s own Small World (1984) takes the exchange principle still further, as the characters process through an international series of academic literary conferences. This spatialization of culture is the English campus novel’s response to postmodernism, and Rates of Exchange is clearly a part of that. But it marches over the territory of many other genres, and that polyvalence is in itself also part of its response to postmodernism.

  One of the generic territories Rates of Exchange covers is the encyclopaedic account of an imaginary place, another tradition that leads us back to the start of the European novel, with Gulliver’s Travels (1726/1735) and its roots in late medieval and early modern travel writing. More recent incarnations of this genre include The Island of the Articoles by André Maurois (1928), Gabriel Garcìa Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), and Jan Morris’s Hav (2006), the latter owing something to Bradbury’s book as well as to a cod guidebook which followed, Why Come to Slaka? (1986).

  A related generic territory is that of the folk or fairy tale, such as Katya Princip draws on for her own novels, and relates to Petworth during her seduction of him. This genre is concerned with the transformations that the various characters undergo in the book, and with the shifting set of masks underneath which Petworth must learn to recognize true motivation. One of the novel’s key locations is the Restaurant Propp, a reference to Vladimir Propp, author of The Morphology of the Folktale (1928). Propp broke down folk and fairy tales into thirty-one narrative functions (interdiction; complicity; trickery; exposure; recognition; victory and so on). Some of these phases contribute to the structure of Rates of Exchange.

  Less obviously, or lying like a shadow over the obvious, is the espionage novel. There are comparisons to be made between Rates of Exchange and John Le Carré’s Smiley novels: although he is deadly capable and does shape events, Smiley suffers similar existential challenges around sex and identity to those that Petworth undergoes. In Rates of Exchange, the submerged spy narrative revolves around the briefcase full of lectures and academic books which detains the attention of Slakan customs as he enters the country and into which another text is secreted on his departure. But what, in his small and unwilling guise as spy, has Petworth gone to Slaka to find out or do? The lady at the British Council asks for a brief report on academic matters, ‘the state of the universities and so on’; as he has access to areas of Slaka usually forbidden to foreigners, the British ambassador asks him to report on military matters; slippery Plitplov wants him to transport something in his briefcase. All these are red herrings. In fact, like the novelist who created him, Petworth is investigating the nature of reality itself. If he is to have a victory, it will involve better understanding of the world and himself; in that sense, like Voltaire’s Candide and Johnson’s Rasselas (both published in 1759), it’s a cautionary tale: ‘these days one has to be very cautious’, a clerk at Heathrow tells him on the last page of the novel, as he tries to track down his briefcase.

  Another generic influence on Rates of Exchange is that of the postmodern novel itself, which questions its own fictionality by drawing attention to or undermining its status as a novel. Often this is done through an ironic interruption of the fictional by the real; such as, in this book, trying but failing to buy its predecessor The History Man at a bookshop at Heathrow. The relevant intertexts here are two novels by American authors featuring Western observers of eastern Europe, John Updike’s Bech: A Book (1970) and Saul Bellow’s The Dean’s December (1982).

  By the early 1980s, the postmodern novel was becoming Bradbury’s main area of expertise as a critic, so when the narrator of Rates of Exchange writes ‘I am a writer not a critic; I like my fictions to remain fictions’, there is a double joke.

  And more than a joke, too: for Bradbury’s attempt to show how the factitious and fictitious interpenetrate is also entir
ely in earnest. Comic as it is, Rates of Exchange is an attempt to depict, more or less realistically, two systems in conflict or dialogue. Here the specific generic context is that of a historical novel set in 1981 at the height of the Cold War, a time when the West is suffering inflation and unemployment (the deregulatory effects of the ‘Big Bang’ of 1986 have yet to be felt) and cracks are beginning to show in the Eastern Bloc. England itself is ‘strikebound’ and in ‘fits of Royal Wedding’ after a summer of ‘stylistic pluralism’.

  Bradbury’s own novel Doctor Criminale (1992) is another postmodern historical novel in this vein, picking up on the intercultural action following the fall of the Berlin Wall; Professor Ron Rum, whom the reader shall encounter in these pages, reappears in that book. It is Rum who in Rates of Exchange makes the crucial critical point that, if solved, would resolve the many contradictions thrown up by such a variety of generic influences: ‘He asks me to explain you that the problem of realismus [literary realism] is to combinate the reality inherent in the historical process with the sufficient subjective perception, do you agree?’ ‘Well, yes,’ says Petworth.

  In many ways Rates of Exchange is a lighthearted attempt to resolve this very problem: how can a novel can be true to the life of the world, to history, and to the life of the subjective mind and the emotions, particularly as experienced in language? It is a problem to which he applied himself as a critic, most notably in his introduction to the collection of essays The Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction (1977). There Bradbury postulates two critical histories of fiction: ‘polar distinctions that have long been made – between, on the one hand, the novel’s propensity toward realism, social documentation and interrelation with historical events and movements, and on the other with its propensity toward form, fictionality, and reflexive self-examination . . .’

  ‘White and male, forty and married, bourgeois and British’, Petworth has an eye for the ladies. But he is ill at ease in the three principal sexual encounters in the book, with glamorous Slakan novelist Katya Princip, with Budgie Steadiman, the nymphomaniac wife of the British ambassador, and with Marisja Lubijova, his long-suffering official guide. In fact, he only sleeps with Princip, narrowly escaping rape by Budgie and sitting side by side in the darkness with Mari, making love ‘not in the usual way’ but through a mental connection that evades surveillance.

  The eyes of the state are a constant theme in this book, for Slaka is a place where the secret police are the largest employer and everyone is watching everybody else. Petworth’s mistake (and all comic heroes must make a large miscalculation) is to take Katya at face value and not to see that her protestations of passion are all part of a game of survival, the rules of which he is unaware. Master of that game is the shape-shifting character of Plitpov, who may or may not have slept with Petworth’s wife on a trip to Cambridge many years before. All these factors contribute to the mounting sense of unease that, despite the farcical elements of the story, makes Rates of Exchange a serious book as well as a comic one.

  An uncertain dynamic between the farcical and the serious is central to Petworth’s status as a character. An apparent lightweight, he does not seem to be, as people keep telling him, ‘a character in the world historical sense’; that is, he does not express the major currents of history which are themselves a function of the economic base and political dialectic. Yet as readers we perceive that he is indeed significant in this way, as an emblem of modernist anomie.

  We see this, in fact, right from the start of the book as, waiting at Heathrow while watching ‘those special exotic airport women one may always see but never have’, he orders another Scotch ‘and finds himself caught by nameless fear – the fear of being trapped here, for eternity, in the unassigned, stateless space between all the countries, condemned to live forever in a cosmopolitan nowhere, on clingfilm-wrapped sandwiches, duty-free whisky, Tiptree’s jam’.

  This stateless space, this ‘non-place’ with its draining deficit of significance, infused the film Lost in Translation (2003), which shares with Rates of Exchange themes of loneliness, insomnia and alienation. At first Slaka promises escape from the significance deficit. In translation himself, mid-flight, as Petworth begins to exchange British airspace for European and then Slakan airspace (‘somehow his being is shifting: a Petworth life and a Petworth wife, a Petworth day and a Petworth way, are strangely slipping and disintegrating’), there is a transfer of significance. The Slakans on the flight are ‘peoply sort of people’; they remind Petworth of ‘the people of his childhood, a time when the world appeared remarkably solid, persons massive, individuals whole and complete, reality really real, buildings permanently in place’.

  The Western postmodern condition which he has left behind reduces individuals to fictions; to mere signs in a marketplace. What are you doing, the narrator asks the fashionably clothed, trend-obsessed young, ‘but bartering your mind and your body, your youth and your opinions, on the economic frontier, in an attempt to find a meaning, invent a value, find your highest price, trade at the best possible rate of exchange?’

  But as Petworth soon discovers in Slaka, exchanges are also taking place there, as individuals work together to game the system, extracting value where they can:

  ‘So I hope you now understand something,’ says Lubijova. ‘Why always we see them together. Of course it is a very good exchange. He likes her charms, and recommends everywhere her work; think how nice for him to be seen with a person who is beautiful and respected, and has a great talent and a little courage. And for her, well, she is safe, you should please. It is not so strange, such things happen in all countries.’

  The ‘her’ under discussion is Katya Princip, who earlier has tried to warn Petworth of the exchange-value of everything, regardless of whether one is living under communism or capitalism:

  Oh, we made the bad world go away for a minute, that really is what love is for, but when it comes back, we have of course to live in it. Make all the loves you like and you still do not escape. Most lives are a prison, here in my country of course, you know, but I know also in yours . . . And all the lovings in the world, they do not make these things go away. The black car that waits outside, did you see it? The water that dries here on your skin that is like me going away. Oh, yes, my dear we have made our nice secret, all so natural. But of course it is not so natural. As my grey father Marx tells, it is also cultural and ideological, economical and sexual. It is part of all the systems, and each time you choose or you do, you enter one of them.

  One aspect of this systemic matrix is language itself (the ‘prison-house of language’ as the postmodern theorist Frederic Jameson has it), and it is here that Bradbury has his greatest fun, with brilliant lexical and grammatical play reminiscent of Anthony Burgess and Martin Amis.

  They were both writers with whom Bradbury was critically entangled. In his review of Rates of Exchange in the Observer in 1983, Amis complained of Bradbury’s slowness of output and ‘ravenous drollery’, finding the novel itself ‘uneconomical – prohibitively so’. In his 1993 Times obituary of Burgess, Bradbury drew attention to Burgess’s prolixity of output and his narrative inventiveness:

  The books which came, almost unremittingly, from 1956 on make a vast record of the second half of the twentieth century, a collective pulling together of what a deeply engaged literary and linguistic mind might draw from what had already been written, what it was now time to write. Burgess is the great postmodern storehouse of British writing, maker not just of contemporary stories, but of innumerable new narrative codes. He is a popular writer, but also an important experimentalist; an encyclopaedic amasser, but also a maker of form; a playful comic, with a dark gloom.

  With the benefit of another decade or so of hindsight, the novels of all these three writers seem closer together than ever. While Bradbury probably never would have matched Burgess’s extraordinary output, certainly as a hyperbolic stylist in this book he begins to match Amis, and perhaps that was one reason for the
Oedipal spikiness of the review. Moreover, there are clear lines of continuity to be drawn between Rates of Exchange and Money: A Suicide Note, Amis’s most famous novel, published the following year. Their concerns around exchanges of value and meaning (and lack thereof) mesh and contend; both seem echt-80s novels; both use Bakhtinian ‘heteroglossia’ for satiric purpose, building up an interplay of discourses and dialects; both depend for their comedy on a misapprehension on the part of the hero. But the most important comparison is that both Angus Petworth and John Self are caught in toils of language and desire. Here’s Petworth:

  In a dream, there is despair: he is looking for a word for a thing, but he does not know what the thing is, because the word will not come. There is a desire to incorporate, to make what is outside inside; and it seems that a body is there, a body that presses itself against him, puts something to his mouth. But when he wakes in the darkness, he is alone, with the water running outside, in the tight narrow bed.

  And here is Self:

  Lying in that slipped zone where there is neither sleep nor wakefulness, where all thoughts and words are crosspurposed, and yet the mind is forever solving, solving, Selina came at me in queries of pink smoke. I saw her performing flesh in fantastic eddies and convulsions . . . I woke babbling in the night – yes, I heard myself say it, solve it, through the dream mumble . . .

  And both novels, too, share a concern with those other zones of slippage, airports. At the end of Rates of Exchange, slubob has returned to slibob, and Petworth himself is waiting again for his flight, caught in the strange ‘grammar of airports’ once more. But now he is able to converse fluently with the armed men in the immigration booth. And that is a victory of sorts.