tomorrow in the battle think on me [marias, tr. margaret jull costa]

Back in the day, working for some Stakhovian corner of the BBC, we were constantly being told about the importance of creating “sympathetic” characters. No-one would want to engage with a central character they couldn’t warm to. The mealy-mouth tediousness of this dictum seems to me more or less fully responsible for the shit-storm which has since overwhelmed Britain. No-one ever wants to engage with anything or anyone they don’t like, as though the complexities of story and discourse are of secondary importance. All that matters is that we feel good about ourselves: that the mirror held up to our society shows us that we are nice, likeable, and therefore worthy of our own attention. I realise that there have been dramatic and literary exceptions, nevertheless, the pervading need to ‘complacer’ the audience has had a deadening effect on our culture. It’s as though Britain hasn’t had a civil war or been invaded in so long that people have forgotten that good people can do bad things, and bad people good. The complexities of moral representation have been eroded. We  have turned into the land of Harry Potter. All of which springs to mind because Marias, whose affection for Britain would appear to be considerable, has such a radically different attitude towards character. At times it’s as though he’s seeking to challenge the audience to engage in spite of his characters, rather than because of them. The narrator of Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me is a brilliant but flakey man, whose first thoughts on meeting the sister of a woman who died in his arms only weeks ago, is to seduce her. The husband of the woman who died in the narrator’s arms turns out to be an even less likeable specimen of humanity, recounting at the book’s denouement a terrible tale of mortal betrayal, a tale which occurs in a London which crucially still had open-decked double deckers. Like The Infatuations, Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me is another curious tale of unfortunate death and the mixed reactions people have towards death. As though the writer is determined to puncture any kind of sentimentalism regarding that most inevitable of processes. Philosophical asides are smuggled into the great rolling tide of Marias’ prose. The story takes a Cortazarian twist when the narrator sleeps with a prostitute, in a bid to find out whether she’s his ex-wife or not. Everything teeters on the brink of the unbelievable, the unpalatable and yet, somewhere in these morbid, amoral observations, there lurks a deranged wisdom. The oft-dismissed whispers of those who don’t paint pretty, palatable pictures, those who insist on reminding us that the world isn’t a box of chocolates; it is full of random cruelty and stupidity. Those who die young aren’t necessarily good; those who mourn them aren’t necessarily noble. Humans are fickle creatures, easily lead.