It is 1941, at the end of the Blitz in London during World War II, and the poet, T.S. Eliot, is fire-watching with a young woman called Iris. They are on the roof of the publishing house Faber and Faber in Bloomsbury when Jim, an Australian from Essendon, flies into their view a Wellington with a dove painted on its side. The plane’s engine is on fire and it crashes into a field.
Months later Jim attends Eliot’s reading of “Little Gidding” from Four Quartets at St Stephen’s in South Kensington and hears the lines, “The dove descending breaks the air / With flame of incandescent terror …”
Jim believes the words were inspired by his plane crash and he rails in his mind at Eliot for seeing Jim and his crew as “a useful idea” — an idea that enabled Eliot to say things he’d been finding hard to express.
“We weren’t real, were we? None of it is real, is it? Ash, old men, houses with the life bombed out of them. None of it. And will the applause, the applause you now nod in recognition of, will the applause sting one day? Will it sting … because you know, and I know, that when you should have been moved to care you were taking notes instead? Remaining perfectly still, as a poet must?”
These scenes are pivotal in Steven Carroll’s A World of Other People, a novel that explores war, tragedy, the nature of writing, resilience and wartime love.
A world of other people
More than a year after the crash, Iris approaches Jim as he sits crying on a park bench and feeling estranged in “a world of other people: other people’s laughter, other people’s ease and repose, other people’s happiness — but not his”.
Iris does not know that he was the pilot of the plane she saw and which crashed.
Iris and Jim become lovers. She attempts to lead him back into the world of other people so he can recover from his trauma, connect with a kinder reality and feel happiness again.
They have some blissful times.
One of Carroll’s finest flourishes is to have Eliot inscribe a copy of “Little Gidding” “To Iris, who was there”.
Yes, she was there for Jim in ways the poet and the poem could not be.
Yes, she was there with Eliot on the rooftop when a plane fell from the sky.
And yet — and this is important — she was NOT there at a certain point because the old world and ways were pulling her back.
In this context, it is easy to see why the war maddens Iris. She fumes about how it reduces people to cliché and makes conformity compulsory. How war “gives the naturally miserable licence to inflict their miserableness upon you. And suddenly she hates them all, the righteous armies of the miserable with their thin lips …”
Dreamlike writing
This is the second novel by Steven Carroll to take inspiration from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.
Carroll’s novel from 2009, The Lost Life, drew images from “Burnt Norton”, the poem that was to become Four Quartets’ opening section. T.S. Eliot also featured as a character in the novel to good effect.
I loved The Lost Life and, in particular, Carroll’s dreamlike writing. I admired the way he could meld different time frames and places so elegantly that it was impossible to see the join.
There were flashes of this brilliance in A World of Other People, and the most poignant example of it occurs when Jim is recollecting his boyhood home and room.
The sequence starts when Jim turns the door handle to enter his old bedroom where he made models of Bristol Bulldogs, Nighthawks, Siskins and Atlases.
The room is quiet and the measure of time feels different.
Jim ponders, “Does the room in which you grew up, and in which, over the years, the world shed one mystery and gained another, and another and another, already contain the many selves you will assume, all there just waiting to meet their moment, so that one day the model world suspended from the ceiling becomes an actual one, and the detail of the tiny Perspex window through which the pilot stares is no longer tiny, but life-size, and you are that pilot? Was it all decided then?”
The sequence ends when Jim wakes in a foreign world of raids and bombers to contemplate which of the crews that left his barracks in the night would not be in the mess for breakfast.
Wartime love story
Carroll works hard to make his wartime love story distinctive. But he’s up against it given there’s a mother lode of such stories published before his was and affect our appreciation of his effort. The Night Watch by Sarah Waters is one example that springs to mind.
Four Quartets was a tribute to Beethoven’s late string quartets and “East Coker” and “The Dry Salvages” are the two poems from Eliot’s four yet to feature in Carroll’s work.
I don’t know if Carroll is planning to work on two more novels to round out the quartet but, if he is, I hope they exhibit the same lyricism and philosophical depth of The Lost Life. Its passages enchanted me so fully I now perceive them as the kind of dream you wake from only reluctantly and thereafter ache to return to, always wanting more.
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