These are the two Nabokov books I read in the last few days. I didn’t expect to spend so long reading them, but I’m glad I savoured every moment of Pale Fire, because it was utterly brilliant – by far my favourite of his novels, though calling it such is never going to do justice to the inventiveness and the intelligence of the work.
The story unfolds in a totally unique way: the book comprises an introduction, a 999-line poem, and then a commentary on that poem. The poem is written by one character, John Shade, while the critical apparatus is the work of Charles Kinbote. It soon becomes clear that the poet has been murdered, and probably intended just one more line of his poem (to give it a symmetrical structure) before he was shot. Kinbote has snatched away the manuscript, believing himself the only one to truly understand his friend Shade, much to the horror of the latter’s wife and the other faculty members of the university that brought the two men together.
However, the notes go off on bizarre tangents and read into the poem things that are clearly not there: while Shade writes an autobiographical, philosophical poem similar to Wordsworth’s Prelude, and deeply indebted to Pope, Kinbote’s notes build up a story about a strange kingdom called Zembla, from whence an exiled king has fled.
It seems Kinbote was convinced that the subject of the poem would be this wondrous land, which he had described countless times to Shade, and despite his bitter disappointment at what he finally read, he nonetheless manages to draw out from the most tenuously linked passages elements of the story which obsesses him.
He also manages to find foreshadowed in the text the passage of the killer, Gradus, sent from Zembla after the king, only to kill Shade by accident, hence linking the Zemblan story to Shade biographically, whether or not it is present in the cantos themselves.
The genius here is the character of Kinbote, the way his lies and delusions come seeping out of his commentary like sand pouring out from between fingers of a hand that wishes to hide its contents from the world by gripping harder. Shade’s poem is a good one, far better than most of the verse published when Pale Fire was unleashed on the world.
Well-crafted, if not exactly brilliant, Shade’s fame seems a little exaggerated – idealised, perhaps – but when it becomes ravelled up with the story, you see Nabokov’s brilliance. It may not be writing verse, but the fact that he creates a whole life to be recapitulated in verse and provides avenues for Kinbote’s deranged mind to latch onto is testament to his supreme technical ability.
But Kinbote is the most brilliant part of this book. By turns powerful, idiotic and hilarious, his utter self-conviction and egocentricity is superb, and a joy to read. I laughed out loud several times, and had a little sympathy for this hopeless but totally self-convinced man, so contained in his bubble of delusions that he grows giddy from breathing only his own air.
He is very much a Nabokovian protagonist – another outsider, another pederast (this time, it’s young boys), another wordsmith, another man who can only see others in very shallow, cynical terms – but he is the best of his kind, the most horribly entertaining, and quite, quite mad.
I think that my dissertation will certainly be on the obsessions found in all, or almost all, Nabokov books, and how they relate to the man himself.
We find those themes again in Transparent Things. Alongside the peripheral things – butterflies, paedophilic tendencies (R. jokes about his ways with minors; Hugh gets excited by naked pictures of the girl he’s pursuing as a child), the way émigrés lives are changed – we have the broader Nabokovian themes, of madness, of the internal world and its unknowable strangeness, of the importance of words.
It’s a flimsy work, little more than a short story, and not especially interesting, but it has some interesting and amusing moments. But ultimately, with questions of conscience so easily dismissed, in the wake of something as masterful as Pale Fire, Transparent Things fades into insignificance, appropriately enough, given the title.
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