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Black swan song >> Could The Laying on of Hands be Alan Bennett’s last hurrah? by
JULIET WATERS This was big news. Bennett’s plays, screenplays, essays and diaries have made him an icon. “It’s not that I don’t think of stories,” he told The Observer, “but at the moment they really are too bleak to visit on the public… I think my most recent work, The Laying on of Hands, is as dark as I could let myself be publicly without being rejected altogether.” Indeed, this collection recently released in Canada is dark. Bennett is relentless in his slim but lethal satire of society’s incompetence in dealing with the two fundamental issues of human existence: sex and death. It’s also thoroughly hilarious. There are three stories in Bennett’s collection, all engaging and twisted, but it’s this first one that should become an instant classic. It’s hard to discuss the title story without revealing sublime twists of plot. Fortunately, Bennett is not just a master of plot, but also of detailed characterization, so one can at least offer a taste of this story without ruining it. In the opening paragraph we meet a man named Treacher, who seems to be sneaking into a large, obviously important memorial service. We don’t know why he’s trying to remain anonymous and we don’t know who the service is for. We won’t know these things for some time. But we do know that Treacher is the kind of man for whom anonymity is not usually a problem. “Tall, thin and with a disagreeable expression, were this a film written 40 years ago he would have been played by the actor Raymond Huntley who, not unvinegary in life, in art made a specialty of ill-tempered businessmen and officious civil servants. Treacher was neither but he, too, was nothing to look at.” And yet on this particular day he feels he’s being looked at constantly, mostly by women, and whispered about too. Tortured, he is unaware that they’re actually looking at the famous young soap opera star seated behind him. “The previous week he had stunned his audience when, with no excuse whatsoever, he had raped his mother, and though it later transpired she had been begging for it for some time and was actually no relation at all, nevertheless some vestiges of the nation’s fascinated revulsion still clung to him. In life, though, as he was at pains to point out to any chat-show host who would listen, he was a pussycat and indeed, within minutes of the maternal rape, he could be found on another channel picking out the three items of antique furniture he would invest in were his budget limited to 500 pounds.” Bennett brilliantly orchestrates the mundane and profane as the church fills. “A remarkable assembly with philanthropy, scholarship and genuine distinction represented alongside much that was tawdry and merely fashionable, so that with only a little license this stellar, but tarnished throng might, for all its shortcomings, be taken as a version of England.” A version of England that is as dead-on as any that’s ever been written. It’s hard to believe that Bennett is 67. This work is so tight and so contemporary that there isn’t a satirist of any generation who can touch him. Yet he refuses to be an inspiration. “Writing is a deplorable profession,’ he claims, “it makes you into a half a person who can feel strongly about something but is always holding something back. We can justly be accused of exploiting people, because that’s exactly what writers do.’ Nothing
is being held back in these stories. One can only guess that this block
might be a form of unconscious retirement. Maybe it’s time to
give him a gold watch and let him live as fully as he’s written.
No one deserves it more. : The
Laying on of Hands by Alan Bennett, |
