Towards the End of Time, by John Updike, Hamish Hamilton, 334pp, £16.99 in UK
A glance at the bookshelves reveals the vastness of the canon of work which is the literary achievement to date of John Updike. He has conquered the combined territories of sex and religion in works such as A Month of Sundays (1975) and his superb Roger's Version (1986), made a masterly study of marriage and adultery in Couples (1968), described the hilarious yet poignant battle with death which overshadows Rabbit At Rest (1990)- and this is not to mention his many miraculous short stories - so that one might wonder what remains for him to say. But Updike is an inventive, coolly philosophical artist - if a mite hyperactive - and his eighteenth novel, Toward the End of Time, combines linguistic brilliance, pathos, whimsy and an eccentric viewpoint, as only he can.
Retirement for Ben Turnbull means living with a wife "now more of a disciplinarian than a comfort" who has come to resent the messiness of his ageing. Their reduced relationship is described with a wry regret often bordering on the vaudevillian. Once his adoring mistress, Gloria has become an obsessive; her world depends on order and that order includes the destruction of the hungry deer currently menacing their garden. According to Ben, his wife is waiting for his death and "the end of her captivity". For him the world is a myriad of sensations: smells, desires, textures, fear. From the opening paragraph - "First snow: it came this year late in November . . . I looked into myself for a trace of childhood exhilaration at the sight and found none. . ." - Updike sets the tone of muted regret which dominates Ben's musings.
Set in Massachusetts in the year 2020, the novel is a somewhat chaotic store of riches which survives its strange, Walter-Mittyish digressions. Ben's wife continues to plot the capture of the deer before she abruptly, if briefly, disappears. She is replaced by a wanton young hooker named Deirdre, and for a moment it seems the girl may be merely the deer in a suitably-named human form. Ben and his "drug-raddled consort" grapple for supremacy in crudely hostile sexual encounters shaped more by combat than the dictates of romance. Yet descriptions of the girl's body show Updike's prose in characteristically opulent lyricism. His tenderly erotic celebrations of skin, its beauty and its vulnerabilities, have long been a feature of his work. The girl's flawless physical beauty counters the gradual disintegration of Ben's tough old hide. When she leaves, he mourns her loss with a delicacy which he later displays in a gentle interlude with a still younger girl.
Through asides, a picture of a war-devastated United States gradually emerges. A major Sino-American conflict has left America in upheaval: government has collapsed - "with the plains a radioactive dustbowl, decimated Mid-Western cities have been living on truckloads of New England mussels and apples from New York State" - while privileged survivors such as Ben are now forced to pay thugs for protection. There is a contrasting sense of wasteland and wealth as Ben alternates between luxuriating in the beauty of nature and commenting at a distance on his shattered society. The ruin which most preoccupies him, however, is his own.
Sexual performance dominates his trysts with the girl who moves in - and quickly reveals her flair for theft. A queasy mortality has always undercut Updike's sex sequences, even at their most comic. In Roger's Version the narrator remarks of sex: "It's a grand surprise nature has cooked up for us, love with its accelerated pulse rate and its drastic overestimation of the love object, its rhythmic build-up and discharge; but then that's it, there isn't another such treat life can offer, unless you count contract bridge and death." For Updike, sex has always been the ultimate expression of the fear of dying, nowhere more so than in this latest novel.
Ben continues with his tale, taking time out for a spell as an Egyptian grave robber. Perhaps this is intended as a metaphor for theft, of which there is a great deal in the book. Above all, Updike appears to be saying that time is a thief, robbing us all. But as with subsequent plot digressions involving a sidekick of St Paul, a Gestapo officer, and a medieval monk on Skellig Michael, the reader finds herself waiting impatiently for Ben to return to his reflections. With the arrival of spring, nature speeds up outside Ben's window and stimulates his memory into a pattern of time shifts. Intensely conscious of his grandchildren, Ben recalls his former self, father of five and partner of his first wife, Perdita: "Her feet were exquisite, now that I think about them - the pads of the soles thick and rounded, the little toes lifted off the ground and clearly vestigial."
Returning to his former life reminds him of a doll's house he once attempted - and failed - to build for his daughter; he bought one instead. "This period of my children's childhoods seems as I look back upon it one great loss and waste, through my distraction. I gave them shelter and went through the motions but I remember mostly sorrow - broken bones, dead gerbils and dogs, little round faces wet with tears, a sickening river of junk food, and their sad attempt, all five of them before they passed into the secrecy of adolescence, to call me out of myself into the sunshine of their love."
Juxtaposed with Ben's gentle, rueful visitations to his former life and his current awareness of his various grandchildren and of Gloria's militaristic domesticity, are his hilarious confrontations with the various crooks vying for protection money, at the de luxe rate. These debates are couched in varying levels of logic and menace. "Spin and Phil, the collectors for the local crime overlords came up to the house for their monthly instalment . . . Spin is natty, with a red-and-gray bushy mustache, a toothpick he rolls around in his mouth, and a nice tidy way of expressing himself, like an old-style movie actor." When he asks what he is paying for, he is informed: "Mr Turnbull, what you get is active consideration, not just passive. With the deluxe, anybody gives you trouble, anybody, we come after them. With the straight, you get no hassle from us, but if anybody else gets on your case, you're on your own. Can you follow that?"
Ben is an interesting character, as vulnerable as he is ironic. Although he is preoccupied with his own declining sexuality, illness, strained relationships and death, his observations on life, nature, women, beauty and its passing, the minefield of male/female relations, the nature of history and of love, all serve to make him not only one of Updike's most likeable creations but also a fitting spokesman for the author; even at his most cleverly knowing, Updike has never been a spiteful writer.
This discursive meditation, for all its U-turns, represents his best work since Roger's Version and Rabbit at Rest. Far more than a showcase for glorious prose, it also conveys the sense of a writer summing up his life and work.