THE FALL
Simon Mawer
A critical paper by
Clyde J. Henry
“There have been joys too great to be described in words, and there have been griefs upon which I have not dared to dwell; and with these in mind I say: Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are naught without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Look well to each step and from the beginning think what may be the end.
From In the Death Zone, James Matthewson
Non-Linear Time / Thematic Implications
Marietta College instructor Joseph Sullivan says the following about Mawer’s narrative structure in The Fall : “What is most striking about Mawer’s narrative terrain is that while he puts the parts of his story in a comprehensible nonlinear order, there does not seem to be a necessity to the plot’s exact sequence. One could imagine a number of alternative arrangements that would have made just as much sense.” (News World Communications, Inc.)
From this reader’s perspective I would rather ask a more open-ended question: Why these particular narrative divisions? What logic seems to govern their placement? The opening segment called The Fall chronicles Jamie’s death in Wales at age 52. It is the catalyst, the jump-start of the narrative for the reader, and the primary reason for Rob Dewar’s journey to Wales, a journey through memory, and to discovery. If my accounting is correct, Rob was born in 1945, placing the time of his early adolescence and that of Jamie’s in the mid-fifties. That places the opening of the book, with Jamie’s death in the mid-nineties.
We are drawn into Rob’s tale with ease and cunning. It’s logical for Rob to recall his long and intense friendship with Jamie, which he tells us began forty years earlier, prior to the latter’s death. The narrative of their meeting fills Part One: Rob is 11 and Jamie 13. A this time, their friendship is cemented through adolescent play, longing, and mishap. A few years pass, and when Rob is 16, he travels to Jamie’s home, Gilead House, to renew his friendship. There, in a subtle web of her making, he finds himself seduced by Jamie’s mother, Meg. It’s a fairly intense and indelible experience.
As Guy Matthewson is the causal agent in reviving memory through his death, we want to know more about him, and therefore it’s appropriate to establish his early life in Part Two, North Wales 1940. Rather than begin with his first wife or his second (Margaret ‘Meg’ York), we are invited by the voice of a third person narrator who elaborates on Guy’s encounter with and deep love for Diana Sheridan. At this time in the narrative, Rob Dewar is exempt from that knowledge and will remain so for much of the rest of the novel. What fun for us the reader to have this tangible piece of the past, which our first person narrator does not have, as yet!
In Part Three we pick up the threads of Rob Dewar’s first person memory in London at the City Climbing Club and also a time when Jamie Matthewson is pursuing a master’s degree at the London School of Economics. Again, we have a perfectly understandable accounting of the past and both young men’s serious link to mountain climbing. Significantly, we have an explicit statement of time: Guy Matthewson’s body has been found, frozen upright, in Tibet. Jamie tells us that he died in 1954, and Eve (Rob’s wife) wryly comments, “Who the hell wants to be freeze-dried at age forty-five?” Regardless of Eve’s assessment that climbing is a “f… silly pastime,” the males reunite for just that purpose. Added to the mix is the addition of Ruth Phoenix, a hard-edged liberal artist of her day who loves them both, and who makes love to them both, although it’s supposedly ‘their intimate secret’ that Rob and Ruth have slept together.
Guy’s death brings further revelation in his Journal of 1939 in which he outlines his hopes and plans for climbing the Eiger in the Swiss Alps a year later. Jamie Matthewson takes up the challenge to complete the trip as soon as he can mount a trip, which he will do in Part Five. Still tracking the rationale for the sequencing of chapters, the question becomes why should Part Four be set in London 1940 as opposed to the more expected climb of the Eiger by Jamie and Rob. Why return to London past? One could argue that there is an untold tale yet to tell: Diana’s pregnancy against the background of the Blitz of London, her decision to put an end to her relationship with Guy Matthewson from shame and regret. There’s after all, the existence of an impediment – Guy’s marriage to a German wife and the disclosure of his daughter, both alive and living in Nazi Germany. Diana, acting on her resolve, decides on an abortion, and after seeking a legal remedy, resorts to a seedy one on top a table.
Part Five makes perfect sense in the sequence. It’s the trip of Jamie’s life, the dream of his father’s, the making of himself as superb climber. Given the opening description of their battered old camper, “a ‘Ban the Bomb’ sign on the back and the slogan ‘Make Love Not War’ across the front, and flowers painted along the sides,” my guess is that we are in the late 60’s. This chapter marks a number of significant turns in the lives of Ruth, Rob, and Jamie. In the ecstasy of their youthful strength, desire for one another, and the moment, they culminate their desire in a ménage à trios, rather tastefully described by Mawer. But there are complications. “The next morning no one said anything. It was the silence after the fall … [They] had eaten the fruit of a particular species of the tree of knowledge, a rare and exotic species, one that is almost certainly poisonous.” In retrospect, Rob remarks, “We wouldn’t get away unscathed.” Ruth, the strongest of them asks, “So what about us? Where do we go from here? I want you both; I love you both, and you both love me and you love each other. Can’t we leave it at that?”
That question is answered in the negative on the lone North Face of Eiger, when Jamie asks, “And what about her? Are you in love with her?” His jealousy is raw and makes him reveal that he knows about Rob and his mother: “I was jealous of both of you, jealous that you had both been closer to each other than I ever could be. And now Ruth. Now I’m expected to share Ruth with you. First you take my mother, and now you’re taking Ruth.” So, in that bivouac site, the Swallow’s Nest, thousands of feet above the valley, they confront each other’s love for the same woman and indirectly for each other. That tension in their lives drives a considerable portion of the novel and to the writer’s credit, he quite appropriately keeps it front and center.
On they go, and after climbing another entire day, they find themselves at Death Bivouac, and only two-thirds of the way up the Face. We recall the second physical fall in the narrative – this time, it’s Rob Dewar who when he stopped falling, “was hanging upside down with my face against the rock. … I was clearly and somehow not unexpectedly, alive.” Pulled to safety and left on a ledge, Jamie goes for help. Which way? Up the Eiger to the summit, then down the easier West Face. After the fall, a new knowledge emerges in Rob’s mind, a knowledge that he was abandoned so that the route could be completed. And between the friends, “there was nothing there any longer, no shared laughter, no shared affection.” Each of them knew that “some bond that had held them together as a trio, had snapped. Like a rope.”
Part Six returns London, and we are again in the hands of the third person narrator. The year is 1945. Of all the novel’s divisions, shouldn’t this one follow “London, 1940” and make a paring of Guy with Diana, Guy without Diana, and Guy with Meg. I have as yet no ‘answer’ to this inquiry, other than to note that it has made some critic’s say that the revelations thus separated “add to the satisfaction of enjoying the intensity of the relationships and the playing out of the underlying story.” In other words, having all that there is to have in this novel is best meted out in small doses, in small revelations. At the closing of this section, we seem to have all the major narrative threads of the novel in place.
But, do we? In Part Seven, the finale, we greet the not-so-surprising announcement of Jamie’s marriage to Ruth – well, after all, he did win her in the toss. It’s probably the very early 70’s. Rob finds his own place professionally and personally. Eve preserves Rob’s life, as she likes to say, and the Porteus Fine Art business flourishes throughout the 70’s and the 80’s. In observing the rapid passage of time, Rob wonders about the relationship between time and acceleration and compares it to an incline. “For the first few decades, you are merely slithering down an incline, like kids playing around a slope, laughing and joking. But, like life itself, the farther you go, the steeper it gets. You don’t have ice axes, and you aren’t wearing crampons. It isn’t fun at all. At the bottom, a cliff is waiting for you.”
It’s some twenty years after the climb to the Eiger, and at the end of Rob’s cliff is a business relationship with Ruth. It’s also his final encounter with Jamie, whose obsession with climbing has become all consuming, and perhaps an escape: “I think climbing is a substitute for feeling,” says Ruth about Jamie. “It’s an evasion. That’s what I think.” True to form, Ruth’s sense of things turns out to be quite accurate. When Rob runs into Jamie at a book signing for In the Death Zone, they meet afterwards and look back to that climb on the Eiger. Jamie confirms that his whole life has been an escape: “Escape from Guy Matthewson, from my mother, but above all”—he nodded, as though the idea had just occurred to him – “from you.” For Rob, it was as if the whole of his friendship (hero worship) was illuminated in a different light, the whole of his friendship rendered in different shades, new colors. And so it was. But, then again, they never saw each other after that last conversation.
The novel closes where it began, with a court hearing to determine the cause of Jamie Matthewson’s death. Ruled “death by misadventure” the novel seems to have come full circle to where it began with the news of his fall. And yet, there is one more fall to experience in the form of a letter from Guy Matthewson that Ruth has found among his things: “There was no address, just the name written in smudged ballpoint pen: Mrs. Diana Dewar.” At seeing this letter, Rob observes: “I had the feeling that things were running out of control. Like falling.”
The letter, found on Guy’s body and written in 1954, was Guy’s last message to the living. In it he reveals that Jamie might not be his son, that “my loyalties must now be to you and to our son.” And finally, “Will you accept me? Will you wait for me? Will you accept all of my love, divided only between you and our son, forever?” It’s the final fall for Rob, and a brilliant ending to an adventure and an exploration into the nature of what it means to live and love.
Guy Matthewson has known three women in his life – his German wife, the young nineteen year old Diana, and eventually his second wife, Meg. Jamie has known and then married Ruth, and shared an intimate friendship with Rob. In turn, Rob has not only slept Ruth, but also with Jamie’s mother, Meg. Eve is singularly unswayed by desire: she has one husband, Rob, and two children. Diana, divorced, childless in her first marriage, carries her second child, Rob, conceived outside of marriage to full term.
We like Diana perhaps of all the women because her plight is so genuine, her character so likable, her life so vulnerable. That she can rekindle her love with Guy, only briefly, is quite satisfying. We like lost causes that are not so very lost in the end. Ruth, we admire for her sexuality, her independence, intelligence, and equanimity in light of the men she has fallen in love with – neither is truly hers in the end. Eve is the least visible female character, seemingly there to round out the cycle of marriage and give Rob a center of normalcy. Her practicality, in light of her husband’s predilections for error and mishap, marks her as steadfast and knowing. She is the stable core of that marriage and shouldn’t be undersold. Meg is feisty, tough, highly charged, predatory: she is perhaps the least likeable character. We suspect her of capturing Guy and in some twisted, inexplicable way evening out the score in competitive drive with Diana, who had him first.
Alan, the Scottish M.D., is perhaps the most sympathetic character. His natural affection for Diana and his need to protect her speak to the more admirable traits of human nature. One can only wonder that his divorce from Diana, as a result of his wife’s pregnancy, struck him deeply. And yet, he had the magnanimity to embrace the son that wasn’t to spare Rob from knowing more than what would have been comforting to both.
Rob for me is more enigmatic. He seems weightless, moved by circumstances rather than by intention. Unguided by a moral compass, he is led by others, and not always to the best of places. I don’t know if he ever loved anyone, even though he was loved. He fails to understand himself, his action, and his life. Perhaps, that’s what makes him an ideal narrator: he’s as close as we come to a disinterested observer and therefore we can trust what he sees and does as a reliable portrayal of events. His minimal authorial commentary challenges us as readers to put the pieces together. But when he does comment on his life, we might want to listen. Reflecting on the unraveling of the untold truths of the past, he coldly observes: “But consider how many relationships survive sewn together with tacit complicity and mutual deception. It’s the cold light of discovery that’s so dangerous. Better to live with the lies” (170).
Happily for us as Novel Club readers, “the cold light of discover” makes for compelling reading and I hope, equally simulating discussion.
Simon Mawer tells us the following in the ‘Acknowledgments’: Information about climbing in the 1940’s came from various sources such as Colin Kirkus’s Let’s Go Climbing! (1941), Eiger: The Vertical Arena (2000) and Harrer’s The White Spider (1959).
For London during the Blitz, he used a number of eyewitness accounts, such as Raider’s Overhead (1943), Westminster in War (1947), and The Forgotten Service (1999), which documents in photograph and diary, the experiences of an ambulance unit during the Blitz.
Critic’s Corner
From The Washington Post (January 26, 2003):
“The books plot simmers with abandoned youthful friendship and slightly sordid love affairs, employing mountaineering and memory as its controlling metaphors. Simon Mawer complicates matters further by slicing up linear time and shuffling narrative voice. Somewhat less intentionally, The Fall also divides and juggles the reader’s sympathies. The novel’s lurches into botched sensuality and gratuitous twists leave the reader pitying Mawer’s unsteady grip on human nature – and lay bare a hollowness at the heart of the novel.”
From The Age (March 9, 2003)
“The Fall is an expertly crafted, thoroughly entertaining two-generation saga. Mawer writes with a cinematic eye, investing every scene with compelling detail and illuminating his characters’ complex interior landscapes as convincingly as he renders the natural world. Like its predecessors the novel delves deeply into its subject matter, developing the dramatic and metaphorical possibilities to impressive effect. The result is a powerful tale of people confronting the natural world and their own tangled histories.”
Questions for Discussion
Source: http://www.thenovelclub.org/papers/fall0407.doc
Web site to visit: http://www.thenovelclub.org/
Author of the text: indicated on the source document of the above text
If you are the author of the text above and you not agree to share your knowledge for teaching, research, scholarship (for fair use as indicated in the United States copyrigh low) please send us an e-mail and we will remove your text quickly. Fair use is a limitation and exception to the exclusive right granted by copyright law to the author of a creative work. In United States copyright law, fair use is a doctrine that permits limited use of copyrighted material without acquiring permission from the rights holders. Examples of fair use include commentary, search engines, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching, library archiving and scholarship. It provides for the legal, unlicensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author's work under a four-factor balancing test. (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use)
The information of medicine and health contained in the site are of a general nature and purpose which is purely informative and for this reason may not replace in any case, the council of a doctor or a qualified entity legally to the profession.
The texts are the property of their respective authors and we thank them for giving us the opportunity to share for free to students, teachers and users of the Web their texts will used only for illustrative educational and scientific purposes only.
All the information in our site are given for nonprofit educational purposes