September 2013 Issue
The House of JournalistsTim FinchFSG, 2013The crippled Stanley Stanislaus, “all stunted hump and stoop and stump and spindle,” was once a well-meaning liberal reporter arrested one of the paranoid round-ups of a corrupt regime. He didn’t despise the regime, didn’t try to see them overturned; he just wanted to gently nudge them toward reform. He was imprisoned, tortured; his hands were destroyed. He could write no more and his mother, from the shock of it, “was dead within a week; Mr. Stan’s resistance, so spirited until then, was broken.” Now Mr. Stan can hold nothing heavier than a sher bidi cigarette, which he smokes with great pleasure in the courtyard of the House of Journalists.Alongside him smokes Agnes, the young photographer who sold one too many images abroad of the government-sponsored murders in her own unnamed country and so was forced to seek safety in England. Also present is Adom, a former headmaster in a country very like Rwanda. He too had to flee, likewise Mustapha, Marie-Antoinette, and the others who come and go through Tim Finch’s debut novel, an investigation into what comes of reporting atrocities, the uneasiness all of governments in the face of dissent, and the impossibility of finding home away from home.A London townhouse built sometime in the 18h century, the House of Journalists is a kind of transitional safe space where persecuted writers can live (pending their asylum hearings) and where their stories, the horrors they have survived, can be collected. While other hopeful émigrés wait in holding centers, glorified refugee camps, the poets, journalists, and photographers at the House are given three good meals a day, a comfortable room, a little pocket money, and permission to visit the city. Outside contacts are possible but not encouraged. Classes are offered daily, not only in English but in composition. The center aims to nurture and collect the atrocity stories of its residents and to share them with the outside world, open its eyes. Now perhaps some of the residents’ writing teachers are looking to use those stories to make their own names one day, and yes, of course, for every writer welcomed warmly to the center, a center which helps England to burnish its open-armed and warm-hearted reputation, another twenty or hundred languish in a displaced persons facility, all but forgotten. But the House is there, at least, to bear witness to global suffering, and to this end it operates a library of refugee studies as well, broadcasts radio programs, holds talks.It’s at one of these talks, given by a Nobel laureate, that the plot, such as it is, commences. The laureate in question is a peevish gadfly of the Harold Pinter variety with the Dickensian name of Edward Crumb. Crumb grumbles through a speech that’s full of praise for the displaced writers but just as full of scorn for His Majesty’s government. (Yes, His Majesty. The House of Journalists is set in a sort of parallel London where a king sits on the throne and Labour seems to be back in charge. I assume Finch’s aim here is a gentle defamiliarization, and it works well enough).
[The House of Journalists] does good work, no doubt, but it doesn’t fool anyone. This country betrays most people who come here looking for shelter. It always has. Our tradition of providing sanctuary to the persecuted and oppressed is a nasty, self-regarding sentimental myth …
Julian Snowman, chairman of the house, is ill at ease with this outburst, since several important funders, government representatives among them, are in attendance. No institution that accepts public funds can ever free itself of politics, and so Julian makes it his mission to stop Edward Crumb from learning anything else about the House or God forbid from writing anything. And so begins his psychological unraveling alongside the further rise and—it is hinted—eventual fall of the House.“You should come under no illusions about this place,” one character observes, “this is not where it all comes right.” London is a former seat of empire, and responsible—directly or otherwise—for much of the suffering its new guests have escaped. “If scaffolding and plastic sheeting were put up, and high-powered jets of water pounded at the façade of the house, the cobblestoned street would run rivers of blood. In truth, what country could tell a different story?”To what extent can this useful and goodhearted place keep from tearing itself apart through its own contradictions? Everyone here is a victim, yes, but were some aggressors too? Did Adom casually doom a whole school full of students in an attempt to save his own hide? To what extent was Agnes, whose blood-drenched poems the house flogs at fundraisers, complicit in the atrocities committed by her lover’s guerilla group? Who have all these people betrayed to be here?And how are they betrayed by the house in turn, and the government that supports it? Are they stooges, whitewashing Whitehall? Are the volunteers and the educators who work there using the house for their own ends?There are no answers in The House of Journalists. There is very little action, either. This is a story of rumination, of weighing one consideration against another: officialese wrestling with its own humanity.Take the following, where Julian ponders how to stop Edward Crumb from publishing anything critical of the house. Wasn’t Crumb seen talking with a resident named AA in the courtyard? Julian can’t discourage contact between residents of the house and outsiders—he has no desire to! But anything AA told Crumb wouldn’t be intended for the wider public. Julian can’t use force to stop Crumb from publishing something critical, of course, or from speaking out—and he wouldn’t dream of it. But might Crumb be subtly discouraged in some way? Dissuaded?
Yes, dissuaded perhaps is perhaps what he is trying to say [...] Because of course Crumb is perfectly free to write a story about the House of Journalists. Any sort of story he likes. Though Crumb should be warned that if he and his ally (and that’s not to say AA is his ally; that is certainly not proven) are intent on destroying the reputation of the House of Journalists they will find that the House of Journalists is ready to protect itself. For although the House of Journalists is strong, any institution, however strong, needs to be protected against those who would destroy it and all its good work, even if it and all its good work can not be destroyed. The arguments are indeed complex. The long and short of it, however, is that Ted Crumb needs to be stopped—or if not stopped … dissuaded.
The prose in House of Journalists, when it doesn’t fall over itself, advances in small, checked steps, careful as a politician speaking in public.Sometimes characters do their hemming and hawing in the midst of another’s dialogue. This is typographically represented by parentheticals and it slows the reader even further. Here Miriam Stern, a major funder of the House, listens to a government minister she has recently met at Crumb’s talk being interviewed on the radio about the visit. Is he opportunistic?
You read … (she could imagine the minister saying) … into my words … (his warm dead hand in her hand) … a construction that is … (the icy warmth of his smile up close) … if I may say so … (smile over) … your own.The warmth the minister gave out seemed to be carefully calibrated—as if, like a reptile, he was controlling his body temperature. (She might be a constituent; she was certainly a voter).
For those not counting, this is four kinds of slowing the story down: recollection (or foreboding) in place of action, a repeated intrusion in the free flow of thought, thought itself that interrupts itself (“if I may say so”), and redundancy: the exchange could have been cut without affecting the pace of the narrative in the slightest. It makes Beckett read like Simenon.To pile on: the countries these refugees are driven from are never named or described with specificity. Presumably, this is to make them more real to us. The opposite occurs, as it nearly always does when this strategy is deployed. If I say “picture a street in New Orleans” you’ve got something. If I say “picture a street in a major American city” you’ve got nothing. So it is with not-Congo and not-Iran in House of Journalists.Still, Finch is to be praised for the ambitious manner in which the novel is narrated: a collective 1st, which allows individual voices to occasionally emerge into a singular 1st before they are subsumed again, like arms which flail before they vanish underwater. This enforces the impersonal nature of the House, the uncomfortable way the stories blend into a single outrage: details blur, and so with identities. Yes, this succumbs to the imitative fallacy—that embodying what you describe helps you to better describe it (e.g. if you’re describing something dull, be dull), but it does so flexibly, and with the ability to surprise. One moment the collective we is a group of the writers themselves, voices deep with irony (“We have experienced so much. It is as if we have experienced it for [our listeners]. How profoundly we have touched them. We are such moving characters”—here Finch attempts to return the humanity to individual voices by absconding with it), in the next moment:
We, the public, call you up, you shock jocks and phone-in hosts, to complain that while we are happy to welcome genuine refugees, we do not see why we should take in Somalis fleeing from the social security system in Holland or Togolese, Burkinabés, and Guine-Bissuans, who prefer our bleak shores to the sun-kissed beaches of the Canaries or Lampedusa; or every con man, abuser, chancer, and no-hoper; every luckless and reckless bastard that ever gave up on his or her country. Honestly, you could not make it up.
Being everyone, it sounds like no one.In the end, the reader is unsure whether Finch has arrived to praise the refugees or to damn them. The House of Journalists is a politically correct institution, and so its residents are circumscribed. Working with one of his writing teachers, Atom, the former schoolmaster thinks to himself the words, “God forgive me but I would possess you this very minute if it was the custom of this place, which it is not.” It seems he used to take advantage of all of the female staff in the school he ran, “They gave themselves up to me because I was in a position of authority over them.” Although he cannot admit this here, Adom, these days prefers
to be among white people. I find them more civilized—even the lower classes and the petty officials. I know that the white races are capable of great cruelty and violence. This is their—and our—history. But the greater nature of the white man’s violence earns its own respect. It is a violence for a point and to an end. The fact is that is serves their interests successfully.
Finch here works against the humanitarian current in which he has set his own story afloat: we are exhorted to respect Adom’s suffering, and yet we cannot respect him as a man. We are moved to admire the House of Journalists, yet we clearly see how it’s being used—Crumb is right—as PC a cover for a government that could be doing much better. As readers, we long to hear each individual story, to understand when it happened, why it happened, and how bad it got. Our punishment here is our reward.And this is the book’s conundrum, intentional and otherwise: how to co-opt the readers you’re accusing of complacency, how to make your characters both anonymous and sympathetic, and how to make a bold plot from a story that’s composed of naught but nuance. That House of Journalists succeeds in part speaks highly of Finch’s ability. But too often it gets lost in its own muddle, and while this may be evidence of Finch’s high-art ambition, it also reflects on his ability as a storyteller. He has received praise overseas for his good political intentions, and it seems only fair to praise him for his stylistic daring too. If this novel does not, in the end, work as fiction, it was at least worth trying. He is a writer who knows the world and wants to tell us all about it; we can hope he’ll try again.____John Cotter is a founding editor at Open Letters Monthly. His criticism has appeared in The Quarterly Conversation, Sculpture, and Bookforum. Under the Small Lights, his first novel, is available from Miami University Press.