Alex Clark
THE HOURS by Michael Cunningham (Fourth Estate)
Michael Cunningham’s new novel – winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction -may have been inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (working title: The Hours) but it quickly slips free of these moorings to become a far more daring, imaginative project than might be implied by the idea of an updated “classic”. And for all its parallels with Woolf’s novel, and its shared preoccupation with the consonance and dissonance between society and the chaotic life of the interior, it successfully establishes itself as its own novel, with a distinctive sensibility, cast of characters and story, or stories, to tell.
Just as Clarissa Dalloway steps out into 1920s London’s busy and various life to buy flowers for her party, so Clarissa Vaughan drinks in the street-life of New York at the end of the century, on an identical errand. Her party, however, is being thrown in honour of her lifelong friend Richard Brown, a poet who has just won a literary prize, and who is also in the final stages of Aids.
Between them lies his last book, a mammoth, unreadable novel, which includes in it a portrait of their complicated, meandering relationship. But also coming between them is the matter of life and death, Clarissa still yearning for her own life and the lives around her to continue, Richard already claimed by death, with its “very beautiful and quite terrible” voices.
These mental torments are strengthened by the allusions to Mrs Dalloway. While Woolf has Septimus Smith’s mind wrecked by shellshock, Richard Brown’s is “eaten into lace by the virus”; both of them hear voices, twittering away in Greek, and both of them search desperately for some truth that lies beneath this surface madness.
Clarissa’s is just one story in The Hours, which skips between three narratives. Another involves Laura Brown, a housewife struggling to maintain control of her sanity in “the rescued world” of Los Angeles in 1949, and tempted constantly away from duty towards the freedom, the irresponsibility and the apparent yielding of self represented by reading her book – Mrs Dalloway.
Laura is also preparing for a party, to celebrate her husband’s birthday, and for which she has to cope with the desperate, insatiable love of her son. The horror with which she contemplates her life – in stark contrast to the emboldened, optimistic and unquestioning happiness of her husband, who has returned from the war a hero – echoes that of the novel’s third protagonist: Virginia Woolf herself.
To picture Woolf in her exile in Richmond, watched over oppressively by her husband Leonard and desperate to escape to the life of Bloomsbury, is an audacious move, and one that doesn’t always work. The details of the couple’s domestic life, and the workings of the Hogarth Press, for example, often seem dangerously under-realised.
None the less Woolf’s presence in The Hours is a positive one, giving shape to Laura’s stricken flights from domesticity and context to Clarissa’s delighted, if exhausted, dependence on it. As Woolf broods on whether to have Mrs Dalloway live or die, that question hangs over all the characters, who face the choice of whether, and how, to join the ebb and flow of life. Cunningham’s triumph, like Woolf’s, is to demonstrate how much that choice depends on the events of a lifetime, rather than the single day that the novelist decides to show us.