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Books and Arts; London fiction
The best of cities, the worst of cities
The capital as inspiration for novelists
London is a “great cesspool” into which the loungers and idlers of life irresistibly drain, wrote Arthur Conan Doyle in one of his Sherlock Holmes stories. But it has proved to be a fertile dumping ground, an inspiration for each generation of novelist and every genre of fiction.
亞瑟·柯南道爾在一集福爾摩斯故事中寫道，倫敦是個(gè)“污水坑”，不可避免地集聚了游手好閑，無所事事的懶漢。但倫敦也是塊相當(dāng)肥沃的垃圾場，每一代小說家，每一種小說體裁都從中汲取著靈感。
The capital's most famous and still unparalleled chronicler is Charles Dickens. His template for the London novel has never dated, flinging together characters from every walk of life into dazzling, swarming, state-of-the city narratives. In his London the rich cannot escape the poor, and the do-gooders and swindlers quaff ale elbow-to-elbow. The inanimate actors are as vivid as the living: the miserable workhouse that harboured Oliver Twist is no less legendary than the poor, begging boy himself or his criminal chum, the Artful Dodger; the “sooty spectre” of fog coloured the capital's image long after the industrial pea-soupers had disappeared.
這座城市最著名且仍罕有匹敵的記錄者當(dāng)屬查爾斯·狄更斯。他為倫敦小說定下的模板至今仍未過時(shí)，各行各業(yè)的角色在其敘述中粉墨登場，眼花繚亂，紛紛攘攘，世態(tài)萬象。在他筆下的倫敦，富貴階級與貧苦人家低頭不見抬頭見，大善人和詐騙犯并肩痛飲麥芽酒。無生命的角色也同有生命的一樣栩栩如生：奧利弗·特弗斯特待過的那家陰暗凄涼的車間，與這個(gè)可憐的小乞兒本身或是他邪惡的朋友亞瑟·道奇比起來，同是一段傳奇；即使工業(yè)時(shí)期的濃霧早已散去，那“幽靈般灰蒙蒙”的霧霾仍籠罩在倫敦的形象周圍，揮之不去。
Few novelists have so successfully managed such vast and varied casts. In contrast, Sherlock Holmes rattled “through the silent streets”; his cases invariably depend on a few players. Yet Conan Doyle did almost as much as Dickens to establish another enduring theme of London-lit: that every character conceals a secret. No wonder the capital is such a popular setting for crime fiction, from Margery Allingham to Ruth Rendell.
少有幾個(gè)小說家像狄更斯這樣，筆下的人物魚龍混雜，截然迥異，處理起來卻依舊得心應(yīng)手。相反，歇洛克·福爾摩斯的車輪轆轆“駛過寂靜的街道”；他的故事里一貫只牽涉寥寥幾個(gè)人物。但柯南道爾同樣確立了倫敦小說另一個(gè)經(jīng)久不衰的主題：人人皆有秘密，就這一點(diǎn)其幾可與狄更斯比肩。難怪從馬杰里·艾林翰到露絲·藍(lán)戴爾的作品，犯罪小說常常以倫敦為背景。
In the early 20th century the city was the backdrop for despair. Virginia Woolf's London in “Mrs Dalloway” (1925) is mournful, offering little succour after the first world war. J.B. Priestley's “Angel Pavement” (1930) offers a latter-day Dickensian tale of cheats, bankruptcy and failed firms. By the 1960s Muriel Spark guided readers through a new metropolis, where women gushed at the thought of sex and film stars, and penned unanswered letters to famous writers. Yet the delights of works such as “The Girls of Slender Means” are overshadowed by the threat of nuclear war.
20世紀(jì)初，這座城市的舞臺上演著絕望。維吉尼亞·伍爾芙《達(dá)洛維夫人》（1925）中的倫敦死氣沉沉，不給一戰(zhàn)結(jié)束后的人們半分慰藉。J.B.普里斯特利的《天使街》（1930）則是近代的狄更斯翻版，講述欺騙，破產(chǎn)和倒閉的公司。20世紀(jì)60年代，穆里爾·斯帕克引領(lǐng)讀者在這座煥然一新的大都市中穿梭，女人一想到性和電影明星便興奮得大呼小叫，還熱衷于給著名作家寄去一封封石沉大海的信件。但在核戰(zhàn)威脅的陰影面前，《窈窕淑女》這類輕快俏皮的小說頓時(shí)黯然失色。
Across the decades the capital has inspired potboilers and sizzling romances, but it was not until the 1980s, when London was booming again, that the city itself returned to centre stage. Martin Amis's “London Fields” (1989) was a triumph, a black comedy about lust and low-lifes that fizzed with a rare energy.
數(shù)十年內(nèi)，圍繞倫敦編就的蹩腳小說層出不窮，風(fēng)流傳奇泛濫成災(zāi)，但倫敦本身真正重回到鎂光燈下，還是在20世紀(jì)80年代這座城市重振旗鼓之后。馬丁·艾米斯的《倫敦場地》（1989）大獲成功，這部黑色幽默敘述著欲望，以及暗潮洶涌的底層生活。
As London has grown in all dimensions, authors have chosen to present a segment of it rather than a Dickensian sweep. The most pioneering modern London novel was Hanif Kureishi's “The Buddha of Suburbia” (1990), set amid one of the many ethnic and immigrant communities that fiction—and many Britons—had ignored for decades. It introduced readers to the city's southern outskirts, and threw in sex, drugs and rock'n'roll.
隨著倫敦全面發(fā)展，作家不再像狄更斯一樣力求面面俱到，而是擇其一二展開闡述。最先鋒的現(xiàn)代小說當(dāng)屬漢尼夫·庫雷什的《郊區(qū)佛陀》（1990），書中的主角是倫敦眾多種族移民群體中的一支，多年來一直為小說界和許多英國人忽略。這部小說引領(lǐng)讀者深入倫敦南郊，其間穿插著性，毒品與搖滾樂。
A new genre was born. The multicultural and dysfunctional families of Zadie Smith's “White Teeth” (2000) brought celebrity to London's lesser-known boroughs. Like Dickens's characters, Ms Smith's are preoccupied with roots—yet class and identity had come to mean something quite different.
一種新的體裁應(yīng)運(yùn)而生。扎迪·史密斯的《白牙》（2000）中分崩離析的多文化家庭使倫敦不為人熟知的街區(qū)出了名。與狄更斯筆下的人物一樣，史密斯女士刻畫的角色也一心牽掛著根系所在——但階級與身份的內(nèi)涵已大相徑庭。
Monica Ali's “Brick Lane” (2003) brilliantly evokes the Bangladeshi community. When her heroine walks down the famous East End street one step behind her husband, she sets the novel's tone in a single scene. A year later London's gay community was given a new voice with Alan Hollinghurst's “The Line of Beauty”, which won the Man Booker prize.
莫妮卡·阿里的《磚巷》（2003）則觸動(dòng)著孟加拉裔群體的心弦。著名的東區(qū)大街上，女主人公落在丈夫后面一步，單這一幕便已奠定了這本小說的基調(diào)。一年后，阿蘭·霍靈赫斯特的《美麗線條》賦予了倫敦的同志群體新的聲音，榮獲曼布克獎(jiǎng)。
The novels of London are now coming full circle, bringing a fuller cast into focus through two modern preoccupations: economic crisis and terrorism. Two recent examples, John Lanchester's “Capital” and Sebastian Faulks's “A Week in December”, fail to define their age as Dickens or Conan Doyle did. But they also point to a new cosmopolitan cesspool, where a similar set of worries beset every strata of society, uniting and dividing it along new lines.
如今，倫敦小說又再次回到原點(diǎn)，借由當(dāng)代兩大憂患——經(jīng)濟(jì)危機(jī)與恐怖主義，拓寬視角，聚焦于方方面面。以最近的兩本小說為例，約翰·蘭徹斯特的《首都》和塞巴斯蒂安·福克斯的《十二月的一周》未能像狄更斯或柯南道爾的作品那樣，成為一個(gè)時(shí)代的印記。但它們也展現(xiàn)了一個(gè)新的大都市版“污水坑”，同樣有無盡煩惱糾纏著各個(gè)社會(huì)階層，令他們在新的戰(zhàn)線上分分合合。
