The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [348]
We are never told how Pam discovered her baby was dead, although we see Fred waiting to be tried with the others for the killing, and learn that Len had watched the murder hidden by trees and not intervened to stop it. We then see a scene in which Pam's middle-aged mother is late for a meeting with a friend, but discovers one of her stockings is torn. Len helps to sew it together on her thigh and is so excited by this intimacy that, when she has gone out, he pulls out a handkerchief to masturbate. We then see another scene in the cafe, where Pam and others are waiting for the gang-members on their release from what seems to have been only a very brief spell of imprisonment. The climax comes with a screaming family row in Pam's home, involving herself, her parents and Len, in which, as Len threatens her father Harry with a knife, Pam despairingly wails `all my friends gone. Baby's gone. Nothing left but rows ... the baby's dead. They're all gone ... I can't go on. Afterwards Harry comes up to Len's room. They engage in trivial chat, as if to imply that they have made up their disagreement. Len muses that he may find somewhere else to live.
Even Penelope Gilliatt, a leading `progressive' critic with the Observer, admitted she had found all this hard to stomach:
`I spent a lot of the first act shaking with claustrophobia, and thinking I was going to be sick. The scene where a baby is pelted to death in a pram is nauseating. The swagger of the sex jokes is almost worse....'
In reply, Britain's leading actor Sir Laurence Olivier, now director of the National Theatre, rushed to defend the play, with the claim that Bond `places his act of violence in the first half of the play, just as Shakespeare does in Julius Caesar'. There could have been no clearer measure of just how far contact had now been lost with the psychic roots of storytelling. Firstly Olivier could no longer see that, as a mere `act of violence, there might be any distinction between the assassination of a supposed Tyrant (after the chief assassin has been shown wrestling with his conscience) and the mindless destruction of a baby by a group of young thugs, so demoralised they are scarcely aware of what they have done. Secondly Olivier seemed oblivious to the fact that, after Caesar's murder, Shakespeare devoted the rest of his play to showing how, in accordance with the archetype, there has to be a counterbalancing `act of violence, whereby the murderers pay the price with their own deaths.
Nothing, archetypally, was more chilling about Bond's play than the fact that, after the baby's murder, portrayed in such obsessional detail, so little interest is shown in what happens to its perpetrators, apart from their perfunctory prison sentence. Bond's own comment on his play was that it was `almost irresponsibly optimistic'. Len, as its `chief character', is `naturally good'. By creating in the end `the chance of a friendship with the father', Bond wrote, Len turns what might have been `the tragic Oedipus pattern of the play into `what is formally a comedy'.4 Truly, in this landmark in the history of storytelling, was the `dark inversion' complete.
The limitations of fantasy
In just five short years the great act of `liberation' had been achieved. Niagara has been shot. Anything, it might have seemed, was now possible. But when we look at what this great leap forward actually led to, nothing is more striking about the brave new world storytelling had now entered than how remarkably limited in scope it turned out to be. When storytelling moves into this realm, as we have seen in this chapter, certain themes continually reappear: the sexual act; nudity;