OK, just to be quite upfront, I’ve most-always been a fan of Peter Greenaway’s, since my first viewing of The Falls at the SF Cinematheque, back in the early 80s (ok, I wasn’t that crazy about The Draughtsman’s Contract the first time through, not till I saw some others and “got” the value-added). Even given my expectations, I was fairly gobsmacked by his recent novel, Gold.
People familiar with his films will easily recognize it as being of the same “stuff”: almost immediately, we understand that we are reading a series of short chapters, each of which will tell us something about the gold which went into one of 92 gold bars (of course it’s 92) (which started out as a hundred (of course)) which are found on the back seat of a car abandoned on the last day of the european war in 1945, on the side of a road outside Bolzano, the only town in Italy in which no one can cook a decent plate of spaghetti (a fact with which we will be very, very well acquainted with in the course of 200-odd pages). The stories are told in the BBC-voiceover voice of what we can call “the Tulse Luper films” — The Falls, A Walk Through H, Vertical Features Remake1 — the details calmly, emotionlessly recited, in that friendly yet slightly-ironic I-know-something tone of James Burke drippingly making another “connection” for us.2 Greenaway’s connections, however, are both more obscure and more pungent.
The stories of those gold chains, bracelets, washroom taps, cigarette cases ... they’re all different, but they have a terrible sameness to them too, as they make their way, either individually or in groups or amalgamated into bars, from all over the continent into a vault in Baden-Baden and thence to Bolzano. The ultimate fungibility of gold stands out clearly: it can always be converted into value; but here it works as a reverse Philosopher’s Stone, converting lives into boxes of saltfish and loaves of bread, and passing on, Gold still, to the next transaction. And far from reflecting a “gold standard,” the exchange rate turns out to be extraordinarily fluid ... a bracelet is worth a life at the start of the process, but worth a loaf of bread somewhere in the middle, then a bagfull of dollars ... and in the end worth nothing, because Lt. Harpsch is dead on the road to Bolzano, the gold bars scattered across the back seat of his car.
Cupidity. Death. Futility. Death. Over and over and over.
What develops is an image of the Nazi system as a great black hole in the middle of Europe, inexorably sucking all history, all culture, all life into itself and defecating an endless stream of anonymized golden turds. And on and on goes Greenaway’s voiceover, drawing connections, now piquant, now hilarious, now heartbreaking, as the coincidences become more and more (or less and less) absurd, the “justice” of the outcomes more or less approximate to dream logic, freudian-punning connections ... backing away here and there as if surprised by his own audacity, commenting on it, justifying it ...
As the years go by, objects of domestic usage disappear. Where do they go? Broken, stolen, burnt, lost, sold. At the start of this particular story we had twenty-five Jewish artefacts, the peasants returned fifteen, in the shop in Prague we now have only eight. This is of course only a story and you can please yourself how you organise fictions to suit your intentions, but it is supposed to be a researched fact that after a hundred years only three per cent of all objects manufactured by man survive, and after three hundred years only one percent. It is an interesting but, I suppose, not so surprising a fact, that what has survived a hundred years stands a one in three chance of surviving three hundred. A third of all things survived will go on being survived by a third forever. (p. 90)
Greenaway’s been castigated in the past for his work’s “inhumanity” — think of the reactions to the rape scene in The Baby of Macon, for example. But here, I think, it’s the anaesthetized calm of the authorial voice that makes the tragic moments so unbearable ... because the mechanical quality of the structure and the mechanical quality of the prose echo the absurd mechanical quality of the process of the accumulation of the gold, the massive rationalized industrialism of the Final Solution ... and when the author suddenly shifts and speaks directly to us, it’s like a medium breaking trance ... Certainly Greenaway has always been fascinated with classification systems and game-playing more than with character; but here that urge to order takes on both a narrative purpose and a punishing reflexivity.
If I had a complaint to make, it would be with the production of the book ... do I seem petty to complain here about typos? The book is saturated with misspellings, which is annoying enough in any professionally-produced book, but maddening here, where the voice fetishizes facts, and where there is much subtle play in the slight mangling of those facts: when the crashed Mercedes’ license plate changes numbers in one story, or a gold bar is smelted in August of 1945 (where April would make sense, and August makes no sense at all (since the crash occurs in May)), well, how do we take that then? Dammit.
