Средства создания образов героев в романе Дэвида Лоджа «Хорошая работа»

⁸ p. 39 ... let us ... meet a different character. A character who, rather awkwardly for me, doesn’t herself beleieve in the concept of character. That is to say (a favourite phrase of her own), Robyn Penrose, Temporary Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Rummidge, holds that ‘character’ is a burgeois myth, an illusion created to reinforce the ideology of capitalism.

⁹ p.44 she is tall and womanly in shape, slender of waist, with smallish round breasts, heavier about the hips and buttocks.

¹⁰ p.49 She sits at her dressing-table and vigorously brushes her hair, a mop of copper-coloured curls, natural curls, as tight and springy as coiled steel. Some would say her hair is her finest feature, though Robyn herself secretely hankers after something more muted and malleable, hair that could be groomed and styled according to mood – drawn back in a severe bun like Simone de Beauvoir’s, or allowed to fall to the shoulders in a Pre-Raphaelite cloud. As it is, there is not much she can do with her curls except, every now and again, crop them brutally short just to demonstrate how inadequately they represent her character. Her face is comely enough to take short hair, though perfectioniss might say that the grey-green eyes are a little close-set, and the nose and chin are a centimetre longer than Robin herself would have wished. Now she rubs moisturizer into her facial skin as protection against the raw wintry air outside, coats her lips with lip-salve, and brushes some green eyeshadow on her eyelids. Her simple cosmetic operations completed, she dresses herself in opaque green tights, a wide brown tweed skirt and a thick sweater lossely knitted in muted shades of orange, green and brown. Robyn generally favours loose dark clothes, made of natural fibres, that do not make her body into an object od sexual attention. The way they are cut also disguises her smallish breasts and widish hips while making the most of her height: thus are ideology and vanity equally satisfied. She contemplates her image in the long looking-glass by the window, and decides that the effect is a little too sombre. She rummages in her jewelry box where brooches, necklaces and earrings are jumbled together with enamel lapel badges expressing support for various radical causes – Support the Miners, Crusade for Jobs, A Wooman’s Right To Choose – and selects a silver brooch in which the CND symbol and the Yin sign are artfully entwined.

¹¹ p. 377 It is a calm, sunny morning, without a cloud in the sky – one of those rare days when the atmosphere of Rummidge seems to have been rinsed clean of all its pollution, and the objects of vision stand out with pristine clarity. Robyn, wearing a cotton button-through dress and sandals, steps out of her house into the warm, limpid air and pauses a moment, looking up and down the street, filling her lungs as joyfully as if it were a beach.

Her dusty, dented Renault creaks on its springs as she throws her Gladstone bag on to the passenger seat and gets behind the wheel. The engine wheezes asthmatically for several seconds before it coughs into life. It crosses her mind, with a little acquisitive thrill, that very soon she will be able to swap the Renault for a brand-new car, something swish and powerful. She could put Basil’s nose out of joint by buying a Porsche. No, not a Porsche, she thinks, remembering Vic’s homily about foreign cars. A Lotus, perhaps, except that you can hardly get into them in a skirt. Then she thinks, how absurd, the Renault is perfectly adequate for my purposes, all it needs is a new battery.

Robyn drives slowly and carefully to the University. She is so conscious of carrying a precious freight of good fortune that she has an almost superstitious fear that some maniac driver will come tearing out of a side turning a smash it all to smithereens. But she reaches the campus without incident. Passing the Wilcoxes’ house in Avondale Road, glimpsing a hand, perhaps Marjorie’s, shaking a duster from an upstairs window, she wonders idly why Vic was called away so suddenly from the University the day before, and why he did not return. She parks her car under a lime tree – the space is vacant because other drivers avoid the sticky gum that drops from its branches, but Robyn rather likes the patina it imparts to the Renault’s faded paintwork – and carries her Gladstone bag to the Arts Faculty building. The sun shines warmly on the red brick and glints on the shiny new ivy leaves. A faint breath of steam rises from the drying lawns. Robyn walks with a blithe, springy gait, swinging her Gladstone bag (lighter than it was in January, for examinations are about to begin, and her teaching load is tailing off, smiling and greeting the colleagues and students that she recognizes in the lobby, on the stairs, on the landing of the English Department.

¹² p.59 So these are the things that are worrying Robyn Penrose as she drives through the gates of the University ... her lecture on the Industrial Novel, her job future, and her relationship with Charles – in that order of conspicuousness rather than importance. Indeed, her uneasiness about Charles scarcely counts as a consious worry at all...

¹³ p.77 Robyn pauses, to allow the racing pens to catch up with her discourse ... the students who have been writing everything down now look up and smile wryly at Robyn Penrose, like victims of a successful hoax. They lay down their pens and flex their fingers, as she pauses and shuffles her notes preparatory to the next stage of her exposion.

¹⁴ p. 379-382 As usual, there is somebody waiting to see her, standing by her door. When she gets closer she sees that it is Vic Wilcox: she didn’t recognize him immediately because he is not wearing his usual dark business suit, bit a short-sleeved knitted shirt and neatly pressed light-weight trousers. He is carrying two books in his hand.

‘I wasn’t expecting you,’ she says, unlocking the door of her office. ‘Are you making up for what you missed yesterday?’

‘No,’ he says, following her into the room, and closing the door. ‘I’ve come to tell you that I won’t be coming any more.‘

 ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Well, it doesn’t matter. Teaching is nearly over now. You wouldn’t find it much fun watching me mark exam scripts. Is there some crisis at Pringle’s, then?’

‘I’m finished with Pringle’s,’ he says. ‘Pringle’s has been sold to the group that owns Foundrax. That’s what the phone call was about yesterday. I’m unemployed, as from today.’ He raises his hands and gestures at his casual clothes as if they are a sign of his fallen state.

When he has related all the details to her, she says, ‘But can they do that to you? Chuck you out, just like that, without notice?’

‘Afraid so’

‘But it’s monstrous!’

‘Once they’ve made up their minds, they don’t mess around. They know I could screw up the entire company if I stayed another week, in revenge. Not that I would be bothered.’

‘I’m very sorry, Vic. You must feel devastated.’

He shrugs. ‘Win some, lose some. In a funny sort of way it’s had a good side. Misfortune draws a family together.’

‘Marjorie’s not too upset?’

‘Marjorie’s been terrific,’ says Vic. ‘As a matter of fact’  – he rakes back his forelock and looks nervously away from her –  ‘We’ve had a sort of reconciliation. I thought I ought to tell you.’

‘I’m glad,’ says Robyn gently.

‘I just wanted to get things straight,’ he says, glancing at her apprehensively. ‘I’m afraid I’ve been a bit foolish.’

‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘I’ve been living in a dream. This business has woken me up. I must have been out of my mind, imagining you would see anything in a middle-aged dwarf engineer.’

Robyn laughs.

‘You’re a very special person, Robyn,’ he says solemnly. ‘One day you’ll meet a man who deserves to marry you.’

‘I don’t need a man to complete me,’ she says, smiling.

‘That’s because you haven’t met him yet.’

‘As a matter of fact, I had an offer this very morning,’ she says lightly.

His eyes widen. ‘Who from?’

‘Charles.’

‘Are you going to accept?’

‘No,” she says. ‘And what are you going to do now? Look for another job, I suppose.’

‘No, I’ve had enough of the rat-race.’

‘You mean you’re going to retire?’

 ‘I can’t afford to retire. Anyway, I’d be lost without work.’

‘You could do an English degree as a mature student.’ She smiles, not entirely serious, not entirely joking.

‘I’m thinking of setting up on my own. You remember that idea I mentioned to you for a spectrometer? I talked to Tom Rigby last night, and he’s game.’

‘That’s a marvelous idea! It’s just the right opportunity.’

‘It’s a question of raising the necessary capital.’

‘I’ve got a lot of capital,’ says Robyn. ‘I’ll invest it in your spectrometer. I’ll be a – what do they call it? A sleeping partner.’

He laughs. ‘I’m talking six figures here.’

 ‘So am I,’ says Robyn, and tells him about her legacy. ‘Take it,’ she says. ‘Use it. I don’t want it. I don’t want to retire, either. I’d rather go and work in America.’

‘I can’t take all of it,’ he says. ‘It wouldn’t be right.’

‘Take a hundred thousand,’ she says. ‘Is that enough?’

‘It’s more than enough.’

‘That’s settled, then.’

‘You might loose it all, you know.’

‘I trust you, Vic. I’ve seen you in action. I’ve shadowed you.’ She smiles.

‘On the other hand, you might end up a millionaire. How will you feel about that?’

‘I’ll risk it,’ she says.

He looks at her, holding his breath, then exhales. ‘What can I say?’

‘“Thank you” will be fine.’

‘Thank you, then. I’ll talk to Tom Rigby, and have my lawyer draw up a document.’

‘Right,’ says Robyn. ‘Aren’twe supposed to shake hands at this point?’

‘You should sleep on it,’ he says.

‘I don’t want to sleep on it,’ she says, seizing his hand and shaking it. There is a knock on the door and Marion Russel appears at the threshold, wearing an oversized T-shirt with ONLY CONNECT printed on it in big letters. ‘Oh, sorry,’ she says. ‘I’ll come back later.’

‘It’s all right, I’m going,’ says Vic. He thrusts the books abruptly at Robyn. ‘I brought these back. Thanks for the loan.’

‘Oh, right, are you sure you’ve finished with them?’

‘I haven’t finished Daniel Deronda, but I don’t think I ever will,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t mind keeping the Tennyson, if it’s a spare copy. As a souvenir.’

 ‘Of course,’ says Robyn. She sits at her desk, writes in the flyleaf in her bold, flowing hand. ‘To Vic, with love, from your shadow’, and gives it back to him.

He glances at the inscription. ‘“With love”,’ he says. ‘Now you tell me.’ He smiles wryly, shuts the book, nods goodbye, and goes out of the bedroom, past the hovering Marion.

Marion pulls a chair up close to Robyn’s desk, and sits on the edge of it, leaning forwards and peering anxiously at her. ‘It’s not true, is it, that you’re going to America?’ she says.

Robyn throws down her pen. ‘Good God! Is there no privacy in this place? Where did you hear that?’

Marion is apologetic, but determined. ‘In the corridor. Some students were coming out of a tutorial with Mr Sutcliffe… I heard them talking. Only I wanted to do your Women’s Writing course next year.’

‘I can’t discuss my plans with you, Marion. It’s a private matter. I don’t know myself what I’ll be doing next year. You’ll just have to wait and see.’

‘Sorry, I was a bit rude, I suppose, only… I hope you don’t go, Robyn. You’re the best teacher in the Department, everybody says so. And there’ll be nobody left to teach Women’s Studies.’

‘Is there anything else, Marion?’

The girl sighs and shakes her head. She prepares to leave.

¹⁵ p.41 Robyn rises somewhat later than Vic this dark January Monday. Her alarm clock, a replica of an old-fashioned instrument purchased from Habitat, with an analogue dial and a little brass bell on the top, rouses her from a deep sleep at 7.30. Unlike Vic, Robyn invariably sleeps untill woken. Then worries rush into her consciousness, as into his, like clamorous patients who have been waiting all night for the doctor’s surgery to open; but she deals with them in a rational, orderly manner.

This morning she gives priority to the fact that it is the first day of the winter term, and that she has a lecture to deliver and two tutorials to conduct. Although she has been teaching now for some eight years, on and off, although she enjoys it, feels she is good at it, and would like to go on doing it for the rest of her life of possible, she always feels a twinge of anxiety at the beginning of a new term. This doesn’t disturb her self-confidence; a good teacher, like a good actress, should not be immune from stage fright. She sits in bed for a moment, doing some complicated breathing and flexing of the abdominal muscles, learned in yoga classes, to calm herself.

¹⁶ p.55 Robyn had a reputation in the family for being strong-willed, or, as her brother Basil less flatteringly put it, ‘bossy’. There was a much-told tale of her Australian infancy that was held to be prophetic in this respect – about how at the age of three she had, by the sheer force of her will, compelled her uncle Walter (who was taking her for a walk to the local shops at the time) to pull all the money he had on his person into a charity collecting-box in the shape of a plaster-of-Paris boy cripple; as a result of which the uncle, too embarrassed to admit to this folly and borrow from his relatives, had run out of petrol on the way back to his sheep station.

Robyn herself, needless to say, interpreted this anecdote in a light more favourable to herself, as anticipating her later commitment to progressive causes.

¹⁷ p. 42-43 … narrow back gardens, some neat and trim with goldfish ponds and brightly painted play equipment, others tatty and neglected, cluttered with broken appliances and discarded furniture. It is an upwardly mobile street of nineteenth-century terraced cottages, where houseproud middle-class owners rub shoulders with less tidy and less affluent working-class occupiers.

 

¹⁸ p. 128 She stepped outside, on to a steel gallery. She surveyed the scene, feeling more than ever like Dante in Inferno. All was noise, smoke, fumes and flames. Overall figures, wearing goggles, facemasks, helmets or turbans, moved slowly through the sulphurous gloom or crouched over their inscrutable tasks beside furnaces and machines.

¹⁹ p. 133 It was the most terrible place she had ever been in her life ... it provoked terror, even a kind of awe. To think of being that man, wrestling with the heavy awkward lumps of metal in that maelstrom of heat, dust and stench, deafened by the unspeakable noise of the vibrating grid, working like that for hour after hour, day after day... That he was black seemed the final indignity ... It was as much as she could do to restrain herself from rushing forward to grasp his hand in a gesture of sympathy and solidarity.

²⁰ p.52 Robyn goes into her long narrow living-room, formed by knocking down the dividing wall between the front and back parlours of the little house, which also serves as her study.

There are books and periodicals everywhere с on shelves, on tables, on the floor – posters and reproductions of modern paintings on the walls, parched-looking potted plants in the fireplace. A BBC micro and monitor on the desk, and beside it sheaves of dot-matrix typescript of early chapters of Domestic Angels and unfortunate Females in various drafts. ...

Outside, in the street, her car is parked, a red six-year-old Renault Five with a yellow sticker in its rear window, ‘Britain needs its universities’. It was formerly her parents’ second car, sold to Robyn at a bargain price when her mother replaced it. It runs well, though the battery is getting feeble.

²¹ p.47 Robyn scans the front-page of the Guardian, ‘LAWSON DRAWN INTO FRAY OVER WESTLAND’, but does not linger over the text beneath.It is enough for her to know that things are going badly for Mrs Thatcher and the Tory party; the details of the Westland affair do not engage her interest. She turnes at once to the Woman’s page,where there is a Posy Simmonds strip cartoon adroitly satirizing middle-aged, middle-class liberals, an article on the iniquities of the Unborn Children (Protection) Bill, and a report on the struggle for women’s liberation in Portugal. These she reads with the kind of pure, trance-like attention that she used to give, as a child, to the stories of Enid Blyton ... it crosses Robyn’s mind, not for the first time, that it is a pity she lives so far from the metropolis where such exciting events  are always happening. This thought reminds her why she is living in Rummidge. She puts her soiled breakfast things in the sink, already crammed with the relics of the last night’s supper, and hurries upstairs.

²² p. 130 The situation was so bizarre, so totally unlike her usual environment, that there was a kind of exhilaration to be found in it, in its very discomfort and danger, such as explorers must feel, she supposed, in a remote and barbarous country.

²³ p. 134 It seems to me the whole set-up is racist ... you just admitted blacks do all the worst jobs, the dirtiest, hardest jobs.

²⁴ p.267 Vic was conscious only of wanting to have Robyn’s company, and to give her a treat. Robyn was conscious only of wanting to be treated, and to be whisked away from her routine existence for an interval, however brief.

²⁵ p.270 Robyn had surprised him by appearing at the door of her little house dressed as he had never seen her dressed before, in a tailored two-piece costume, with matching cape, made out of a soft olive-green cloth that set off her coppery curls and echoed her grey-green eyes.

²⁶ p.215-216 But this year the winter term was different. Every Wednesday she left her familiar milieu, and drove scross the city to the factory in West Wallsbury. In a way she resented the obligation. It was a distraction from her work <...> she had her carreer to think of ... the Shadow Scheme contributed nothing to that – on the contrary, it interfered with it, taking up the precious one day a week <...>

But this irritation was all on the surface. The Shadow Scheme was something to grumble about, tp Charles, to Penny Black, something handy to blame for getting behind with other tasks. At some deeper level of feeling and reflection she derived a subtle satisfaction from her association with the factory, and a certain sense of superiority over her friends <...>

It was as if the Robyn Penrose who spent one day a week at the factory was the shadow of the self who on the other six days a week was busy with women’s studies and the Victorian novel and post-structuralist literary theory. She led a double life these days, and felt herself to be a more interesting and complex person because of it.

<...> Robyn felt herself like a secret agent; and as secret agents are apt to do, suffered occasional spasms of doubt about the righteousness of her own side.

²⁷ p. 289 Robyn’s mood is blithe. She feels mildly wanton, but not wicked. She sees herself not as seducing Vic but as putting him out of his misery. There is of course always a special excitement about the first time with a new partner. One never knows quite what to expect. Her heart beats faster than if she were going to bed with Charles. But she is not anxious. She is in control. Perhaps she feels a certain sense of triumph at her conquest: the captain of industry at the feet of the feminist literary critic – a pleasing tableau.

²⁸ p.42 She was born, and christened Roberta Anne Penrose, in Melbourne, Australia, nearly thirty-three years ago, but left that country at the age of five to accompany her parents to England. Her father, then a young academic historian, had a scholarship to pursue post-doctoral research into nineteenth-century European diplomacy at Oxford. Instead of returning to Australia, he took a post at a university on the south coast of England, where he has been ever since, now occupying a personal Chair. Robyn has only the dimmest memories of the country of her birth, and has never had the opportunity to refresh or renew them, Professor Penrose’s characteristic response to any suggestion that the family should revisit Australia being a shudder.

Robyn had a comfortable childhood, growing up in a pleasant, unostentatious house with a view of the sea. She attended an excellent direct-grant grammar school (which has since gone independent, much to Robyn’s disgust) where she was Head Girl and Captain of Games and which she left with four A grades at A-Level. Though urged by the school to apply for a place at Oxbridge, she choose instead to go to Sussex University, as bright young people often did in the 1970s, because the new universities were considered exciting and innovatory places to study at. Under the umbrella of a degree course in English Literature, Robyn read Freud and Marx, Kafka and Kierkegaard, which she certainly couldn’t have done at Oxbridge.

²⁹ p.44 In their second year, Robyn and Charles moved off campus and set up house in a small flat in Brighton, commuting to the University by local train. Robyn took an active part in student politics. She run successfully for the Vice-Presedentship of the Student Union. She organized an all-night telephone counselling service for students in despair about their grades or love-lives. She spoke frequently in the Debating Society in favour of progressive causes such as abortion, animal rights, state education and nuclear disarmament. Charles led a more subdued and private life. He kept the flat tidy while Robyn was out doing good works, and always had a cup of cocoa or a bowl of soup for her when she returned home, tired but invariably triumphant.

At the end of the first term of her third year, Robyn resigned from all her commitments in order to prepare for the Finals. She and Charles worked hard and, despite the fact that they were pursuing the same course, without rivalry. In their Final Examinations, Robyn obtained a First – her marks, she was unofficially informed, were the highest ever achieved by a student in the School of European Studies in its short history – and Charles an extremely high Upper Second. Charles was not jealous. He was used to living in the shadow of Robyn’s achievements. And in any case his degree was good enough to earn him, as Robyn’s did for her.