Poetic justice—the practice of rewarding good characters and punishing evil ones by the end of a story—didn’t originate with the European neoclassicists, but it flourished under their strict adherence to “rules.” Their guiding principle was that art should not reflect life as it is, but as it ought to be. Hence Nahum Tate in 1681 rewrote Shakespeare’s King Lear so that Cordelia and Edgar married at the end of the play, while the jolly, chastened, and very much alive Lear and Gloucester witnessed the ceremony. It sounds like such a travesty in comparison with Shakespeare’s majestic original, and it is, but Tate’s was the only version of the play seen by the public in theaters between 1681 and 1820, when the Romantics restored Shakespeare’s text to the boards. And let’s admit it: we all like to see happy endings, wherein the heroes and villains receive their just deserts. In the hands of good writers (I’m looking at you, Jane Austen) poetic justice makes for the most satisfying of conclusions.
Geoffrey Chaucer knew that. His Canterbury Tales, 626 years old and going strong, remains the best collection of stories in our language. He models for us how to write tragedy, comedy, satire, and romance, and even today writers borrow from his deeply ironic “Pardoner’s Tale.” In Chaucer’s version three men go looking for Death in hopes of killing It. A man they encounter assures them that they will find Death waiting for them under a certain tree. There they find buried treasure, turn on each other, and indeed find death at each other’s hands. Today those three men show up regularly. Take John Huston’s film adaptation of B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, wherein three men learn about a cache of gold from a stranger, discover it, and then lose it after (only) one of them dies. Or the 1992 movie “Trespass,” the title of which comes directly from Chaucer and which happens to be the only show I’ve ever seen starring two actors named Ice (-T and –Cube), wherein two firemen learn of a cache of gold hidden by a dying man, go to retrieve it and turn on each other after they find both the gold and a violent gang also interested in the loot. In the end, the lust for gold destroys nearly everyone in the cast.
Now Ian McGuire has given us the latest version of Chaucer’s exemplum with his new novel White River Crossing, wherein three men, inspired by the testimony of an itinerant stranger, head into the Canadian wilderness in 1766 to search for gold. McGuire is a great writer of historical fiction. His The North Water grips us in an irresistible adventure set onboard a 19th Century sailing ship, and with this new book, McGuire’s scrupulous, extensive research helps to bring the world of 18th Century Canada and its occupants into vivid, often thrilling detail. But I regret to report that we can see the ending coming long before it arrives. It’s all back to the Pardoner’s lesson: radix malorum est cupiditas.
David Szalay would probably be shocked to hear me associate his new novel Flesh with another Medieval source: the anonymous allegory Everyman, which dramatizes how every person must die stripped of all worldly belongings. In this counter-Reformation play Beauty, Strength, Fellowship, and Possessions all abandon the protagonist Everyman at the grave. Only his Good Deeds (this is, after all, a work of Roman Catholic propaganda) will follow him into the afterlife. Flesh is not an allegory and is not a religious text, and yet there’s something vaguely parable-like in its structure. We meet Istvan, Szalay’s Hungarian protagonist, when he’s an adolescent, curious but inexperienced with sex until a neighbor woman seduces him. Then we follow him as he ages through a series of episodes, many of them grounded in a sexual relationship. We see him acquire and lose wealth and loved ones in a story hypnotically engrossing, and while he’s not on his deathbed at the end, the final word of the book is “alone.” Szalay won the Booker Prize for this work reminiscent at first of Camus’s Meursault, the detached, affectless protagonist of The Stranger; Istvan does develop the ability to feel in the course of his life, but he does his best to suppress it. What makes Szalay’s novel so memorable is that it rejects poetic justice for the sake of a more unsettling, cerebral goal: to present one life not as it ought to have been, but as it was.