MacDonald Harris (1921-1993) was the author of sixteen strikingly intelligent, interesting, and original novels, of which The Balloonist was probably the most successful. What amazes me, and has done since I read this book when it came out in 1978, is that he’s not far better known.
I can think of two reasons why this might be so. In the first place, the public loves a writer who produces the same book year after year. They know where they are with an author like that; they can buy their new books with confidence, secure in the knowledge that nothing surprising will disturb the placid tenor of their habit. The parties to this unwritten contract value consistency above every other quality. Every one of Harris’s novels, however, is quite different from those that came before it. To his publishers, it must have seemed as if he was trying to start a fresh career with each new book.
If the first reason for his comparative neglect is that each of his books is different, the second might be a particular quality they all have in common. A writer can’t help a certain continuity of something, even if the subject matter and the setting of his novels varies as much as Harris’s: from late eighteenth-century Venice to wartime Japan, from the early days of the film industry to terrorism in modern France. And what is continuous in his novels is a curious sort of stance towards the world, a quite un-American stance, if I can put it like that: the position of an intelligent adult confronting the tragi-comic absurdity of existence. There is little that’s heroic about Harris’s protagonists, but a great deal that’s ironic and witty and sympathetic, with an acute sense of the ridiculousness of things. And while this is very agreeable to a certain kind of taste, as it certainly is to mine, it’s not a popular taste.
But all his novels are extraordinarily interesting. And gripping, too: he knew how to arrest the attention and keep it, how to time the events of a narrative so that we can’t help turning just one more page.
And another quality that remains constant in his work is a superbly flexible, elegant and witty prose. It’s the work of someone who attends to every aspect of the words they’re using, not least their weight, their rhythm and their colour. Once I open any of his novels at any point I find it almost impossible not to turn and read on, so delightful is the sensation of a sharp intelligence at work.
In The Balloonist, we see all of his qualities at their best. Typically, he sets the story in a part of the world he hasn’t written about before, and equally typically he evokes it with a marvellous feeling for the whiteness of white, the coldness of cold. We’re in the Arctic, towards the end of the nineteenth century, and our narrator, the Swedish Major Gustav Crispin, is setting out with two companions to fly to the North Pole. The Prinzess, their balloon, sponsored by a German brewery, is fitted with all the latest gear and the finest instruments, including a rudimentary radio with which Major Crispin is very pleased. Since no-one has invented broadcasting, though, he has nothing to listen to but the hissing and crackling of the atmosphere itself, which tells him, he believes, the direction from which a storm can be expected.
The Major is a delightful character, a little pompous, a little impatient, but impulsive and passionate too, and, like other Harris heroes, utterly helpless when it comes to love. Harris is quite superb at love, especially love between difficult, prickly, unlikely people. The love affair in The Balloonist is richly comic and sexy and ultimately very moving, and he never invented a lovelier heroine than the beguiling and exasperating Luisa.
The technical background of this book is immaculate – which is to say, it feels solid when the characters pass in front of it, and it convinces me that it’s all real. That does matter: we want to feel that the world we’re reading about does exist, or could exist, or did exist, and technicalities and details of clothing and behaviour and speech as well as of machinery are all part of what makes it seem real. There’s a danger in research, which is that the writer is likely to be so pleased with what he or she has discovered that they can’t bear to leave it out, and it’s a fine judgement to make, whether you’re deepening the perspectives and pointing up the chiaroscuro or just overloading the story with more information than it can carry. A research principle I’ve found useful is to read enough to enable me to make up convincingly anything I don’t know. MacDonald Harris convinces me in The Balloonist that if he’s made any of the background up, I can’t tell. It’s all fascinating. And what’s more there’s just the right amount of it, and it comes to us convincingly in the voice of our narrator, who is fascinated by mechanical devices and the problems of mathematics, and it’s all there to serve the story.
The character-drawing in this book is particularly skilful. One encounter with Luisa’s timid mother, perpetually grazing on pastries (“Do you know Mifeuya?”) and I never forgot it. And the admirable Waldemer, his “American and pragmatic head screwed squarely on his shoulders” – who could wish for a better companion on a dangerous expedition? By the end of the story, Waldemer still has not realised what we more acute companions of the Major in the little gondola below the vast and gaudy swell of the Prinzess twigged some time ago. But his bravery, his cheerfulness, his way with a kerosene stove! The ingenuity with which Waldemer boils their coffee without setting fire to the hydrogen in the balloon is delightful.
And one small technical point: much of the story is told in the present tense. I’ve complained many times about the present-tense habit, which has now become almost the default setting for any narrative with aspirations towards the literary. In the hands of most novelists it’s a pointless affectation. But if there was ever a novel in which its use is justified, in fact necessary, it’s this one.
I hope that in this second voyage of publication The Balloonist finds as many admirers as it deserves, and that we shall see some more of this singular, elegant and witty novelist’s work restored to print. MacDonald Harris is too good to be neglected.