Jacob's Room

"Her novels are timeless in many ways. A great deal of interpretation tries to put us back into the historical context of those novels, which is tremendously important. There is also the way in which they have a universal significance as novels. I was shocked when I was first read her that it was possible to write a novel [ To The Lighthouse ] about a little boy going to a lighthouse and for that to be the central plot. Nothing else really happens at all yet it left me absolutely reeling, with a sense that I needed to reorder my life and that life was now going to be a different experience. What she does is all to do with style, form, structure and symbolism. It’s very much not to do with plot. That was one of the great mysteries that I wanted to keep getting at, and which sent me back to read more. Another thing I tried to emphasise in my book on Woolf was her capacity for enjoyment of all kinds of things in the world. She’s often portrayed as a very exquisite and withdrawn figure who was liable to have nervous breakdowns at any moment. But what strikes me most about her novels, diaries and letters is her garrulousness, her gossipyness – her relentless capacity for living and looking at the world. I would have been absolutely terrified to meet her, but I would have been absolutely seduced if what comes out on her paper in her novels came out of her mouth at me. I would be just bewitched by the speed of her figurative language, the precision with which she captures people, a street, the setting of the sun, the kind of wind. It’s so extraordinary. I agree wholesale. Woolf was able to tell the same story 50 times without repeating herself. She will report the same anecdote to three friends in different letters and never use the same word twice. That limitless exercise in reformulating the world – in seeing how life is so very multi-faceted – is an inspiration for the people who came after her to keep talking about her work. This was really her first experimental novel. We have a hero, Jacob, at the centre of the book who keeps going missing. When the book starts, Jacob is a little boy on the beach – he’s run off and we have to go find him. Then we chase him through his life, but we really never get to sit down and talk to him as you would in a Victorian novel where you would look at every facet of a character. We see him disappearing on the back of an omnibus and the narrator takes us to his student room in Cambridge, but he’s gone to dinner and he’s not there. So we look around and see the invitation cards on his mantelpiece, the books on his table and his empty chair. It’s a great test of how far we get to know the people in our lives. What can we tell about them just from meeting them for a moment? What can we tell from going into their room? How much of a mark do people leave on the world? What is a room like when they go out of it? These are questions which in a way are ordinary, because we all experience someone going out of a room, someone leaving a house. But we don’t think about it very much. We don’t think how well we know our friends, or how well we know members of our family. In this book, Woolf makes the subject matter not Jacob himself but the ways in which we know and don’t know each other – the gaps in our knowledge. It’s a very ghostly book in that we have a very likeable hero and want to get to know him a lot, but he keeps disappearing. At the end his surname, Flanders, comes into its own and he dies in the First World War. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Woolf captures this sense of an upper middle class young man with certain expectations in life, all the stereotypical things that he is likely to do – go to university, go on boating trips with his friends, or trips to the British Library. She looks for the social panoply around him. She pays attention to the old woman who’s sweeping up around the statues at Westminster, or the guards at night who shine their torches around the British Museum library when the posh people have gone home. She looks into the corners of life and what these dusty corners tell us about the central subject – as we can’t look at anyone straight in the face, we have to be detectives and nose around. No novel sets out to be traditional. People often hold up Dickens or George Eliot as “the traditional novelists”, but the moment you think about what Dickens is doing, you realise he is wildly experimental in creating his characters. So one has to be careful about condemning everything that came before modernism as stuck in the mud. But certainly Woolf does something new, which is to present us with very short chapters, each of which is a little glimpse, a little shard of experience. She doesn’t bother taking the reader by the hand and carrying us between chapters. She just leaves a space on the page and we have to catch up with Jacob in the next chapter. Maybe he’s 10 years older, but we have to keep up. The sense that life is not delivered to us fully narrated on a plate, but rather that we spend our lives piecing together bits of evidence, is partly what was so new about the book."

"How can I talk to a British woman about Virginia Woolf? She is so large in all of our lives! What would female fiction be without Virginia Woolf? As always with Woolf, I think it’s the extreme interiority. She picks out exactly the right details to reveal the character’s interiorities. And she’s very patient with the moments of life that would otherwise go uncaptured. They are. Perhaps the relationships aren’t as successful as in her greatest books, To the Lighthouse and Mrs Dalloway , but they are awfully resonant. Jacob dies in the war, but the enormity is suggested more than extolled."