Given the deep, lifelong devotion the sport inspires in others, I am hesitant to call myself a fan of test cricket. I do not understand cricket well enough to speak about it intelligently. I don’t really know the difference between a sweep and a hook, and I can’t say where silly point is without checking on a diagram. Of the teams that play test cricket, I only follow England, and even then, an entire test series can go by without attracting my attention. I’ve only once, for a single day, attended a test match in person. Long ago, I was told by a proficient amateur cricketer than one can only properly appreciate the game if one has played it. I believe that to be true, but I have never played.
So perhaps I am not truly a fan of test cricket. But I am an admirer and enjoyer of it, and above all of Test Match Special, the BBC radio program that covers cricket tests live in their entirety. Like many, I believe Test Match Special is the best sports broadcast in existence, and if the time and my mood are right, I can listen to it for many hours.
Many hours are indeed required to taste the delights of Test Match Special, because test cricket is slow. A football game lasts ninety minutes. A long tennis match takes five or six hours. But a cricket test, if it goes the full length allotted to it, stretches over five days.
Many hours are required to taste the delights of Test Match Special, because test cricket is slow.
A single sporting contest can only be played over five days if it unfolds at a low intensity: otherwise exhaustion would destroy the players. Accordingly, test cricket is a sport where, much of the time, very little happens. There are innumerable pauses in play, and even when the action is in full swing, much of it involves the batsman hitting tame, low-stakes shots, or not even hitting the ball at all. To be a great batsman, anyone will tell you, requires not just finding superb shots, but the ability to do as little as possible much of the time.
If one tunes in at random during a test match, one knows to expect that very little will be happening. The most momentous punctual event in a sequence of play is generally the bowling of a batsman, and this often does not occur for hours and hours. Meanwhile, the batsmen, much of the time, stand stolidly at the crease, playing defensively, raising the score at a glacial pace. Commenting on cricket is such a fine art precisely because so little is going on, so much of the time.
Cricket is very slow and quite dull, until it isn’t. When I listen, I am at first hardly attentive, minimally involved. Yet, little by little, I am captured by the rhythm and drama of the game. Every innings, no matter how dry, is building a chapter in a complex and suspenseful story: once one begins to grasp the shape of that story, one becomes gradually riveted. Because it is played over five days, and because there are so many ways of winning and losing a match, test cricket, beneath its stolid surface, is the most wildly dramatic of sports.
Not all have the patience required to reach the point of excitement. To satisfy the hasty, other, shorter forms of cricket have been invented (one-day cricket and twenty-over cricket). These have been hugely successful, and are indeed very enjoyable. But they lack the deep, rolling satisfaction of test cricket. It is the difference between buzzing across a bay in a speedboat, and crossing the Atlantic by sail.
I was reminded of all this recently, when reading and listening to Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove for the first time. Much like test cricket, this is a book carefully designed to demand extraordinary patience, and to reward it.
The challenge does not lie in the story itself. James was not the sort of modernist who believed the duty of a novelist is to convey the hollowness of modern life by eschewing plot. The Wings of the Dove—for those who don’t know—is about a fabulously rich, orphaned American girl, Milly Theale, who is travelling in Europe, and dying of a mysterious illness. In London, Milly is quickly befriended by the refined but impoverished Kate Croy. Kate is secretly engaged to the journalist Merton Densher, whom Milly had met, and fallen somewhat in love with, in New York. Kate wishes very much to be rich, and she and Merton build a trap for Milly: Merton will make love to her, marry her, inherit her money, and then marry Kate after Milly dies. I may state without spoiling the ending that none of this quite works out as planned.
The Wings of the Dove is not a slow book because of the nature of its story, but rather because of how it is told, and, to a large extent, not told.
In outline, then, this is a melodramatic tale of money, cruelty and passion, of the sort a Daphné du Maurier could have made into a barnstorming bodice-ripper. The Wings of the Dove is not a slow book because of the nature of its story, but rather because of how it is told, and, to a large extent, not told.
The Wings of the Dove is one of James’s later novels, written in the strange, enigmatic style he came to prefer. His use of English at this late stage, while never pretentious or flowery, was deliberately and meticulously out of kilter with any ordinary form of the language. The reader knows all the words, yet must concentrate hard to determine quite what is being said, both because the expression is so unusual, and because the idea itself is so often unexpected. James’s focus is on what his characters are saying and thinking. But they rarely say quite what they mean, and their thoughts—like those of real people—are winding, contradictory, haunted with images and memories.
Every description, episode and conversation is clearly freighted with meaning, but the reader needs to go deep into the book before understanding much of what that meaning is. Even the nature of Kate and Merton’s plot is only apparent about half-way through, and it is not put into execution until the final third of the book, when the scene shifts to Venice.
By then, the book has one in its grip. James does not change his pace or technique as the crisis unfolds: all is still oblique conversations and long unspoolings of inner thoughts. Most of the action we are shown directly involves nothing more lively than characters taking walks, alone or together. Yet, as we have learnt to understand who these people are, have begun to breathe the anxious air in which they live, and to see the physical and moral death hovering over them, we are moved towards all the terror and pity inspired by the great tragedies.
The Wings of the Dove is very slow and quite dull, until it isn’t. Then one looks back, and realizes that all that seemed laborious was necessary, that James has built an eery, heart-rending tragedy with the subtle patience with which a great test batsman builds one of his finest innings. Such an innings can stretch over an entire day of play, or even longer. It is as it nears its end that its magnificence becomes overpowering, but it is also only by following it from the start that one can truly perceive its splendour. It is not that the end of the innings, or of the novel, is worth the wait, but rather that it is in the waiting, and the patient watching, that the worth lies.
