Buy two copies, Irene (as I believe Charles Kinbote suggests...). And read the poem first, then the commentary with reference back to the poem. Here are my thoughts on
Pale Fire, which you may want to avoid until you've finished it:
Pale Fire is very easy to summarise for what is presumably a very complex book. In summary it surrounds the 999-line poem 'Pale Fire', the last work of an American poet named John Shade, with a foreword and commentary by his 'friend' and neighbour Charles Kinbote. The poem itself is accomplished, a highly autobiographical meditation on death and the afterlife (inspired largely by the suicide of Shade's daughter) and goes something like this:
I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff - and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
And from the inside, too, I'd duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I'd let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make my chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!
And Kinbote, our commentator, is the maddest and most detached of all unreliable narrators that have ever been. He believes himself to be the exiled king of Zembla, 'a distant northern land', and that Shade was murdered by a regicidal Zemblan contract killer called Jakob Gradus, or Vinogradus, or d'Argus, or Jack Grey (curiously close etymologically to John Shade itself), who was aiming for him, Kinbote. He also believes that 'Pale Fire' contains many hidden messages which relate to his own story as said exiled king. His notes to the poem - which he effectively stole from Shade's widow - although they refer nominally to specific lines, rarely have any connection with the text and are usually just a springboard for him to tell the parallel tales of his own exile and Gradus's pursuit of him. Shade, despite being author and subject of the poem, barely gets a look in (even in the clever index, he earns only a page of references where Kinbote gives himself two). Here are Kinbote's reflections on suicide:
There are purists who maintain a gentleman should use a brace of pistols, one for each temple, or a bare botkin (note the correct spelling), and that ladies should either swallow a lethal dose or drown with clumsy Ophelia. Humbler humans have preferred sundry forms of suffocation, and minor poets have even tried such fancy releases as vein tapping in the quadruped tub of a drafty boardinghouse bathroom. All this is uncertain and messy. Of the not very many ways known of shedding one's body, falling, falling, falling is the supreme method, but you have to select your sill or ledge very carefully so as not to hurt yourself or others. Jumping from a high bridge is not recommended even if you cannot swim, for wind and water abound in weird contingencies, and tragedy ought not to culminate in a record dive or a policeman's promotion.
And now comes the problem, and the reason why I said "
presumably complex" above. If Kinbote really is entirely detached from reality, and his fantasies are just that, then what significance do they have? They are entertaining and frequently funny (particularly Kinbote's rampant homosexuality from an early age, with his numerous 'ping-pong partners') but do they have any real correspondences to the poem? If not, then we are in
Royal Tenenbaums territory, where eccentricity is an end in itself, and how tiresome that very quickly becomes. We know Kinbote is mostly making it up, for sure (otherwise how would he be able to trace his would-be assassin's steps in parallel with his own?), but it does not help us - or me - to find the truth. Unlike in Patrick McGrath's
Spider, with its equally deluded narrator, it is never particularly clear to us what is happening as well as what is definitely not.
This is where Mary McCarthy's essay (neatly prefacing the Penguin Modern Classics edition) comes in. Entitled "A Bolt from the Blue", in it she avers that the book was written not by Shade or Kinbote but by someone called Botkin, although this may not in fact be a third party at all... The essay is worth reading for the first few pages, but the rest of it is increasingly wild attempts by McCarthy to sew in everything she can think of to the
Pale Fire cause - astrology, chess, colours - irrespective of how flimsy the evidence is. It turns the book into a crossword clue, an exercise in saying
I got that!, a sort of mini-
Finnegans Wake. And one of those is enough. Otherwise I welcome the notion that Pale Fire does have endless unplumbed depths - otherwise why would it take Nabokov five years to write? - like the other article I found on the internet referring to it as a book steeped in Shakespeare (the title coming, probably, from the description of moonlight in
Timon of Athens - and again see the allusion in the extract above, which I didn't choose for these purposes, honest). So for me it scores highly for its sheer novelty and masterly execution, and for the suggestions of suggestions detailed above, but it also falls down for bringing the suspicion, in me at any rate, that all of those are really just suspicions. It doesn't have the emotional force of Nabokov's masterpiece
Lolita to add to its cerebral challenges, whereas lollypop Lol's got the lot.
