FICTION

Shteyngart’s Absurdistan. In Away, you remember an extraordinary woman and her successes and mishaps: it reproduces the picaresque form of Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie Marchbut not its monological moxie,

JOHNDEFALBE HARSH TERRAIN

THEKINGDOMOFASHES

★By Robert Edric (Doubleday 400pp £16.99)

ROBERTEDRICIS one of our most prolific contemporary novelists. Besides his recent trilogy of crime novels set in Hull, this is his fourteenth novel; the last two have been longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His work is serious but highly readable. Moral confusions animate it, often in the context of a collapsed society or one on the brink of collapse. His historical backgrounds range widely: the Arctic of the 1845 Franklin Expedition (Broken Lands, 1992); Conrad’s Congo (The Book of the Heathen, 2000); Tasmania in 1864 (Elysium, 1995); the First World War (In Desolate Heaven, 1997). They are vividly portrayed, with a lightness of touch that makes one hesitate to call them historical novels. No detail is there just for period flavour. The Kingdom of Ashes is a complementary work to Peacetime (2002), which focused on the decommissioning of an airfield in East Anglia just after the Second World War. Now Edric has turned his attention to a provincial town in Germany where a British officer, Alex Foster, is employed interrogating German prisoners at an ‘Assessment and Evaluation’ centre. The Nuremberg Trials are underway and everyone is aware that this is a sideshow: much of the work may be futile and unrecognised, crimes may go unpunished, yet it is clear that vast and horrific crimes have been committed. It is worth considering the entire first paragraph: Alex Foster leaned forward and looked down at the corpses. The slab of fractured concrete on which he was standing rocked slightly, and the man beside him held Alex’s arm as the ground beneath them settled. Alex thanked the man and then turned back to the bodies. Rods of rusted and twisted metal protruded from the edge of the concrete; elsewhere, this reinforcing mesh had already been cut away and discarded. The prose is precise and rhythmic, soberly descriptive. Death is introduced immediately, examined with a careful, appraising eye, but from a position that is ‘fractured’ and ‘rocky’. Technical details are noted, for life and death in Edric’s worlds are often subjects for technicians. Preconceptions will not be ‘reinforced’ but forced apart

and gives it a female twist. Asking to be measured against such a masterpiece involves Lillian-like audacity, but Amy Bloom’s splendid novel can stand the comparison. To order this book at £8.79, see LR Bookshop on page 37

by extreme circumstances; ‘mesh’ will be discarded; people and their values will be exposed as little more than ‘rods of rusted and twisting metal’. It emerges very soon that near the civilian bodies uncovered in the cellar is another group, evidently prisoners from a concentration camp. Does anybody know who they are? Does anybody care? It is presumed that the locals know, but it isn’t in their interests to go into the matter – the venal new Mayor is much more interested in constructing a War Memorial and moving on. Nor does Colonel Dyer, the senior British officer, want to be distracted with inconvenient bygones: he likes to feel his own power, and requires his underlings to restrict themselves to their explicit instructions. Among these are interviews that Alex is obliged to conduct with two prisoners on behalf of the Americans. One of them may have been involved in a confused massacre of prisoners but it is impossible to establish independently whether he was there. But the Americans want scalps – and does it really matter if he was definitely there or not, because it’s certain that if he had been there then he would have been involved? The other, despite his crimes, is useful to them in an exchange with the Russians for a scientist. Woven into this story is a local one. Alex starts up a relationship with Eva, one of the translators at the Institute. Nina, a friend of hers, has a half-starved teenage sister who is heavily pregnant by a passing American soldier. Alex’s colleague Doctor Whittaker goes to visit her in a ramshackle camp and wishes to transfer her to the town hospital. But he doesn’t have the authority to do this, and the German authorities don’t want anything to do with her because she represents aspects of their recent history that they would rather ignore. It becomes increasingly unclear whether Whittaker’s laudable behaviour actually helps her, or anyone else, in the long run. Indeed by getting drugs from Jesus Hernandez, the American officer’s driver who operates a thriving black market, he buys into just the corruption he detests. The only character who might be called pure is Eva’s deluded younger brother Kurt, a relic of the Hitler Youth who understandably and bitterly resents the high-handed actions of the British and American authorities concerning the huts where he lives in the woods with his friends. Edric handles the many characters and threads of this complex novel with skill. It is remarkable that anyone should attempt to write so many novels with such varied settings, but that he should manage to do so with such consistent brilliance is astounding. To order this book at £13.59, see LR Bookshop on page 37

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LITERARY REVIEW August 2007 FICTION

FRANCISKING IN TASMANIA

SECRETS OFTHESEA

★

By Nicholas Shakespeare (Harvill Secker 402pp £12.99)

AFTERHEHADwritten an acclaimed biography of his friend Bruce Chatwin, Nicholas Shakespeare took himself off to Tasmania in an effort, he declared, to escape from the gravitational pull of a subject that had for a time totally dominated his life. But the effort was only in part successful. Chatwin’s best book was his first, In Patagonia. The title Shakespeare chose for the book he wrote during this period, In Tasmania, clearly referred back to that work, and Shakespeare’s book is also a fascinating mixture of history, travelogue, autobiography and, one strongly suspects, fiction. Now he has produced a novel that has the same setting, and might have been given the same subtitle, as the earlier book: ‘Adventures at the End of the World’. Constantly buffeted by these adventures, as the former penal colony is constantly buffeted by storms and high winds, the two central characters have suffered childhood bereavements so traumatic that their eventual marriage and attempts to be happy together in a farm on the edge of a ‘one-horse town where even the horse is on its last legs’ all too often seem to be doomed. When Alex was seven, his immigrant English parents, two ineffectual misfits in the country of their adoption, were killed by a log truck that barrelled into their car on a country road. The orphaned Alex is despatched to school in England, and then, having reached adulthood and decided to be a teacher, he returns to Tasmania – temporarily as he mistakenly thinks – to deal with an inheritance that now consists of a dilapidated farmhouse and land shamefully neglected for years by the agent paid to look after it. As Shakespeare corrosively depicts them, the people of his small town on the edge of nowhere long to escape from a place that is at once a scenic paradise and a social hell; but at the same time their attitude to any would-be settler – English, Japanese, or even mainland Australian – ranges from courteously chilly to derisively hostile. Merridy, when she first meets Alex, is a sexually and intellectually restless young woman, tied to a father reduced to a wheelchair-bound existence by a highvoltage shock received while at work and to a domineering mother whose twin addictions are religion and the bottle. When she was a child, her adored younger brother suddenly disappeared, leaving no trace other than a single discarded shoe. Murdered, kidnapped, lost

while exploring the dense and often dangerous Tasmanian countryside? She is obsessed with a mystery to which there is no answer until the last pages. After the couple have settled down together, it is clear that Merridy is incapable of feeling for Alex the allconsuming love that he feels for her. In addition, their relationship is jeopardised by their inability to have children. (If this otherwise absorbing novel has a fault, it is in the way the couple’s attempts to overcome this problem become increasingly wearisome in an accumulation of trivial detail about IVF and the other desperate expedients to which they resort.) Having at last given up any hope of parenthood, Alex works harder than ever to make a success of his farm, while Merridy embarks on an oyster business. Shakespeare deals with both these activities so knowledgeably that it is clear that he must have spent a lot of time on research. Drama verging on melodrama is provided by a teenage delinquent, suspected of murder, whom the couple heroically rescue from a ship wrecked in a storm off the coast near the farm and then in effect adopt. Kish, by turns sulky, threatening and demanding, all but destroys an already fragile marriage. One of Shakespeare’s acknowledgements is to a friend who ‘guided’ him to the works of Patrick White. Throughout one is aware of White’s towering shade at Shakespeare’s side. Reminiscent of White’s is a style staccato in its short paragraphs and sentences and idiosyncratic in a syntax that often makes one wonder whether words may not have been swallowed by the author’s computer. ‘“You’ve chosen the hottest day of the year”, pouring out five plastic cups’ is one typical whole sentence. As with White, there are also a lot of bizarre images like ‘his moustache so close to his mouth, like a mutton-bird flying over water’, and some hectic overwriting, chiefly about sex or the sea. For all its occasional oddities and intermittent slackening of tension, this is a remarkable novel. It is brilliantly successful in portraying the forlorn, claustrophobic, gossipy, defiant little society in which it is set, most piquantly when it quotes items from the Newsletter compiled by the owner of the town’s only department store. The first of these wryly sets the tone: ‘At the next meeting of the Wellington Point reading group, Mavis Pidd will speak about her recently released autobiography A Self-published Life.’ Later, a favourite of mine runs: ‘MENOPAUSE INFORMATION SESSIONS. You are not alone. If you are interested, please drop by and browse.’ When I read Shakespeare’s earlier novel The Dancer Upstairs (later made into a mediocre film, in which John Malkovich gave a surprisingly inert performance), I realised how fine a novelist he was. This latest work shows him to be one of our dozen or so best. To order this book at £10.39, see LR Bookshop on page 37

LITERARY REVIEW August 2007

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