Windows on the world
by Tessa Hadley
It's not only David who is made queasy by the reality of married intimacy. His son Ed, 32, a solicitor, married to lovely ex-dancer Rosalie, "has intimations already - that marriage can impose a sort of heaviness that never lifts, a sort of muting of the senses". Rosalie desperately wants a baby. Ed is willing to want one too, to make her happy; but his private ironic vision of her character and desires doesn't bode well. "He knows how desperately she wants a little acolyte following her into the magical world of dance and he knows that she longs to dress her up for children's parties." The novel makes delicious short work of the domesticating pieties. Men feel penned inside the shelters women make. David has never liked the family home in Camden, Nancy's domain; he sees uniform brick boxes, individuated by touches of gentrification. His roots in London are in the old Soho of male camaraderie and bohemianism and illicit sexual frisson. Women spin "little myths around the family" to protect themselves from horror outside ("tsunami, earthquakes, murder, torture, betrayal"); "mothers lie on demand". Men in their sceptical truth-seeking disassemble the myths. Without Nancy's tending, the Camden house reveals itself as dingy and dated, and David longs to be rid of it.
When his daughter Lucy spends the night there, however, wearing one of her beloved mother's nighties, we see the home differently through her eyes: as a source of self, an enriching continuity. And through the twists of plot as the novel develops we understand that Ed's male sophisticated ironies won't necessarily overmaster Rosalie's female magical thinking. "She is a believer in moments - intense, meaningful, fateful, numinous, although he doubts if she knows the word". He may know the word, but it's Rosalie who makes the thing happen. She does get pregnant, in an act that takes a leap of faith, and imagination; her treachery is of a different order altogether from the ordinary kind Ed gets up to with the trainee in the office.
Retired, David has shed more than just his ill-fitting marriage. He's grown so thin, working out at the gym, that friends and family worry that he's ill. Cartwright dwells unmercifully on this time of reckoning, between a powerful man's prime and his decline. It isn't vanity, exactly, that drives David: he knows all about "his nipples obdurately puckered" and the "threads of grey hair on his chest". He's burdened by a lifetime's glib approximations, reporting to camera or reading from the autocue at Global television with "bogus gravitas", processing and packaging the suffering of the world for easy consumption. From underneath all this falsity, he needs to disinter what's true. Last reckonings beckon him, in the person of his eccentric, dying brother Guy, who's failed in everything - wives, children, career - but obstinately pursues transcendence in the Kalahari. Guy's a good invention, a flawed and obstinate prophet, sympathetic but comically inept.
How can David escape glibness, though, in this language of his inward narration - and of Ed's and Lucy's narrations too - which processes and packages unrelentingly? It is a problem that there's no difference between the novel's register of David's conventional fluency, and its register in the places where he's meant to come nearest to transcending that. In fact, whenever the language gets closest to a core of meaning, it tends to fall into quotation (from Camus, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, the Venerable Bede and others). These sublime imports, though, can't stop the hole; when David's at his most serious and trying hardest for the truth, he always sounds like the version of seriousness you get on the telly: speaking of "the never-ending and restless human desire to make some meaning out of life", or telling us that "under the Kalahari stars you see things differently".
No comments:
Post a Comment