by Samantha Harvey
328 pages, Vintage Books
by Paul Harding
191 pages, Windmill Books
Review by Marc Nash
What is literary fiction exactly? I'm told
I write it, but to compare it to these two prize-winning literary fiction books,
I am none the wiser. Tinkers won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and The
Wilderness, nominated for every literary prize going in Britain, won a Betty
Trask first novel award.
Not very much happens in either book, as
both deal with the slow swandive towards death and look back on lives lived, in
which again, nothing much the ordinary foibles and frailties of mankind happened.
Both books are beautifully written in terms of language and imagery. Both
attempt to be philosophical as they consider the human condition, but both,
despite adopting narrative conceits to try and set up such philosophical
inquiries, actually fail to deliver any wider profundity about our species
beyond the fates of their respective protagonists.
Tinkers has a man dying at home in his bed,
surrounded by his family. He imagines the walls of the room he is in collapsing
in on him in Chapter 1 and this leads to an expectation in me, the reader, that
we are in for some wild distortions of his perception as he sinks towards
eternal unconsciousness. No such luck. His recollections of life as a boy, the
son of an itinerant tinker in the wilderness of Maine, proceed in very orderly
narrative fashion. This is no less than a fictional memoir, for all its little
flourishes of highly literary writing, such as his father's dealings with a
hermit, his love of repairing clock mechanisms, or the portrayal of his epileptic
fits and his wife's practical dealing with them and her shielding of the
children from any real awareness.
Good as these set pieces are, the novel
rambles beyond Chapter 1 and offers few other such tasty morsels throughout.
For a man lying on his deathbed, I found it curious that the bulk of his
recollections surrounded his own father, even if presumably he is about to
rejoin him on the other side. His own mental instability and relationship
ruptures are skimpily dealt with very late on in the novel. For a book about an
itinerant, it didn't really deviate and wander off the beaten track an awful
lot. Style over substance in this case did not quite sate my appetite, whetted
by such a strong opening.
Wilderness sees a man casting back, or
trying to cast back on his life, impeded by his descent into dementia.
Fractured memories slip away, as he tries to glue them back together again.
There is a hint of narrative being subverted, as memories are reconstituted but
differing from their previous airing. But this is only lightly offered
throughout as a framing mechanism. Again some of the writing is ravishingly
beautiful, to match its bleak marshland of Lincolnshire, where the novel is
set. "...her body lost to the blanket; he only knew her lap was there
because the bible was resting on it, otherwise she was a swirl, a question
mark, an open question".
Why this book didn't work for me was that
the main character, who is losing his memory and identity, isn't really all that
appealing. While I felt sympathy for his plight, I didn't really pity him, nor
did I welcome gathering knowledge of the petty touchstones of his life. He is
unfaithful to his wife and always wishing for his lost love. Yet he impugns his
wife for her perfection, which "gets a bit wearing sometimes". He
uprooted his family from London to return to his childhood landscape, the
wilderness of Lincolnshire, with his perpetually unrealised dream of building
them a house made entirely of glass. If he is eternally dissatisfied with life
and the state of things, it is entirely his own fault. He is not a man who sees
anything through.
So two books about looking back on really
rather small, unremarkable lives, framed in such a way as to set them up as
considerably larger than they in fact turn out to be. I think if one is to
offer up the consideration of a life in such a portentous way, then something
really rather daring has to be done with the narrative structure and
particularly that part played by time and how that impacts on memory. I felt
both books in their different ways foundered upon this snag. Both ultimately
served up rather linear stories of a life, even though "Wilderness"
ought to have fractured and dismantled any such linearity through its conceit
of failing, elusive memory. Literary fiction as beautiful, atmospheric writing
I don't believe is enough. It has to deal in narrative form that best services
its material and make the reading experience an interactive one, rather one
that just calls for the reader to lie back and bask in the language. But then I
have never won a literary prize.
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