Nuanced account of a family’s history
Vincent O’Sullivan’s prose is densely detailed, picking up the culture of each age and generation, writes Nicholas Reid.
Vincent O’Sullivan is one of New Zealand’s best-known poets and a prolific writer of short stories. But in a career spanning over half a century, All This By Chance is only his third novel.
It is such a compellingly written and accomplished piece of work that it is surprising that he has not written more often in this form.
On the simplest level this novel is, as the cover blurb says, a ‘‘multigenerational family saga’’, moving from parents to their adult children to their adult grandchildren.
Stephen Ross, an inexperienced young New Zealander, goes to London in the late 1940s to train as a pharmacist. He meets and marries Eva, and brings her back to Auckland to raise a family. Eva thinks of herself as thoroughly English, deliberately blotting out her childhood years.
But we soon learn that she is of East European Jewish parentage and was transported to England as a child to escape the Nazis before the Holocaust started in earnest. Stephen goes along with her chosen amnesia. The two will live placidly pretending something important in the past never happened.
How this denial of the past affects the following generations is one major thread of the novel.
As an adult, Stephen and Eva’s daughter Lisa apparently takes no interest in her mother’s background. By contrast, their son David zealously re-embraces the Jewishness his mother denies.
This is at best the barest premise of this novel, which moves from the 1940s to the early 21st century with a large cast of characters, and across locations as diverse as Greece in the 1960s and a Catholic mission in the middle of nowhere in Africa. From a family friend there is also a vivid reconstruction of what life was like in Ravensbruck concentration camp.
In part, All This By Chance tells us
Rats tell us more about ourselves than we might wish to know. If you provide them with unlimited free booze, ‘‘for the first few days they go a bit crazy, but then most of them settle down to two drinks a day: one just before feeding (which the scientists refer to as the cocktail hour) and one just before bedtime (the nightcap)’’. The dominant male of the colony remains teetotal, though, while lowstatus males drink the most.
This entertaining study of drunkenness makes for a racy sprint through human history. Food surpluses create priests, bureaucrats, writers and other useless parasites. They also create beer, which stores better than bread, is antibacterial and doesn’t need baking.
The ancient Egyptians embraced sex and drunkenness ardently. Mark Forsyth’s depiction of the Festival of Drunkenness in honour of the goddess Hathor, in which everyone got plastered, fornicated and then fell asleep, sounds much like a Saturday night out in Cardiff, only with less rain. And more religious significance.
In fact, this is the heart of Forsyth’s thesis: drunkenness hasn’t been pursued by mankind merely for pleasure or escapism, but also for authentic spiritual insight. It is this angle on the subject that makes Forsyth’s account something more than just a jolly romp through the ages, with a focus on how often alcohol and religious feeling go together.
The Bible is genially in favour of drinking. Jesus famously turned a whopping 120 gallons of water into wine and wine, of course, is central to the Mass/Holy Communion.
Islam is more confused on the subject than Christianity, promising ‘‘rivers of wine’’ in heaven in exchange much about how different generations of young New Zealanders have interpreted the big world called Overseas. Stephen in the 1940s, Lisa in the 1960s and a granddaughter in the 2000s react to Europe in very different ways.
More essential, though, is what the novel says about the hold that the past has over us, how the past shapes us whether we like it or not, and how lethal it can be to pretend uncomfortable parts of the past never happened.
This novel is about time, remembrance and the persistence of family traits, even when they have been ignored. And it is at least possible that the title All This By Chance is ironical. Various characters in the novel hold firm religious beliefs, which do not see blind chance as shaping us, while others have an agnostic looseness that does not speculate on such matters.
O’Sullivan’s prose is densely detailed, picking up fine nuances in the culture of each age and generation. It is as outstanding a novel as has been produced in this country in the past 10 years. for abstaining now, although the Koran also commends wine in the here and now, in Surah 16:67. Perhaps this explains the habits of Sultan Murad IV (1623-40), who would wander the streets of Istanbul utterly pifflicated, and murder anyone he caught drinking.
Forsyth struggles to maintain his jaunty tone when evoking the horrors of the 18th-century gin craze, though, after which the high-minded teetotalism of the Methodists and the Victorians comes as a relief. But promoting teetotalism sometimes backfires.
In 1914, Nicholas II outlawed vodka in Russia. Thus ‘‘1914-17 are the only three years in Russian history when the population has been sober enough to notice exactly what their government were doing to them’’, hence the revolution.
As for humanity’s future, Forsyth is optimistic that it lies in the stars specifically, in the stellar nebula near the heart of our Milky Way, Sagittarius B2N, ‘‘an unimaginably vast cloud of naturally occurring space alcohol’’. – The Sunday Times