Monsieur Ka by Vesna Goldsworthy
Ysenda Maxtone Graham
Monsieur Ka By Vesna Goldsworthy Chatto & Windus £12.99 Oldie price £11.56 inc p&p
The notes I took while reading this novel show just how slow I was to work out what was going on.
‘Freezing winter of 1947. Narrated in first person by Albertine (‘Ber’). She and her husb. Albert have arr. in London from Alexandria. She French Jewish, he English, quite square. They kiss by Albert Memorial in snow but you get feeling she’s not really in love with him. She goes to work for old Russian man, Monsieur Carr, in Chiswick (Bedford Park). Reads Madame Bovary to him. He eats cabbage soup and pickled mushrooms. Pancakes and sweet cheese. Lives in rooms full of gaudy Russian clutter. Samovar. Tea syrupy, smoky and black as coffee.’ The notes continue: ‘Mr Carr was a Karenin and knew the Vronskys! They go to Shepperton Studios where he’s the “period consultant” for Alexander Korda’s film of Anna Karenina. OMG! Mr Carr actually is Seryozha! He’s Anna’s son! Monsieur Carr – English for “Ka”.’
That’s a real ‘For it is he’ moment. Ah, so this whole novel is built on the conceit that little Seryozha, born to the Karenins in Anna Karenina in the 1870s, lived through the Russian Revolution and wound up as a gentle, wistful, 83-yearold White Russian grandfather in London. He tells his life story to Ber, who becomes his memoirist.
So we learn what happened, from Seryozha’s point of view. His father, the icy Alexei Karenin, made the whole household pray five times a day for the sinning wife and mother. He then sent Seryozha to Germany as a young student, as he couldn’t bear to look at him because he reminded him of Anna. Both of them were ‘enslaved’ by Anna’s suicide. Seryozha never knew how his mother died or where she was buried.
After a terrible escape from Russia, during which his wife, Tonya, had to resort to prostitution in Istanbul, the couple arrived in London in 1924 with their son, Alexei. Seryozha got a job – as so many real-life aristocratic Russians did – answering the phone at a Mayfair hotel. Tonya was killed in the Blitz.
We glimpse some of the other characters. Anna and Vronsky’s illegitimate daughter, Annie, is now living in Soviet Russia, a mother of three, ‘suffering or making others suffer’ – those are the only two options for living under the Soviet regime. Levin’s son is now high up in the Bolshevik ranks, and he was the person who had the humanity to release Monsieur Carr from his spell in a Soviet prison.
Gosh, it’s a strange book. I liked it. It’s hung about with a pall of exile and sadness, and with the grey chill of that freezing 1947 winter: ‘an English January, kind to the body, cruel to the soul’. London smelled of coal fires and rubble. Everyone in the novel is homesick. Albert and Ber never refer to their gloomy flat in Earl’s Court as ‘home’; just as ‘here’.
Anna-like, Ber falls in love with a man who is not her husband, and the plot deepens. The whole novel is written in a hush: I found myself reading it in a whisper inside my head, the whole thing muffled by snow and gloom, with only occasional bursts of joy. Sometimes, people speak for too long: you come to those sequences of paragraphs with a quotation mark at the beginning but not at the end, indicating that the character will still be talking in the next paragraph. Do people really talk for that long in real life, except in sermons?
Vesna Goldsworthy’s first novel, Gorsky, was a reworking of The Great Gatsby set in 21st-century London: the narrator, instead of being Nick Carraway, is a Serbian immigrant, Nikola Kimovic, who finds himself living next door to an oligarch called Gorsky. Goldsworthy (who was herself born in Belgrade and is now a professor of creative writing at Exeter university) enjoys playing with the classics, and she’s good at it. She has Monsieur Carr speak this apposite sentence: ‘If you write a memoir, everyone looks for lies; if you write fiction, people search for the truth.’