Kitchenly 434 by Alan Warner
an enthusiast, with too much detail, and not enough perspective.
Yet as always, he constructs a compelling page-turner of a plot, threaded with wry and sometimes piercing social observation of the many ways the world has changed over the last quarter century, not least because of the internet revolution through which we have lived.
And in the end, the human story of Jerry and Millicent’s journey away from the worlds in which they had been trapped, and of the connection between them that helps them to make their escape, has an almost fairy-tale quality that is difficult to resist; as the aged crone sweeps the young hero away on a terrifying journey, only to find herself transformed into a kind of fairy godmother, opening gateways to a world of freedom and creativity of which our hero could previously only have dreamed.
The fly-leaf here is a good primer for readers, so before getting to page one we know that the narrator is called Crofton Clark, and that he is the steward – or “help” – in an English country house called Kitchenly Mill Race, owned by a rock star called Marko Morrell. We also are told it is set in 1979.
Even before the novel proper, the reader encounters a paragraph in the style of 19th century novels outlining what will happen. Then the unsettling settles in, as the reader tries to get a fix on our narrator.
An image emerges of Crofton. He is somewhat obsessive about the place and narrates in a mildly officious style. Every first-person novel is in some ways a challenge to the reader. So what can we learn about the narrator?
Is Crofton a wilfully blind prog-rock version of Stevens in The Remains Of The Day, or a gentle fantasist like Billy Liar or Reginald Perrin, or something more sinister? Moreover, we know precisely where and when the story unfolds, but when and where is the story being told?
Over the course of the novel we get various misadventures and Crofton as a character starts to become human to us. The fly-leaf calls it “tragicomic” and the final pages deliver on the tragic part of that, but do so in an almost science-fiction style, dislocating in time.
Kitchenly 434 is an exercise in disorientation. But then Warner’s work has always been intriguing and this, I feel, is his most ambitious and haphazard novel since The Man Who Walks. There is a strange echo of Nabokov, whose novels were similarly unreliable and designed as man-traps of a sort. The voice of Crofton, by turns lyrical, lachrymose and ludicrous, is a peculiar elegy.