A clever and devilish narrative
Clever title. Clever concept too, in this South Island poet’s debut novel. Theodore De’Ath, devotee of literary classics referencing the Underworld, eventually has to endure the more immediate and squalid hell of World War I. (What will publishers do for material when the centenary has passed?)
It’s a narrative with a narrator who’s not only unreliable but unidentifiable for some time, until you realise — no spoiler here — that he’s Mephistopheles. The tempter provides prelude, a fair number of interludes, a postlude. Clever again.
The plot? Theodore is born in 1888, on a night of gales bellowing through Cook Strait. It’s a childhood of gardens and gentleness. It’s also a vulnerable one: there’s death by bee sting and strychnine, plus the shock of school, where precocious young Theodore is “a stranger arriving at a vast citadel”.
Friendships form. He falls in love, lyrically and longingly. He falls also for books and ideas. At university, the life of the mind and the rewards of academia open before him. We even get the text of one of his lectures.
However, it’s wartime, with its bellicose bigotry, the wrecking of shops owned by German-sounding names, Lady Stout and her Anti-German League determined to “root out the ‘Hun Hog’.”
Theodore loathes the jingoism, the brutishness, but he reluctantly enlists and is soon in Flanders. He’s wounded during a messy confrontation in No Man’s Land. It’s while he recuperates that he makes a decision that takes the story in a startling, increasingly tragic direction, with more random death, brief serenity and affection, a final act of crushing stupidity.
Majella Cullinane writes with much respect for her characters, though authority figures sometimes dwindle into caricature. Theodore’s rich, even tumultuous inner life is well rendered. Goethe, Freud, Dante are all quoted; you’re in the presence of two good minds — protagonist and author.
There’s some fine writing. Actually, there’s a lot of fine writing; most actions and/or utterances come attended by at least one metaphor, simile, philosophical aside or scholarly reference. It’s appropriate to what Theodore is and becomes but it doesn’t always mean a compelling narrative. Rather less might bring rather more.
In the past four years, whole warehouses of titles have tried to evoke the human condition in the inhuman context of World War I. Cullinane does so with sensitivity and commendable fidelity.