The Herald - The Herald Magazine
No sweet little mystery
milieu of his chosen period; a post-war world of itinerants and obsessives, of people with devastating secrets.
Unusual details catch his interest, from maps and dog racing to thatching and the wartime production of explosives at Waltham Abbey.
If his main theme is the shade and distortion that time can throw on the recollection of youth, a period of licence where self-invention is almost expected, Ondaatje’s subterranean theme is the enormous potential war can have to liberate men and women from their straitened circumstances, to throw them for the first time on their own resources and demonstrate the range of their previously-unsuspected capabilities.
This isn’t to glamourise war as such, but it’s of a piece with the shadowy, seductive allure of the Moth’s criminality, or of Nathaniel’s later recruitment into the intelligence services.
It shows that “warlight” can illuminate as much as disguise, although Ondaatje suggests the moral compromises that take place in its furtive glow will have to be paid for in the end.
There’s always the risk of the sententious in Ondaatje’s prose, the stumble into aphorism, but this is easily his most satisfying and seductive novel in years.
It’s also his most English book, lingering on the place names of great swathes of Suffolk and south London, the same places Ondaatje must have know as a child when he moved from Sri Lanka.
With his earlier novel The Cat’s Table dramatising that oceanic journey, it seems Ondaatje might perhaps be in the process of writing fictionalised autobiography, plummeting from the present into those hidden depths of memory and childhood. Faber and Faber, £16.99
KUDOS is the final novel in Rachel Cusk’s trilogy about a female writer who has “come to believe more and more in the virtues of passivity, and of living life as unmarked by self-will as possible.”
That quote is from the first book, Outline, published in 2014. The second book, Transit, was released in 2016. These highly stylised novels have not so much rejected literary convention as completely ignored it. As such, they are not easy to encapsulate in one sentence.
If I were to tell you that in Outline the narrator goes to Greece to teach on a creative writing programme, or that in Transit, the dramatic background is the renovation of the narrator’s new flat in London, you could not be blamed for questioning my judgment in regarding them as among the best novels of recent years.
Like the other novels, Kudos keeps the narrator as a cipher, although we know some basics: she has two children, she is divorced, and her name is Faye. Her one identifiable trait is that she lives at one remove from the world, as if she is suffering from some deep rupture in her being. A lesser novelist might have created a retrospective narrative that discovered the psychological fall-out behind Faye’s isolation. Cusk, thankfully, is much too unconventional. Instead, Faye is a receptacle for other people’s stories. So, each new person she meets further eclipses her own self. The more she experiences, the less she becomes. In an interview for Outline, Cusk described her narrator as having an “annihilated perspective”.
The structure of Kudos resembles the hotel Faye is staying at while she attends a book festival in an unnamed European country. Upon her arrival, she meets her publisher in the bar. “He asked me how I liked the hotel and I said that I had found its circularity surprisingly confusing. Several times already I had tried to go somewhere and found myself back where I started. I hadn’t realised, I said, how much of navigation is the belief in progress, and the assumption of fixity in what you have left behind.” There are no fixed assumptions in Cusk’s novelistic world: the conversations – which are more like monologues delivered to her – question our base notions about family, gender, love, literature and the publishing industry. That we know each person will tell their story in the same voice as the last, all her characters sound remarkably similar, means Cusk runs the risk of being banal and predictable. Somehow, however, she never is.
Kudos consistently exposes the contradictions of our modern lives. One conference attendee, called Eduardo, tells Faye a story as evidence that “it is the very intentness of our own will that causes us to be blind to other realities”.
It involves Dutch friends of his whom decide to go on a holiday to an “unpopulated wilderness” in southern Europe. They key an address into their satnav, drive to their destination, and relax, almost glorifying in how easy it is to be suddenly so free from their day-today existence.
When they set off for home, however, their Satnav breaks and they realise they have no idea where they are. They drive around for hours desperately searching for petrol and a way out. “All that time, he said, when they thought they were free, they were in fact lost without knowing it.”
Cusk’s prose veers between absurdist, grotesque and ironic comedy. For example, a director of the book festival tells her – one of the visiting writers, remember - that “the attempt to make a public concern out of a private pastime – reading and writing – was spawning a literature of its own, in that many of the writers here excelled at public appearances while producing work she found frankly mediocre.”
She is described as a “tiny, sinewy woman with a childlike body and a large, bony, sagacious face in which the big, heavy-lidded eyes had an almost reptilian patience, occasionally slowly blinking”. Writing like this is in evidence throughout the three books, right up to and including the exquisitely unnerving final scene in Kudos. They leave the reader with a sense that everyday life, far from being quotidian, is a mysterious and troubling realm, more like a surreal dream than a cogent reality.