An undistinguished thing
Anne Chisholm
OBLIVION by Josephine Hart Chatto, f12.99, pp. 201 Reading this book is like finding your- self sitting next to a fashionably thin and very well-dressed person at a dinner party, who eats nothing, says little, looks sad and generally manages to convey enigmatic sensitivity and serious depths. Gradually, after you have worked away at trying to sympathise, to. understand, you realise that it is all a great waste of effort; there is less there than meets the eye.
Josephine Hart writes little books on big subjects. When her first novel, Damage, appeared she let it be known that her own early life was dominated by a tragic series of deaths; and her fiction is marked by a brave attempt to tackle huge, dark topics: lust, cruelty, despair. Now it is death's turn. Death has played a support- ing role in her stories before, but this time becomes her main theme, her target. As a writer, the one quality she does not lack is nerve.
Andrew Bolton is a youngish television journalist and a widower, suffering horribly in the aftermath of Laura's death. The book opens in his voice as he makes love to another woman, Sarah, while unable to banish thoughts of his wife. The hotel room is decorated in tasteful shades of grey and blue; the girl is tender and beautiful, but Andrew is in thrall to Laura's ghost and cannot keep death out of his thoughts. No wonder: her mother is deranged with grief and spying on him; his job requires him to conduct a rare television interview with an ageing woman playwright who turns out to be much obsessed with death herself. The core of the book is a fairly disastrous excerpt from her tip/ play, in which a sinis- ter Maitre d','or Maitre Death, presents in monotonous theatrespeak a series of dead people returned from the other side with pathetic and gruesome tales to tell. By the end of the book Andrew is beginning to recover, and, guiltily, to forget.
Inside its modish carapace, a simple, deeply felt story is struggling for breath. Josephine Hart is angry with death and with clichés about death, but she tries too hard, and her tense, staccato prose ensures that the many voices in her book all sound much the same. There are frequent allu- sions to great writers and thinkers Brecht, Beckett, Macchiavelli, Montale, Gide, Kant, Apollinaire, — and too many predictable quotations — Petrarch, Auden, E E Cummings, Yeats, Plath, Larkin. The effect is of an anxious literary and intellec- tual namedropping, an attempt to paper over the cracks in her own perception and style. Finally, the impression is of a small but determined talent in pursuit of the biggest, scariest subject around. But it just won't do: the Angel of Death is not to be caught in a butterfly net.
From a Sonnet History of Modern English Poetry
The Gods
The Gods made Art and Poetry and they All died within the memory of Men We tried and failed to find fresh things to say So dug them up and buried them again.
In chiselled verses chaste as Ancient Greek And enigmatic as the pyramids.
Myth and Allusion played at hide-and-seek, Something about the workers and the yids, Something about a secret that the Low, The festering filthy and the filthy rich, Will never understand, will never know, Who's in, who's out, what's what and which is which, Something about The Blood, The Mystery,
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