Cracking up in Beirut
Anna Vaux
GRANDMOTHER WOLF by Patricia Tyrrell Weidenfeld, £12.99, pp. 280, ISBN 0297848968 ✆ £11.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 Patricia Tyrrell’s previous book told the story of a young girl reunited with her mother from whom she had been abducted when she was a toddler. It won her admirers for its resonant exploration of loss and reunion, alienation, trust and betrayal. It also won her a publisher: The Reckoning was self-published until shortlisted for the Encore Prize, a prize for second novels, though Tyrrell has said it was her tenth book.
Her third — or eleventh — should also win admirers for its quietly compelling story of an elderly lady, the grandmother of the title, and the grandson she’s never met, in which Tyrrell is drawn again to fractured emotional lives in peculiar and shadowy circumstances.
It is set in Beirut towards the end — or an end — of civil war. Madeleine is the widow of the founder of a large Lebanese bank, and has lived out the years of fighting in a house abutting the Line, one wall blown in, which can only be accessed down a narrow alleyway and through a ruined cinema. This she calls her ‘loved cosy prison’, luxuriously furnished as it is with cut-velvet chairs and a beautiful hanging tapestry, to which she retreats as to a ‘sheltering womb’.
Rick is 18, and was born and brought up in Seattle. Both his parents are dead. He has run up gambling debts, crashed a car, had trouble with a girl and made an attempt at suicide. This has not pleased the bank, which is not enamoured either of Rick’s professed intention of relinquishing his fortune and living in the woods. It is ‘bad for business’. Offered a choice between an extended stay in a psychological institution or some time with his grandmother in Beirut (the bank has faith in her transforming powers), Rick chooses the latter.
It is a pleasing cleverness of the book that Rick is seen from the third-person point of view, while Madeleine is in charge of her own story, the narratives tagging each other as in the children’s game the title is reminiscent of. It is also the central scheme of a novel that is much concerned with watching and looking, surface appearances and hidden depths, and in which large pieces of the jigsaw are mysteriously hidden. Standing gazing at the Line from Madeleine’s window, Rick feels ‘he’d gone one extra step and an unearthly abyss had swallowed him’. Madeleine scrutinises Rick’s face but doubts she’ll fathom ‘that superlatively clean and conscience-driven background of his’.
Questions float to the surface: what is Madeleine’s son Georges, a Phalangist militiaman, really doing in his jewellery shop? Where does her beautiful daughter Brigitte disappear to throughout the night? And there is also something harder to pin down: Rick asks, what must it have been like to live in Beirut these 15 years? What Madeleine asks is, what might living in Beirut do to you? — and this is the book’s most poignant question.
Tyrrell’s is a suggestive method, which undoes certainties. Truth in the book, as Rick painfully learns, is as shimmering and multifaceted as the jewels that Georges sells and Madeleine loves so much. It is with a suitably puzzled image that his slide into Beirutisation is marked, his ‘bland’ American wholesomeness seen cracked across his face ‘like the crazing on a worn plate’, his ‘porcelain illusions’ broken. When Brigitte (a photographer) takes a photograph of her mother, Madeleine does not recognise herself: the camera cannot lie, but Brigitte knows it can distort, and something other can be revealed.
Tyrrell works her symbolism densely, and it is one of the virtues of her writing that this is so unobtrusive. Reading her book is like entering Madeleine’s house, down its dark alleyway and through the ruined cinema, where images echo and what is revealed is all the more haunting for being viewed obliquely.
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