Hutchinson
RRP $37.99
Reviewed by Maggie Rainy-Smith
You cannot help but be a little awed by the scope of Sebastian’ Faulk’s
imagination. In this novel he explores not just A Possible Life but many ‘possible lives’. They are all quite fascinating as stand-alone
stories, so the question arises... is
this a novel? That’s what I asked myself
as I was reading it. The back blurb
tells us “From the pain and drama of these highly particular lives emerges a
mysterious consolation; the chance to feel your heart beat in someone else’s
life. And it’s true. For Faulks has this extraordinary ability to
make you feel as if you do inhabit his character’s lives.
It’s true too that
the stories are sometimes linked by a chance detail that catches you unaware
suggesting our connectedness, or at least that of his characters. The first story ‘A Different Man’ begins with
the mostly unremarkable Geoffrey Talbot who having been rejected from the
Diplomatic Service takes up a teaching career.
And then at the start of World War II, he volunteers for service and
through interesting circumstances (a failure as a trainee officer), instead of
the front-line, he ends up working as a spy in France. It’s a benign sort of story as it begins,
but remember this is the writer who called the most harrowing account of trench
warfare ‘Birdsong’ – so don’t be fooled.
The first story moves unexpectedly into the gruesome heart of a
concentration camp. I found myself
deeply shocked at the imaginative detail of this part of the story. And then the story returns to the more
benign, as Geoffrey resumes his teaching position, traumatised by his war
experience. It ends on an affecting note
when he falls ill and one of his former students visits him in hospital, a
small but very touching incident – this mixing of the extreme and the ordinary,
something Faulks is so good at.
The second
story, Part II the Second Sister, begins
rather bleakly with the narrator aged seven being dropped off at the Union
House by his Mother because the family
have hit hard times(he’s one of the middle children of five so they had to
cruelly choose which child they will abandon to the Union House). But bleak as it may begin, this story is of
survival and I found strangely sad, but also oddly uplifting. The narrator learns to live by his wits and
to get ahead and finds love and it is his love story that is the most
unusual. I’d just been to Bats theatre
and seen ‘White Cloud’ by Ken Duncum and Tim Finn, and one of the Pakeha
settler characters sang/spoke a narrative about an ancestor who had suffered a
peculiar malady, a sort of temporary loss of sanity and mobility. In this Second Sister story, a similar thing
occurs and I think had I not been to the play, I may well have doubted this
story’s even fictional credibility.
‘Everything can be
explained’ is the third story and set in the future, 2029 in fact. It is the story of Elena and Bruno, raised as
brother and sister. It’s both a story
of and explanation for love and a rather complex almost parable. The mutant gene for human self-awareness
is discovered by accident. There’s a
moment when Bruno and Elena meet up, as adults with separate lives and Bruno
says “ ... ‘But the trouble with me, said Bruno, ‘is that I have more than one story. You’re the main character in this one. In the hills here.’ He put his hand against
his head.” I recall reading something
very similar recently in Iain Banks’ ‘Stonemouth’, a line I loved but forgot to
quote in my review of this book “we all sort of secretly think our lives are like these very long
movies, with ourselves as the principal characters.”
Part IV – A Door into Heaven is
primarily the story of Jeanne who ‘was said to be the most ignorant person in
the Limousin village where she had lived most of her life.’ Indeed, this is the first sentence of this
section. But Jeanne’s very small
ignorant life is magnified to have meaning through her constant and enduring
faith, the very thing that keeps her ignorant is both beautiful and
terrible. And even when Marcel one of
the young children she is responsible for as a child, returns maimed from war
to find comfort at the family home where Jeanne still lives - and begins reading
to her from the bible (awful stories she’s never heard before that she hates),
her faith remains unshaken. A farmhouse
that is part of Geoffrey Talbot’s story, a century or so later, is also,
briefly part of Jeanne’s life.
Part V – You Next Time is a small
masterpiece really. Faulks has inhabited
the life of a musician in 70’s California. I had no idea, but I see from other
reviews I have read, that it is loosely based on Joan Baez (Guardian review by
Helen Dunmore) and then locally, Christopher Howe reviewing on his blog for the
Booksellers NZ reckons it is “the re-imagining of the love affair between Joni
Mitchell and Graham Nash”. Whomever it
is loosely based on, the imaginative detail is impressive and you could almost
believe that Faulks himself had inhabited this life. Of course, I’ve not been a
muso in the 70’s in California and so I can only join Faulks here in the
imaginative leap, but it was fascinating.
If you are the good fortune to be something of an old muso and have a
half decent knowledge of music, this section will reward two-fold. I know I missed out here, having no technical
skills in the understanding of music and how it is created, but for a short
while, I felt I did. This too is a
powerful love story.
I end with the question still on
my lips… is it a novel and how is it a novel?
I think about Fiona Kidman’s latest collection of short stories ‘The
Trouble with Fire’ and how the stories are linked by the theme of fire both
actual and metaphorical – and how too, characters reappear in stories and yet,
this is unequivocally, a collection of short stories. Is this because Kidman tells us so, and is ‘A
Possible Life’ a novel merely because Faulks has the audacity to say so?
Well, here is the final sentence
from the final section (and not a plot spoiler I might add). “So when
eventually my hour comes and I go down in that darkness, into the blackness of
the black-painted wings, there’ll be no need to mourn me or repine. Because I think we’re all in this thing, like
it or not, for ever.”
So, does the last
sentence somehow make this collection, finally, a novel -.....? I’ll leave it
for you to decide for yourself because whatever genre you agree or disagree on,
you’ll no doubt agree with me, the stories are a fascinating look at the human
condition, what makes us who we are, nature versus nurture, the whole
existential shebang.
Footnote:
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