Lofty aspirations drown in tedium
TO HEAVEN BY WATER Justin Cartwright (Bloomsbury £16.99)
Desert storm: Justin Cartwright's latest novel is set in the Kalahari and London
Saturday July 18 2009
If, as his admirers insist, Justin Cartwright is among the finest contemporary British novelists, then that explains a lot about the current vapid state of English fiction. Indeed, while aspiring to highbrow insights, South African-born Cartwright only succeeds in peddling high-flown twaddle.
The reader's alarm registers from the first page as retired television news anchor David sits in the Kalahari desert listening to his older brother Guy reciting Hopkins's linguistically difficult poem, The Windhover, which is quoted in its entirety. The message is clear: this is going to be a serious book with weighty literary, artistic and political allusions.
Thus, back in London where most of the novel is set, there's a flurry of lofty references -- to Dylan Thomas, Darcey Bussell, Edmund Dulac, Jane Austen, Francis Bacon, Coleridge and Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. And this is is before the story has really even begun.
David's wife has recently died and his offspring -- solicitor Ed and antique coins expert Lucy -- expect him to remain bereaved. Instead, David feels unaccountably liberated by his single state. Yet Ed and Lucy keep fussing over him and worrying about him. The reader, though, feels less tolerant towards a man who reflects that "if you are middle-aged you are obliged to be glib" without realising that he's the epitome of glibness himself.
But if David is tiresomely shallow, his children are positively infuriating. Ed and his neurotic ballet dancer wife Rosalie spend most of their time trying to conceive a child -- a situation not helped by Ed's fling with a young legal assistant in his office. Lucy meanwhile is trying to find emotional and sexual fulfilment while warding off the threatening behaviour of a jilted boyfriend.
The problem is that Cartwright wants us to care about these tedious people when, in fact, they never rise above the level of trendy social stereotypes. It's especially hard to sympathise with the ageing David when he sees nothing amiss about having a one-night stand with his daughter-in-law, who then becomes pregnant. In real life this would raise some rather vexing questions; though in Cartwright's fictional world, it appears to have no consequences. But by this stage the reader has lost all patience with such Mills & Boon insights as "women are more interested in the emotional aspect of sex than men are".
Towards the end, back in the Kalahari desert with his older brother, David reflects on his relationship with his late wife. "I loved Nancy," he suddenly realises, "and I had to come and sit in a bloody cave to know it."
But what about the hapless reader, who's expected to sit in the bloody cave with him, listening to such unearned platitudes?
- John Boland
