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We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“SALT PICNIC” by Patrick
Evans (Victoria University Press, $NZ30)
This
is a very odd way to begin a review of a novel by the erudite Patrick Evans,
but as I read Salt Picnic, I couldn’t
help feeling how easily it could be turned into a conventional thriller. Very
naïve young woman comes to Spanish island in 1956. Mysterious Jewish-American
photographer persuades her to look into the affairs of a German doctor, who
lives in the same boarding house as she does. She snoops and fossicks through
the doctor’s effects. “Aha!” we immediately think. It’s only eleven years since
the Second World War ended and the photographer must be after some Nazi war
criminal, especially as Franco’s Spain is one place where such a person could
well be hiding out. We await some horrible revelation in the denouement.
Actually
there is an eventual horrible revelation and the story does (more or less) take
the form of an investigation. But all is not as we might have at first assumed
and the doctor is not German, even if he is a dodgy person.
More
to the point, Salt Picnic is
definitely not a thriller. In his
author’s note, Evans explains “This novel
concludes a trilogy that reflects the influence of the writing of Janet Frame
(1924-2004) on my creative imagination and my understanding of the world”.
The “trilogy” began with Gifted
(2010), which was specifically about Janet Frame, and went on with The Back of His Head (2015 – reviewed
on this blog), which deals with completely fictitious characters in the New
Zealand literary world. Evans now calls The
Back of His Head the conclusion of his “trilogy” and Salt Picnic the second book thereof. He goes on to explain that the
protagonist of Salt Picnic, Iola
Farmer, despite sharing some of the history and outward characteristics of
Janet Frame, is not Janet Frame but is a fictitious character. One on-line
reviewer has already suggested that Evans is possibly being especially tactful
to avoid the wrath of the people who control Janet Frame’s estate.
This
all requires a little unpacking.
Like
Janet Frame, Iola is, to English people, a “colonial” (presumably New
Zealander). Like Frame, she spends some months of 1956-57 living on the island
of Ibiza. In her past she has had some traumatic experience – for Janet Frame
time in a psychiatric hospital; for Iola Farmer, a story she wrote which might
have led a woman to commit suicide. Like Frame, Iola gets pregnant but aborts
the child … or does she? How Iola loses the child is unclear in the novel, and
at one point we are told “all the time
the child still inside her that she’d thought of killing but in the end, in the
end she hadn’t, had she, not at all: she’d brought him back with her. She
didn’t kill him after all.” (p.211) Like Frame, Iola remembers something
dreadful that happened to a sibling (Frame’s sister Myrtle drowned when Frame
was an adolescent; Iola remembers something happening to “Douglas”). She is
intensely interested in language and the meanings of words, and the novel is in
some sense an account of “the making of a novelist” as Iola digests experience
and gains confidence as a writer, so that “Here
they come, here come the words, here come the stories”, as the concluding
words of the novel say triumphantly.
One
could go further, and point out that much of the way Evans sets up the
psychological disposition of Iola Farmer is very like the received image of
Janet Frame. There is, for example, her fear of being lost in a crowd, or
caught up in the system bigger than herself, as when Iola recalls her journey
to Spain:
“Everything had been different from what she
expected, that was what she remembered – the ferry, of course, but before that
the Channel crossing, and Paris with its vast, hideous marketplace, and then
the train journey south and to the border and the wait to change to the new
gauge, the long, terrifying city walks when she hadn’t known how to get onto trams
and buses. Worst of all were the times when she found herself caught up in a
system she didn’t understand – any system, anything controlled by someone else,
anything controlled by them.” (p.15)
There
is her desire for a low profile and, if possible, anonymity, as when Iola tries
to explain to a Spanish railway official how some of her luggage is missing: “How to get across to him the fact that one
of the bags had someone else’s name on it, and that she’d kept it that way
because she’d preferred the anonymity? How to explain that she liked the idea
of someone else’s life story travelling around the world with her? It sounded
so irresponsible, so potty.” (p.32)
And
there is her sense that other people are more practical than she is, and more
at ease with the way the world runs: “How
was it that people seemed so easily to know what to do in this world, as if everybody
knew everything there was to be known – except her?” (p.33)
So
I could go on, picking out more Frame-like characteristics in the novel’s
protagonist. Yet, forsooth, Iola Farmer is not Janet Frame, says Patrick Evans.
Iola is a fictitious character; the people among whom she moves are fictional;
and much of what happens to her is fiction.
So
let’s imagine we’ve never heard of Janet Frame.
Let’s
consider what the novel itself appears to be saying.
On
the simplest level it deals with Europe as the inevitable lure for earlier
generations of “colonials” doing their OE. Iola remarks: “What else was there to do in this Old World where everything was
finished, everything had already taken place, all the work had been done? What
else but to look at it, what else but to see.” (p.23) Worn
out or not, Europe is still an essential destination for an aspiring New
Zealand writer. Just as she is – at the novel’s opening – literally a virgin in
sexual matters, so is Iola metaphorically a virgin where European culture is
concerned. But perhaps European culture is not what she needs in order to
develop? Symbolically, when she visited the Louvre, the Mona Lisa had been
removed and the blank space it left on the wall appeared more numinous than the
painting would be. This is the blank page on which she will write.
Quite
apart from the untutored antipodean’s reaction to Europe, however, there are
the objective facts of what Europe was in the 1950s, and especially what Spain
was. Nearly twenty years after the civil war, Spain in 1956 is still - officially at any rate – a reined-in and
somewhat puritanical society. As Daniel Bernard, Iola’s American photographer
friend, explains, modesty in public is enforced, people are supposed to cover
up on the beach and couples are meant to have a chaperone (p.148). But tourists
are beginning to pour into the Baleraric islands and mores are slowly changing even if, paradoxically, it is still a
suspicious society in which it remains important to know which side one fought
on in the civil war. Again it is Daniel Bernard who says: “No one ever forgets around here, there’s no forgiveness. Even now the Caudillo’s
starting to relax things a bit – well, so the word goes out there, they say the
old man’s relaxing the rules to get money from overseas, tourists, y’know the
kinda thing. And even now he’s, y’know, takin’ his boot off of the floor,
there’s no forgiveness. It’ll last as long as the people from the guerra
last. Unto the third generation.” (p.122)
This
is a culture in which civil war atrocities are still not spoken of. One such is
exposed in the denouement.
Because
it is so specifically set in this place and time, Salt Picnic is rich in description - in the sights and sounds and
smells of the locals. But recreating a past age and place is less important
than the novel’s most insistent theme, which is the development of a writer.
How does the writer’s mind evolve? Iola (who had the draft of a novel in her
lost luggage) sees things, and then they disappear; waking reality is contorted
and elaborated in dreams; she is often unsure of what she is seeing and
consciously offers alternative explanations; in other words, in some sense her
imagination is always at work, even as she tries to sound the depths of hard
material reality. She is always quizzing what she sees. She admires a painting,
but then the painting dissolves into its material constituents: “But had it ever been there in the first
place? The painting had died in front of her, and finally become oil and wax
and lead and resin, the charcoal sketch beneath that and the canvas beneath the
sketch, the contrivance and work that had enabled them, the tricks and wheezes
the artist had brought to the canvas each day…. As a painting, it had
disappeared.” (p.23)
Before
the writer can produce anything, she must first read the world that is before
her.
Iola
often misreads the world.
There
are matters of mistaken identity. She is given somebody else’s luggage. The
reputed German doctor is really an English doctor. Other people are mistaken in
things, too, but Iola has a special sort of naïvete. She admires the handyman
and gofer of the boarding house Antonio, and speaks with him. Then she begins
to have exalted ideas of him: “But poetry
– that was what he couldn’t speak about – that was what she couldn’t reach in
him. Slugs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails: fine. But not poetry. It must
be there - no one has no poetry in
him at all, she was sure of that. It was just a matter of finding where it was.
The romance of him, that’s what it was. To find things about him that had
happened, the colour of him, his taste. Those things about other people that
suddenly made them your own so that they never really left you and were always
part of the story you told yourself about you-and-the-world.” (p.103) But the
Antonio she eventually comes to know is nothing like this poetic figure. Nor is
the little boy Vicente the impish innocent she at first thinks he is. The two “sisters”
Magdalena and Concepcion do the cooking and cleaning up at the boarding house.
Iola interprets them as hardy peasant sorts. She later discovers their more
sinister backstories, related to the civil war.
In
all these cases, the real person who is exposed hardly resembles Iola’s
imaginings. And yet (a writer’s paradox) often the imagined person is more
precious to the aspiring writer than the real person.
Iola’s
greatest misreadings concern Daniel Bernard and the English Dr Almond. For the
New Zealand innocent, Daniel Bernard has all the exciting alienness of an
American, feeding her with delicious Hershey bars, pointing his Leica in all
directions and apparently aiming to be a great photo-journalist like his hero Robert
Capa and (clearly a left-winger) eulogising Ernest Hemingway. Bedazzled by
images she has seen in romantic movies ( Roman
Holiday et al), Iola is seduced by him and sees him as a romantic partner.
Yet it is he who sends her on a spying mission, breaking into the doctor’s room
to find information on him. And he in the end he does not conform to her
romantic image of him.
As for Dr Almond, he seems an old-fashioned
tweedy sort of English gent, with a slightly military air and a peremptory
speaking style, doing Times crossword
puzzles and listening to classical music. But there is a nasty history lesson
attached to him too. He is more extremely right-wing than Daniel Bernard is
left-wing.
As
well as reading the world clearly, the writer has to find an appropriate
language. Her own language. This is another insistence of the novel, as it so
often focuses on language itself. There is much mention of Ibiza as more a
Catalan island than a (Castilian) Spanish one, with characters often speaking Ibicenco
rather than Castellano. There is much evidence of characters talking across one
another, with no real understanding. However, Iola is aware that her
difficulties are not only with the local languages, but with English itself.
She is quick with word games and crossword puzzles. But there are episodes in
which she says something utterly conventional and dull, and realizes that she
is channelling her mother and saying what her mother would have said, rather
than expressing her own thoughts and feelings. She is looking for a language
that will express not only her own viewpoint, but her sense of alienness in the
Ibiza she is slowly discovering. At one point she battens on a book purloined
from the suspect doctor’s room, Charles Doughty’s Victorian classic Travels in Arabia Deserta. Its made-up,
pseudo-Elizabethan locutions seem to her a language entirely fitting for
Doughty’s purpose of expressing how foreign the desert is to him. But then how
does she convey in writing the foreign colloquial chatter she hears all around
her?
“There was nothing between all this and
herself, they just were. The bank of dead, stiff books in the doctor’s
bookshelves – how could they compete with voices like this? How was she to
write anything – where were the words, where was the language that could tell
more than this, the truth of the world?” (p.164)
Quite
apart from the Castellano- or Ibicenco-speaking people, there are the languages
of the two men who have the greatest impact on Iola. Daniel Bernard (often called
just “the American”) speaks racy American-English. Dr Almond speaks (or affects
to speak) upper-middle-class English-English. The novel makes much play of how
odd their pronunciation sounds to Iola’s Kiwi ears.
When
the American refers to Carl Jung, Iola hears him say “this guy
Young” and assumes there is somebody called Guy Young. She rankles at the
Amercan’s pronunciations “turdle” (=turtle),
“toytoys” (= tortoise) and so forth, and
when he speaks of “movies”, she still
wants to call them “films”. In the 1950s, New Zealanders were already used to
watching American films (think of all those romantic movies Iola has seen); but
these moments remind as that, back then, New Zealand was not as thoroughly
saturated with American idioms as it is now, thanks to 24/7 multi-channel TV,
the internet etc.
As
for the Englishman, he has the proprietary attitude towards the English
language and its pronunciation that many Englishmen still assume. He pronounces
salt as “sault” and corrects the
colonial Iola when she refers to the PallMall brand of cigarettes. He insists
it be said as “PellMell”. (Most
non-English people, including New Zealanders, would probably pronounce it “PaulMaul”).
Iola
is either baffled or intimidated by these two variants of the English language. When with the Englishman there is (at first) an element of cultural cringe. When with
the American, there is excitement and attraction. But is it going too far to suggest
that both these non-New Zealand varieties of language are temptations that Iola
has to overcome before she can speak comfortably in her own voice?
I
have dealt with Salt Picnic as
dealing with Europe and Spain as they were once; with the attraction of the old
OE; and with the development of a writer in terms of gaining a clearer vision
of reality and finding her own voice. Of course ticking off ideas and themes
like this tells you nothing about the novel’s quality or impact.
There
is a major down side to the novel. Put simply, Iola’s (initial) naïvete often
becomes oppressive. Given that she is a young adult and not a child, does she
have to be so ignorant of the Spanish Civil War when she comes to Ibiza? Or
were most tourists to that part of the world then completely uninterested in
politics and history? Possibly so, but we do sometimes have Iola discovering
the bleeding obvious as if it is a great revelation.
Again,
given that Iola is established as both shy and poor at socialising, how
credible is it that she could be persuaded to play the role of snooping
detective? [Iola knows she is entering foreign territory when she breaks into
doctor’s room, and there are sly references to Alice-in-Wonderland’s “drink me” as she feels small and a
little overwhelmed.]
I
might be told that Janet Frame had both her naïvetes and her venturesome
side. But then Patrick Evans has told us that this is not a novel about Janet
Frame. It’s about a fictitious character called Iola Farmer doing fictitious
things. So the burdens of credibility and verisimilitude still rest with the
author.
Good to see you are back at work.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed this book as I read it, but I was delighted when I twigged what Evans was doing at page 380! See my review at https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/04/17/salt-picnic-by-patrick-evans-bookreview/
ReplyDeletePS How can I subscribe to your blog so that I don't miss your future reviews?
The only way to "subscribe" is to type Reid's Reader into your search engine. OR [only if you really want to] you could send me your e-mail address, and I will add you to my list of people whom I notify each fortnight when thee is a new posting. NB As you have already accessed my review, remember you can cheerfully search the index at right of each posting for authors in whom you are interested.
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