We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.
“THE PALE NORTH”
by Hamish Clayton (Penguin, $NZ30)
I have never
thought that reviewers should spike the narrative surprises of new novels. It
is permissible to give things away when talking about an old novel, I think,
because an old novel has already had time for its surprises to become well
known. But when it’s a new novel, it’s only fair to let the narrative have its
way with readers. This applies as much to “literary novels” (horrible term!) as
to thrillers, whodunits and the type of thing where surprise is the key
element.
So I’m loath to
say everything there is to say about the structure of Hamish Clayton’s second
novel The Pale North, because so much
depends on a change of perspective a bit under two thirds of the way through.
Clayton’s first novel, the excellent Wulf
(2011), was an historical novel, based on a real event, with a central English
character facing the oddness and disorientation of being in such a remote and
strange land as New Zealand in the early nineteenth century. The Pale North is a very different sort
of story, but it has some similar concerns.
The best way I
can tell you about it is to tell you how I experienced it in reading it.
Scrupulously
avoiding the blurb, and any reviewers’ comments, I sat down and read the first
part of the novel, “The City of Strange Things”.
It is a sort-of
ghost story. It is a sort-of love story. Or at least it could be. The
first-person narrator, Ash, is called back to New Zealand after years in
London, when the great earthquake of 1998 destroys Wellington. A mysterious
woman’s voice on the phone tells him “Come back”, and he does.
Wellington has
been demolished. Ash walks its near empty streets and its suburbs where the
window frames of deserted houses, now deprived of glass, look like staring
eyes. In his wanderings, he meets,
sheltering in a city ruin, a strange woman called Grace and her little daughter
Charlotte… which sets Ash off thinking of another Charlotte he knew and loved
in Wellington years before the earthquake.
The story
becomes loose, reverie-like reminiscence.
When Ash was a
young student and aspiring writer, he was beguiled by an exhibition of antique
black-and-white photographs, which always appeared to suggest something evanescent
– something that had just faded from view. This led him to the photographer
Colin, whose forte was to photograph Wellington in ways that suggested some
impending apocalyptic doom. But Ash was also beguiled by Charlotte, meeting
her, and then seeing her disappear, in a park.
In trying to
convey the flavour of this, I find myself reaching for clichés. It is surreal.
Dreamlike. Nightmarish. Foreboding. Maybe Kafkaesque. Certainly it is not a
story that develops in commonsensical daylight, for we are never sure of how
“real” the people are whom Ash remembers in post-earthquake Wellington. Ash
recalls, pre-earthquake, a country journey he took with Charlotte, where the
statue of an angel seemed to watch over them in a country church and there was
a mysterious “presence” which Charlotte saw but Ash didn’t. There is, later,
Ash’s even more unsettling return visit to the same church.
Where this all
goes, I will not specifically say, except to note that more than once,
characters melt away as if they were ghosts.
What exactly is
going on here?
From the very
first page, we understand that this novel exists in a sort of parallel
universe. Wellington, we know, still stands. There was no great earthquake of
1998. Ash tells us that he has had out-of-body experiences, and premonitory
dreams about Wellington, when he was in London. Ash and the photographer Colin
have produced images of Wellington’s destruction before it has happened. Is
this, then, a novel about how much we live in our imaginations, and how
subjective our lives are? Clayton infuses the novel with so many images
suggesting psychological states that it is easy to make this reading. The
gallery of fading photographs is like a metaphor for memory. The city we imagine is more real that the concrete
and steel around us. Ash sees (remembers) the lost city more vividly that he
sees the wrecked city.
At the same
time, Wellington is a real city. The great earthquake of 1998 may never have
happened, but the great Wellington earthquake of the 1855 and the lesser
Wellington earthquake of 1942 did happen and Wellington does sit on a major
fault-line. Perhaps Hamish Clayton has created his fictitious earthquake as a
projection of the underlying anxiety of Wellington – the awareness
Wellingtonians have that their city is not on stable ground.
Or is the real
point that this city is the city as imagined by the expatriate New Zealander?
So much of New Zealand’s literary and cultural experience has, after all, taken
place in the heads of New Zealanders remembering or imagining the country from
overseas. The Pale North emphasises
Ash’s status as a long-time resident of London. When he returns to ruined
Wellington, he views it as an outsider, for all the emotional pull of the city
which his memories give him. This outsider status is clear in passages such as:
“As
I walked it was as though I was moving untouched through the ruin all around
me: like an angel I passed, present yet removed from its scenes of despair.
Wellington had passed through a fire, a crucible, but I had not passed through
this flame. I’d escaped that baptism and so I remained a creature of the old
world, a child of the old city. As I walked I held within me the Wellington I’d
known before the earthquake, its idea as delicate as a birdcage. I walked there
with memory a staff in my hand.” (pp.13-14)
And again:
“Ever since I’d woken in the middle of the
night, in a cold sweat in London, everything had changed. Wellington had been
torn and ruined, and the fates of those I’d loved reduced to faded outlines of
possibility. From London I beheld my past in New Zealand as if I were standing
at the edge of a spare grove of elms, their shapes barely discernible in a
field of grey mist.” (pp.51-52)
The oddness, the
unexpectedness, the (yes) dreamlike quality of New Zealand as seen by an
alienated person coming from somewhere else – these are the chief qualities
that The Pale North has in common
with Wulf.
And then there
is that matter of prose style.
“The City of
Strange Things” is written in a style that is scrupulously (and one assumes
deliberately) old-fashioned. It is first-person confessional with very little
dialogue, and often with an exalted vocabulary that belongs to another age.
Indeed it reads like a pastiche of early nineteenth century Romantic-era prose
in such passages as:
“Through the thin film of grime on her skin I
saw that she was beautiful but worn out too, hardened as if she had borne a
solitary weight of sadness. Like one suffering alone through illness, her face
had creased in dark arches. And yet her eyes shone. I saw horizons in them. I
was mesmerised. I offered the sandwiches to her, and as she took them from me a
look of sudden, exquisite compassion crossed her face. She looked down on me
with divine tenderness, as if she’d held and weighed my soul in a balance. I
knelt there on the ruin of broken bricks, beneath the light of her eyes, with
the grace of her look falling upon me amid a soft rain of dust and sunlight,
and for a brief shining second it was a though she knew me. It was as though
she knew everything.” (p.27)
Or:
“Returning to the ruin of Wellington, I was,
in one way, cast back to a version of the city just as I’d left it: as the
place I’d once loved but whose streets I could no longer bear for how they had
become symbols of unnavigable confusion and loss. And even though the raft of
desolation to which I’d returned made a pittance of the private anguish I’d
borne in the time before, still it made sense to me, as I walked there for the
first time in years, that I was profoundly reminded of the last months I’d
spent there with Charlotte, in the weeks before she left me, the weeks before I
fled Wellington for good.” (p.68)
Reading this, I
for a while toyed with the idea that this was meant to be a novel written long
ago, with the earthquake of 1998 a projected future event – but this theory was rather foxed by the
appearance in the story of such modern items as answerphones etc. I understood
fully that Hamish Clayton was playing with notions of time and memory, and
sometimes suggesting that we, as readers, should experience the same thing more
than once, just as Ash does. (One stylistic game is to have three or four
paragraphs, about a meeting between Ash and Colin, repeated word-for-word on
pp.107-110 after their earlier appearance on pp.47-50). And of course I was also bemused by those
quasi-religious images. Characters with resonant signpost names like Ash and
Grace. The country church and the angel.
Thus my reading
of “The City of Strange Things”, the first 126 pages of The Pale North, which left me piqued, puzzled, and not quite sure
of what I was reading.
And then the
stink bomb.
The remaining 78
pages of The Pale North, called “In
Dark Arches”, introduce a new narrator, Simon Petherick, who tells us that all
we have read so far was written by a Gabriel North (note the angel’s name), a
chap who, like Hamish Clayton, was born in Hawke’s Bay in 1977. So we have the
meta-narrative, commenting on and teasing out ideas raised in the first part.
And it is this
meta-narrative that I do not wish to explain in too much detail, for fear that I
will spike all the book’s surprises. Suffice it only to say that “In Dark
Arches” gives a sly critique (at, for example. Pp.158-59) of the type of things
that unwary critics (like the present one) might say about “The City of Strange
Things”. In its long references to Weimar Berlin, to the Aztec Empire, and to
the last expedition of Captain Percy Fawcett in South America, “In Dark Arches”
hits again and again the idea that what is gone, lost and destroyed can live more
vividly in the mind and the imagination than what physically exists. Things
that disappear always leave room for
rich speculation, in the way that ruins often conjure up stories more readily
than preserved buildings do. Hence the potency of evanescence. [See my post On the Potency of Ruins]. Things fade and
die as the year declines to autumn. Only on p.195 is the novel’s title
explained when we learn that in New Zealand, the autumn sun is in “the pale
north” – although this also provides a punning reference to the Gabriel North
who has supposedly written the novel’s narrative section.
There are boxes
within boxes in this short novel – a fiction within a critique within a
meta-narrative. Whether the meta-narrative undermines or enhances the narrative
is something for each reader to decide. For myself, I remain piqued and
puzzled. But then, as Simon Petherick warns in his meta-narrative, critics
always do expect too much neatness.
Very good review of a very good novel.
ReplyDelete