DISQUIET
Julia Leigh
Reviewed by John Holten
Julia Leigh
Reviewed by John Holten
Faber
& Faber 2008
What is it
about the space of time writers indulge in between books? Often times it seems
that they can't get it right – too long and people forget they even exist (the
first novelist's quandary) and too short a time and a suspicion of haste will
inevitably be raised, an arched eyebrow levelled at the integrity of a work
knocked out in half a year. It has been quite some time since Julia Leigh's
first novel. ‘The Hunter’ appeared almost ten years ago in fact. With her
follow up, ‘Disquiet’, she has delivered a short novella length piece of work
that is as poised and deftly crafted as her first. But of course in an ideal
world literature should be free of these concerns – number of pages, time taken
to write a book – the pared down nature of this novella however opens up a
feeling of compression, of concentration, in both style and subject matter,
that is hard to not to contrast with the space of time the writer had to
compose it.
‘Disquiet’
opens with a mother, Olivia, and two children, a boy and a girl, turning up
outside a large French chateau, a building only ever vaguely outlined in the
book, and surrounded by surprisingly ornate gardens complete with 'yews clipped into fantastic shapes, into top
hats and ice-cream cones and barbells'. They arrive with their baggage in tow, fleeing it seems from a violent
and traumatic past. The world they enter, the world of the chateau and
Grandmother, Olivia's mother, quickly turns out to be no safe haven; it is a
house of slow, sure footed drama – a very fine big house then, exactly the way
literature likes them. Balloons greet them on arrival, balloons set out to
welcome back the Olivia's brother Marcus and his wife Sophie from hospital, due
back with their first born child that very same day. Only of course the baby
has died upon birth, and what the reader is left with quite quickly are three
mothers all in various states of extremis, each colliding with the next in a
series of oddly claustrophobic scenes that play out slowly, somewhat dreamily,
the narrative Leigh so carefully unpicks with her short, detached paragraphs
and neatly divided islands of prose (even with its hundred odd pages,
‘Disquiet’ still enjoys a tremendous amount of blank space throughout).
It is
hard to say whether Leigh has spent all this time deciding to dispense with
character, with story, and concentrate instead upon ideas and the language of
ideas. This short book stands on the tightrope fiction itself throws up in the
face of taking subject matter, conceptual subject matter, before the narrative
characterisation that drives so much of recent writing. Whether or not the
ensuing story of a French chateau hosting grief stricken families balances the
reader's want of drama and characterisation or falls for an antiseptic
aestheticism of its themes is difficult to tell at times. Leigh's language is
nothing if not wholly assured, her management of setting, right down to the
maid's Gallic use of English is as successful as it is economic. This is where
the length of the book feels like it pays off, the reading in places is a joy
of perfect sentences, one following the next, slowly turning the screw of the
suffocating story. The space allows for the increasing despair of Marcus and
Sophie and the rest of the household in their wake to be bearable to a reader
seduced by the pitch of words perfectly chosen: a telephone's persistent
ringing gives it 'dominion'; 'The girl was chit-chattering'; the old relatives who turn up for the first failed funeral of the baby
are 'the revolution’s refuseniks, death's attendants'. However Leigh's control loosens once in the book when she relies on
multiple exclamation marks to designate heightened speech – something I first
read in a printed literature in last year's Booker Prize winning novel – and
which confuses me for its lack of grammatical restraint. Here Sophie attacks a
priest because of his exhortation to bury her dead, putrefying baby, an act
that in her grief she finds impossible to carry out:
The Prophet Isaiah speaks
of the time which is to come! he shouted. Never again will there be in it an
infant who lives but a few days! Or an old man who does not live out his
years!! He who dies at a hundred will be thought a mere youth!! A youth!!! And
he who fails to reach a hundred will be considered accursed!! Accursed!!
This is
the one point in the book where lyrical compression lets itself down, not
because of the use of the exclamation mark, a usage the reader will consider
either as a possible by-product of text messaging influence or as an unwieldy
grammatical device, but because it shows up the limitations of brevity, of the
author's difficulty to outline the naturalism the book plays with throughout in
scenes suspended on that very same tightrope mentioned earlier. This is a work
of fiction that is itself unconcerned with doing justice to its characters, or
self examining its 'voice' – it is third person prose which is unapologetic in
its own literariness, and the use of multiple exclamation marks, something that
should really only be employed in closer prose, first person prose if you will,
lets this literary distance down.
The
priest is just one beseecher who steps up to 'an elaborate piece of garden furniture, a
rattan throne' and from which he gives forth the reasons why Sophie should let the dead
be buried and embrace the death of her miscarried child. The story twists and
turns around the macabre (Gothic springs to mind but thankfully, through the
world weariness of Olivia, seems a superfluous word to use here) disability for
Sophie to let go of the cadaver, an elaborate scene allowing the reader to
wince as Olivia discovers the bundle of it in the kitchen freezer, where it is
stored at night. It would seem like this is one of Leigh's main points of investigation
in the book – the ends to which the bereaved and hurt go to deal with their
fate. The initial funeral is abandoned after Sophie runs off with her bundle,
allowing for a succession of advisors attempting to convince the grief stricken
Sophie to bury the baby. The Grandmother is one of the first: 'You must bury
this baby. In a short time no-one will speak of it. That is good. Things are
not diminished by being left alone.' People barely speak of it as it is, it
should be pointed out, the reader guessing their way through the denial and
hushed atmosphere of a house in pain. Josette, a local from the nearby village
and 'a representative of the State', ups her supplication beyond the levels employed by the Grandmother and
even the priest:
The smell – the smell is a
sign. Return the corpse to the earth. The skin will blister and fall away, the
organs will bloat. Liquefy. Leak. Even the little ones leak. Millions of
microbes inside the body will feast from within. And there may be coffin flies.
It doesn't take long to work down to the bone. The bones, they will outlast
you. And one day they too will – crumble. Everything will be transformed: this
is what happens. The earth is thriving…The child is no longer suffering. She
will remain in your thoughts. I do not believe in any soul, God is not the
mystery, but I say – open your heart to those around you.
The
mystery is not god, not the reasons why this death had to happen – or indeed
why Sophie is so unable to part ways with her dead child. Leigh makes the
mystery a lot more deep rooted than anything the story itself immediately
offers – Marcus, for example, would appear to be having an affair and yet also
is deeply complicit in the charade his wife plays with their dead child.
Husbands, in the world of ‘Disquiet’, or absent or sinisterly complicit in
crimes unstated and committed off stage. Olivia's husband would seem to have
beaten her savagely, leaving her to profess that she is already 'murdered',
deadened by her lived life.
The book
works as a contemplation on death, the various ways it can be present in
people's lives, but ultimately fails to comment on it in any way that is
engaging or at least subtly involving. Mothers can go some way, it would seem
Leigh says, to staving off death, averting the inevitable, calculating for its
upheavals, but ultimately they fail too. Olivia at one point even appears to
offer Marcus and Sophie her two children in a weird form of sisterly
generosity.
The
graceful pared down nature of the prose is just one effort Leigh makes in her
novella to affect a sort of universalism, the kind of clean-shaven effect
Cormac McCarthy mastered so well in ‘The Road’. And while his interest in the
ideas his fictional world generated were perfectly married to the sparseness of
his characterisation and style, Leigh's attempts at something similar fail due
to a confusion of intent, something that comes through in the necessity of
naming her characters. We meet them throughout in her prose as the mother, the
girl, the boy, but within dialogue they are named: Olivia, Andy, Lucy. The
frequency of her fine dialogue is out of tune with her equally well-honed prose
– the result being a deflation of the sincerity the novella strives toward.
Perhaps it would have been better if another level of compression was applied,
striping the names completely of the whole cast, sifting out the personal from
the dialogue, compacting the action even more. The story after all seems to
strive for such compactness, but the length as it is just doesn't allow for it:
it overruns itself and as such leaves one to think whether or not this story
could have been more successfully managed as a short story. All of which brings
back the question of length: compression and concentration in both prose and
subject matter, married to an attempt at elemental universalism leaves the
reader in a world that seems not quite fully realised, reading their way toward
a world only a longer novel could do justice to. With ‘Disquiet’ you quickly
find that what you are offered is an obscure world hiding its own story behind
the conceits of its telling and artifice.
From the
beginning the boy is compared to elemental forces of nature: 'But the door was oak and he was boy,’ or toward the end: 'The boy was mountain and lake.'And once
they manage to bury Sophie's dead baby successfully right at the very end of
the book, the boy's mother has her own fears for her son presented in a cadenza
explicit that forces her to come to terms with the passing of things, of her
own disappointments in life and the growing older of her son, 'But no boy is mountain and lake.' This leads to her to make a wish for him to 'Hold, hold’ as if all things could become steadfast in the face of the transience of
things. The house and its ghostly grounds would seem to have stayed steadfast,
Ida, the head maid, seems to be the only one to remain implacable. The boy asks
her early on if she is a servant."'A housekeeper,' replied Ida. 'And I
am here a very long time. I know this place inside outside and I know
everything that happens here. Every. Thing. Everything.'" And isn't this the way of big house stories? It is always the domestics
who hold out over the lost inhabitants, exhibiting the real wisdom of the
story, complicit in all the plot's demands. But it is hard to know what to make
of this equation Leigh makes between nature, children and death – not much
really, due to the changing of the values constantly throughout the book. Boy
equals mountain and lake, boy does not equal mountain and lake (he and his
mother and sister nearly drown in the lake), nature is impervious to change,
nature is all about change and becoming. In the end all that is really to be
gleaned from this shadowy, elliptical narrative is the bald facts that children
can die, and if they don't die they will grow up in a world that will hurt
them, becoming just like the damaged adults that gave birth to them in the
first instance. Therefore, even if they do in fact die as infants, this novella
is interested in the parent's ability to remain holding on to them. Some
children never want to grow up; Leigh posits in ‘Disquiet’ that it is the
damaged parent, full of weakness and wholly fallible, that can sometimes wish
for their children not to grow up and so not to approach death.
All of
this, and what with the setting, led me to think on more than one occasion that
a better title for the book could have been ‘l'Angoisse.’ Unjust I have no
doubt, but as a reader angst or anxiety, a fixed gaze on death – these
existential concerns crowd in on the reading of the story. Not just once will
you find yourself squirming as you battle on to denouement of this tale, eager
to start breathing again. Disquiet after all, is not very present within the
story: the characters are all far too damaged and disturbed to be
inconveniently disquieted by things. Indeed, it is as if even in her title
Leigh is once more acknowledging the book's inherent literariness, informing
the reader what it is they are going to experience upon reading.
Unlike
the interest generated in Donna Tartt between ‘The Secret History’ and ‘The
Little Friend’, Julia Leigh's first work does not anticipate a book such as
‘Disquiet’. A quiet, punctilious piece of art that, published as it is by Faber
and Faber who are increasingly, it seems to me, the cul de sac of many such
literary endeavours, will remain as an interesting exercise in marrying ideas
with fine prose, nothing more. What those that pick up this slight book will
find is a short work (shorter than McEwan's ‘On Chesil Beach’, leaving it
squarely in the novella genre) that is as aloof as it is 'disquieting' in its
stuffy story, so full of bruised adults and decomposing dead babies. The
epitaph comes from Ingeborg Bachmann, after Flaubert: Avec ma main brûlée, j'écris sur la nature du
feu, which leads one to consider the possibility that this a more personal
piece of work than its unabashed artifice would lead one to believe: certainly
the mother character, Olivia, fleeing her husband in Australia, who is 'already murdered' and sees herself as dead, fears for her children and their future hurts,
their inevitable passing, their deaths, in a manner that at times, and only for
the shortest of times, seems more humane than Leigh may have intended. A
strange mirroring therefore goes on in this book that could be seen to act as a
metaphor for the writer who writes from experience, the empirical burn or scar
from the real world going some way, in all that time between books, to a
meditation on life's difficult phenomenon. But than in an ideal world such
fancies have no place, the art should be aloud to speak for itself. Perhaps
that is the final irony of ‘Disquiet’: that for all its sparseness and
intensity, so long in its appearance from such an undeniable master of the
craft, one cannot help try and fill in all the white space around its elegant
prose. You count the pages, you count the years of writing – and you're left
wondering: is this it?
© John
Holten
Reproduced with permission
Reproduced with permission
http://www.laurahird.com/newreview/disquiet.html
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