In the aftermath of his wife's death Albert Danon, a tax accountant, is left in an emotional twilight zone. His grief is not helped by his son's decision to go mountaineering in Tibet. Not that Enrico David, "Rico", has ever been much of a support; not even when his mother lay dying and in need of love. Written in a random number of verse styles, mainly free, Oz has adopted a largely conversational yet also lyric language to tell his story. Both the narrative and the characters unfold through a series of poems of varying lengths serving as chapters. This book, as the sea of its title suggests, also ebbs and flows. It is an ambitious and surprising idea, not that a verse novel is that original - but it is uncommon. Oz takes the form and makes it work because many of the most telling poems give the impression of being the random thoughts of the respective characters.
Into Albert's empty world saunters Dita, his son's sometime girlfriend and an aspiring film-maker who is working as a hotel receptionist while waiting for her big break. She is an ambiguous figure representing danger as well as a blatant sexuality, "Something cheap and something soft and something hard and remote,/Dita Inbar in her orange uniform, with a namebadge on the lapel,/works three nights a week as a receptionist at an expensive seaside hotel." For Bettine, a civil servant and widow, a long-time friend of Albert and his now dead wife Nadia, Dita is a threat; "and there is, after all, something/ cheap about her. "
The three women - Nadia, the watchful Bettine and Dita - represent three faces of women, while there is a fourth, Maria, the prostitute, weakly symbolising woman as a care figure. It is Maria who comforts Rico on his Tibetan journey. Interestingly, despite the very physical portrayal of Dita whose body speaks for her, it is the dead, gentle Nadia who emerges as the ruling presence of the novel. She dominates her husband's consciousness just as she appears to track her son through the mountains. As the novel unfolds, more of Nadia's past is filtered through the daily activities of the living characters. First seen as a woman pondering her coming death, "Not long before she died a bird/on a branch woke her./At four in the morning, before it was light . . . " The dying woman asks "What will I be when I am dead/ A sound or a scent/or neither"; later in the same poem-chapter "Nadia Danon begins to remember" she is then recalled as the young girl given in marriage to a widower who subjects her to clinical sex until he dismisses her when no babies arrive.
In contrast with the ghostly Nadia, who has known humiliation and later love, is Dita, a wanton on the make who has known neither and who casually sleeps with Rico's friends. For all her physicality the brash Dita never quite becomes real, although it is through her and what she represents for Bettine - who sees the lonely Albert as a possible end to her own solitude - that Bettine, the solid loving grandmother who "likes to sit indoors in the evening/in her pleasant room that faces the sea, half-submerged in pot plants . . . She is deep in a novel about a divorce and an error./The suffering of the fictional characters fills her/with a feeling of calm. As though their burden has fallen/from her own shoulders."
In the midst of all this is Albert, who is thinking and remembering, partly disturbed and partly tempted by Dita. Bettine frets and cautions like a solo Greek chorus, while some comic relief is provided in the messy antics of Dubi Dombrov, a desperate producer tormented by his physical ugliness and his desire to bed Dita. Not entirely successfully, Oz enters the narrative as a confidant of sorts to some of the characters as well as to the reader. Even he stays clear of Dita. Oz the poet confers a meditative tone on the proceedings with interludes such as the short poem "In Between", which stands apart from any of the characters, "Like a sooty engine at the end of its journey the lit half/of the earth drags wearily towards the shadow/while the dark half gropes at the first line of light."
AT TIMES the narrative suggests that Oz is not telling the story of any of these characters, but is instead engaged on a study of themes of youth and ageing, memory and loss, the tender and the harsh, dream and reality. The comic despair of Albert, confronted with his fear of Dita, both moves and alienates. Rico's epiphanies on the mountain don't quite convince but he does symbolise a safety won by flight, a grief eventually mastered. Life and death are being acted out against the backdrop of present-day Israel, overlaid upon the Bulgarian origins of Albert and Nadia. There is little detail; no words are wasted; Oz is almost businesslike in his whimsy. The narrative is, in fact, like Dita's functional rucksack. Oz relies on mood to fill in the gaps and it often does.
For a novel of random, if deliberate moments, it displays confidence as well as skill. There are also touches of casual bravado, of the internationally established novelist addressing his dead parents while also wanting the reader to be alert to the writing process which takes place in stages in between Oz leaving his desk and eating a meal. These characters truly are mere players on a stage.
Yet there is also an urgency - the narrative, for all its reflection, moves at a snappy pace albeit interspersed with quiet interludes. Since the publication of the wonderful comic fantasy underlined by reality Fima (1993), the romance Don't Call It Night (1995) and his atmospheric autobiographical novel based on his childhood, Panther in the Basement (1997), Oz in late mid-career has revealed an exciting flexibility and humanity. While this gentle, earthy new novel is not among his finest, it possesses sufficient grace and wisdom to just about deflect several of the blunter edges.
Eileen Battersby is the Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
