AS this century draws to a close, the facts of history, particularly of war, continue to dominate international fiction. Although the examination and exploration of the nature of relationships has remained a central preoccupation of novelists, often these personal stories are set against a background of the larger political and military conflicts. No story is more enduring in its scale of horror, shame and outrage than the brutality perpetrated during the second World War. And no subject has provided novelists with richer pickings.
Canadian poet Anne Michaels's debut, Fugitive Pieces (Bloomsbury, £15.99 in UK) emerged last week as the surprise winner of the £30,000 Orange Prize For Fiction. A surprise not so much because she won the prize, which is open only to women.. but because among the contenders were internationally established writers such as her countrywoman Magaret Atwood, with her 1996 Booker nominee Alias Grace, and American E. Annie Proulx for Accordion Crimes. Interesting but hardly surprising is the fact that Michaels draws as does Atwood and Praulx, an history, yet Michaels is not only far less inventive than them, she is also disturbingly unconvincing.
Fugitive Pieces is about the aftermath of the Holocaust. Apparently heavily influenced by Michael Ondaatje's work, it is in many ways a narrative poem, interspersed with facts, often burdened by detail. All this leaves the reader caught between the tragedy of the history which inspired the hook and the inevitable doubts raised by the what might seem an opportunistic revisiting of familiar material.
Remember the outrage caused in some circles by Martin Amis's Times Arrow (1992)? Critics appeared to feel a satirist had no right to consider such a sensitive subject. Michaels approaches her risky lyric narrative with a rhetorical profundity which frequently comes close to pretentiousness, c.g. "We look for the spirit precisely in the place of greatest degradation. It's from there that the new Adam must raise himself, must begin again". Her determinedly lyric prose is flat and lifeless. There is no air, never mind dialogue or characterisation in this book.
The novel begins with the story of Jakob Beer, who as a young Polish boy fleeing the Nazis is. rescued by a Greek archaeologist digging in the ruins of a buried Polish city. The opening images are dramatic as Jakab likens himself to Tollund Man and Grauballe Man. No one is born just once. If you're lucky, you'll emerge again in someone's aims, or unlucky, wake when the long tail of terror brushes the inside of your skull.
Jakob alternates reportage with heavyhandedly lyric, nightmarish interludes. "A grey fall day. At the end of strength, at the place where faith is most like despair. His life with At has the archaeologist educates him in the sciences of geology and geography without ever really freeing him from his past and the destruction of his family. The dead surrounded us, an aurora over the blue water." The pair return to. Athas's home in Greece and then an to Canada when Athos accepts a university post.
Despite the horrors it describes, Fugitive Pieces never breaks free of the artificial intensity Michaels creates through long, portentous passages. Details, information, historical asides are crammed into the text. "A boy my age hid in a crate; after ten. months he was blind and mute, his limbs atrophied. A woman stood in a closet for a year and a half, never sitting down, blood bursting her veins." The narrative is disjointed, fragmentary and detached.
At has the archaeologist emerges as the most compelling character in the book, not through any skill of characterisation, but through the range of his interests; as Jakob recalls, he went where interesting tasks took him. He had an international reputation for both eclecticism and a very defined expertise in the conservation of waterlogged wood." He had also briefly considering joining Scott's expedition to the Antarctic. Athos also shares the ponderousness of the rest of the narrative: "Love makes you see a place differently, just as you hold differently an object that belongs to someone you love. If you know one landscape well, you will look at other landscapes differently. And if you learn to love one place, sometimes you can also learn to love another.
When Athas dies, Jakob drifts into a relationship with Alex. she was a character in a screwball comedy searching in vain far a serious moment. When she wasn't dancing, we are told, "she was standing on her head." They part and he returns to Greece. When he eventually finds love with a much younger woman, he confesses: "I'm paralysed in the cave her hair makes her clothes dissolve." Setting out to write in a quasi poetic style offers an unlimited licence for poor writing: "Even the wild molecules of objects seem suddenly palpable. After years, at any moment, our bodies are ready to remember us.
The narrative switches from Jakob to Ben, a young Canadian academic who sounds suspiciously like Jakob and whose adult life remains overshadowed by the misery of his childhood. He also favours epigrammatic directives: "You must abandon your illusions every time you speak,"
and the by now standard strained lyricism is much in evidence as he refers to "the wet thighs of the river".
Ben addresses the now dead but famous poet Jakob in a formal language utterly unconnected with normal speech: "Experience had wrong excess from you. Or as a geologist might say, you'd reached the pure state of residual concentration." More fragments of history and isolated references to the war, then Ben describes his lover Naomi who also specialises in converting largely through random pieces of information. As expected, Ben sets oft on a quest to Greece where he revisits. and eventually recreates, Jakob's life.
Michaels has borrowed heavily from history and created an original work of little life and multiple pretensions which is nonetheless protected by the seriousness of the history which inspired it. It leaves us with yet another example of a work of poor artistry garnering an unmerited gravitas and literary status solely through its subject matter.
