FICTION: To Heaven By Waterby Justin Cartwright Bloomsbury, 304pp, £16.99: FORMERLY a famous television news journalist following a youthful flirtation with acting, now a retired widower, David Cross, not the most sympathetic of men but a genuine lost soul harbouring a cowardly secret, is spending a great deal of time wondering what it's all about.
He has also taken to punishing his body in a gym, causing his two grown children and his circle of friends to wonder if he is ill.
Justin Cartwright, author of the ethereal Masai Dreaming(1991), sets the theme of this lively, all too believable narrative from the opening sentences in which Cross, sitting with a group of his buddies in a restaurant, "concedes to himself that we are all losing our hold on small things; the world we were brought up in, and we thought belonged to us, is losing us in this dense, moving panorama which surrounds us."
Of course Cross may not just be speaking for himself; he may be speaking for all of us. Cartwright, an ironic, astute observer, not only knows how to tell a good story, he misses very little about the world that buzzes on beyond that particular story. That said he never falls into the trap of easy polemic, instead he writes novels that testify to why exactly fiction continues to be read, his characters do live off the page and for all the brisk pathos, there is always humour and subversion.
Born and raised in South Africa, he came to England to study at Oxford and although Africa has provided a rich dimension to his work, Cartwright, the most underrated of enjoyably readable good writers, has mastered a particular type of wry English social comedy invariably seething with black under currents.
In fact few living British novelists write English fiction quite as well as Justin Cartwright. Families, marriage, relationships and grown children are familiar Cartwright motifs, ones he used to persuasive effect in The Promise of Happiness(2004) and summons again here. Yet if there is a prevailing preoccupation in his work it is that of the business of trying to make sense of one's self. His characters are often in flux, usually as a result of their own choices.
In To Heaven By Water, Cross is not the only one attempting to make sense of himself. Admittedly he is the survivor stuck in the family home, a house now increasingly neglected and suffering from a layer of dirt in the wake of his wife's death. Cross's son, Ed, a lawyer working in a firm run by Cross's old friend, is having problems as his beautiful failed ballet dancer wife Rosalie, frets over not being pregnant.
The effort of trying to make a baby has become her life’s failure, while Ed, who means well, has somehow stumbled into a messily sexual arrangement with a junior in his office. And then, there is the lovely Lucy, Cross’s daughter, who is still experiencing the fallout of having lately been involved with the caddish Josh. Despite their respective situations Ed and Lucy are concerned that dad is not as upset as he should be about their mother’s passing and he is behaving oddly, it’s not just the new devotion to the gym.
In ways this new novel shows Cartwright writing a superior form of John Mortimer, as is The Promise of Happiness. To Heaven By Wateris not as intensely personal a narrative as White Lightning(2002) or In Every Face I Meet(1995), nor does it aspire to the historical narrative intensity of The Song Before It Is Sung(2007) yet it has something which all of his fiction achieves, compelling readability.
Cartwright even at his deceptively lightest, and this book may appear light, but isn’t, holds a novel together through his grasp of narrative. Cross is a man facing age, in fact he is older and has realised that no amount of time spent on cross trainers will change this.
The strength of the story lies in his realisation that although he cared for his children he was never all that involved with them. His other preoccupation is a detached regard for his dead wife.
Although she is never present in the action, Cartwright evokes a powerful sense of her presence, here was a woman who minded her children and who also, during her husband’s long absence, sustained herself by way of a long affair.
Cartwright’s prose is earthily exact, he writes well, fluently and with an instinctive feel for the visual, the reader walks into fully furnished rooms, the characters are fully drawn, particularly the minor ones.
It is no coincidence that Cartwright once worked in film. His fiction is visual and unlike many British novelists, Cartwright writes convincing dialogue, often witty, at times even too witty, but who’s complaining. Ed and Lucy exchange one-liners worthy of teenagers, but then they are brother and sister. Elsewhere in the narrative David joins his eccentric elder brother Guy in the Kalahari. Guy is dying and intent on going out in style.
Interestingly, the most evocative passage in the novel describes a walk Lucy takes through Soho en route to the British Museum: “But out here in the street, a street of expensive art and fragranced men in pale, old-fashioned raincoats and Church’s shoes. . . she feels the reassuring familiarity and ease with London. She walks past St George’s, Hanover Square, one of the most beautiful churches in London. Near by very thin people often exit from Vogue House, like a delicate forest-antelope emerging from a glade. . . Dad loves Soho: he thinks of it as the remnant of a lost city, with its small-scale enterprise, crafts, film-production-houses, publishers and restaurants, all wrapped in an urban classlessness. . . She cuts up Firth Street and on through Soho Square, where there is a sense of stillness, pigeons foraging calmly on the dead, dead soil. . .”
IT IS A MIDDLE-CLASS WORLD and yet Cartwright is always alert to the criminal fringes. His eyes catch the drug addicts and dropouts, just as his ear catches the taxi drivers and the gym instructors. This is a vivid narrative peopled by a less obvious form of walking wounded, members of a middle-class family dominated by aspirations. In David Cross, Cartwright the consummate novelist, has drawn a study of a minor celebrity whose fame has all too often compensated for his darker shortcomings.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
