FICTION: The Rowing Lesson By Anne Landsman, Granta, 279pp. £12There's a moment in Anne Landsman's second novel, The Rowing Lesson, when the narrator, Betsy, remembers an incident from her childhood, writes Catherine Heaney.
AFTER TRYING to rescue his car from a river, her father, a country doctor, is forced to borrow the trousers and shoes of the patient he has come to treat, a hulking farmer a good foot taller than himself.
Seeing the alien clothes laid out on her parents' bed the next morning, the young Betsy remembers that "even when the pants and the shoes have left the house and gone back to the farm in Slanghoek, I can see their shadow in your bedroom, the shadow of a father the size of a giant". It's an image that encapsulates much of what this powerful, evocative novel is about - the bond between father and daughter, and the spell memory casts over everyday episodes which, in time, become life's markers.
Now married and pregnant, Betsy has come home to Cape Town from New York to keep vigil at her father's deathbed. Hooked up to a battery of machines, Harold is a mute, helpless figure - "laid out in death's waiting room, in an end-stage coma" - nothing like the irascible, complicated man he was in reality.
But through Betsy's imaginings of his early years, and her own memories, he is resurrected in these pages. The son of a volatile mother and shopkeeper father - both European Jews transplanted to South Africa - Harold grows up dogged by self-loathing and an ingrained sense of shame. His childhood, as imagined by his own daughter, is not without its moments of joy - boat journeys up the Touw river with friends, parties in the family home - but his physical slightness and embarrassment at his humble origins are the darker underpinnings of any happiness, along with the precariousness of life at home, where good times "move into bad like fizzy drink up your nose".
As the second World War breaks out, Harold leaves to go to medical school, where he will do well and yet still always feel like an outsider, both as a Jew, and as a young man watching from the sidelines as his classmates leave to enlist. He will also meet Stella here, embarking on a spiky courtship that leads to a turbulent but lasting marriage.
Since her father can't share these memories with her, Betsy is forced to imagine them for herself, addressing him throughout in the second person. It's this "you" that is the book's fulcrum, and at times it can be a confusing device, but it gives an immediacy to the writing, a sense of being in both Betsy's and Harold's consciousnesses. Interspersed with these dreamlike sequences are Betsy's own memories of her father (including the rowing lesson of the title), and the slow-ticking hours of the present at the hospital bedside. In a lesser writer's hands, this kind of shifting narrative could be problematic, but through the fluidity and sheer inventiveness of her prose, Landsman pulls it off.
This is also a book that delights in richness of language, and the author wields her words in such a way as to make them every bit as incisive as the scalpels young Harold uses to dissect his cadavers. As well as English, the narrative is permeated by that mysterious (to most) other language of medicine, while the dialogue is laced with Afrikaans. Indeed the sounds, landscape and turmoil of South Africa are the backdrop for Harold's story, and while Landsman touches on the horror and cruelty of apartheid, the foremost politics in this book are those of family. Above all, this is a portrait of a man laid bare: Betsy is not afraid to look her father's demons square in the face - alcoholism, bullying and domestic violence are all recorded - but never for a moment do we doubt her devotion to him, and the desperation she feels in watching him slip away.
It's a pity such a powerful book should stumble somewhat towards the end. There's an inconclusiveness to the final pages that may, on the one hand, echo the unknowability of death, but on the other, does leave the reader hanging. But even so, you finish The Rowing Lesson feeling as if you too have lived through Harold's last hours. It has the surreal, visceral quality of a life flashing before the eyes - a final montage of an ordinary existence, made extraordinary through the power of imagination.
Catherine Heaney is features editor of The Gloss magazine