Edited by Steve Bamlett, Friday, 12 Aug 2016, 20:45
This was a strange choice for the Booker Longlist. It opens
as with echoes of The Wicker Man – ordinary ‘urban’ middle class couple enter a
remote fishing village. One expects their naivety to be shattered, almost
as a generic expectation. But all expectations are shattered as the novel
proceeds and the landscape, objects and persons of the drama increasingly
resemble symbolic or allegoric (though a richly layered allegory) images. It
reminded me of George Macdonald’s Phantastes
more than any other novel I have read (or the more Gothic parts of Lewis
Carroll).
As with that novel, nothing can be taken to be what it
appears on its surface or ‘mean’ what it appears to convince you it means. At
its centre is the drowned – or in some ways lost (we think) -‘character’,
Perran. But who or what Perran is or means constantly changes and even
multiplies to become the ‘many’ of the title – breaking from its confines
underground or under the sea – and is the central ‘question’ in the novel and
in its central character’s consciousness.
It is like Macdonald because as in Macdonald, the sea is
increasingly a symbol – of fertility, as in the earlier novel, but now a sea
poisoned or corrupted containing toxic secrets – answers to questions that the
hero attempts to ask but cannot even articulate.
The remainder contains ‘spoilers’ so stop reading now if you
like to experience the novel’s symbolic resonance and failure to yield easy
resolutions for yourself.
Male fertility is a difficult and deep subject – for men at
least – and the nearest I get to knowing why this is an interesting novel is
that it does begin, quite unusually, to query feelings about the felt loss of
male infertility, consequent on the loss of a baby, a baby we eventually
remember and who has the name, Perran (a truly Cornish name). Here is the
internet definition:
Perran is a form of Piran and is
generally pronounced like "PEER an". This name is mostly being used
as a boy’s name. Perran is a variant spelling of the Cornish name Piran. St.
Perran (Piran) is the patron saint of Cornwall and tin-miners.
We see here a mythic basis for the novel and for Perran’s
association with both underground mines (and burrows) and the sea. It is also
the seed of male progeny, like the pale semen like fish pulled from a poisoned
sea outside the barriers of a number of ‘containers’. It explains how the title
of the novel relates to the theme of Perran’s loss – as a principle of the
meaning of Cornish masculinity, of Timothy Buchanan’s feelings of sterility
after the loss of a child and a breakdown in his relationship, of a world whose
means of reproduction and sustenance have been corrupted by pollution. Here is
the key passage – my emphases:
They emerge in their hundreds, or
perhaps in their thousands, pouring out of the sea and he cannot believe the
sea is able to hold so many of them.
They emerge in numbers too great for him to take in and, overwhelmed, he turns
away from them, only to find them emerging too from the b arrows and are
filling the fields. Perran upon Perran upon Perran. … (p.112)
You need to read on because it is not the meaning of single
words here but the flow and excess: ‘they continue to come until they block out
the light from the moon and the darkness takes him’.
I do not think this is merely a masturbatory fantasy but it
is certainly that – a man unable to reconnect to the meanings of the life he
had, unable to reunite with his wife – unable even to act ‘like a man’ and mend
his own car. Unable even to connect to the ‘strong and ‘firm’ implied in the
Hebrew name Ethan. A man who sees his attempt to rebuild the home that Perran
inhabited as doomed to failure – either because it is wrecked by a community
unable to absorb either him or Perran or drowned by rising and surrounding
seas.
I think it can be read more richly – like all good allegory
(from Edmund Spenser to Macdonald) there is no one meaning to any one symbol –
only a 'flooding' excess of meaning. There is no solid ground here not vulnerable to a too ‘fluid’ sea of
unstable meanings. We try to contain the meaning of the sea, of course, in the novel and try to move
beyond those containers (the fishing trips of Ethan and Tim).
If the sea is sterile and its fruits always bought up by a
forbidding authority, and if returned to their owner, then buried.
My worry is that this novel may be Christian allegory, of
the kind once championed by William Golding, and therefore a too easy answer to
a world that finds it difficult even to imagine a religion that means something,
and the same thing (at least emotionally) to everyone. What are we to make of
the central metaphors of the ‘fisherman’ who was once ‘firm’ (Ethan) and of Tim’s
dream that he can walk on water. The end
of the novel suggests the tired trope of a Godless world that has lost its
hope:
… he shifts his focus once more
to the Great Hope, and he watches it
for a while as it bobs on the surface of the sea, aimless and without
direction, before he turns away.
Is this a Bunyan allegory of the modern Age? Another go at the
Golding of Pincher Martin? Or is the
directionless of human purpose to be embraced and lived with – the actual
condition of a postmodern and post-religious world. I suspect the sea in the
novel is the ‘sea of faith’ that ‘was once like this’ in Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, also a work of art about
failed faith in a married relationship.
I do not know though. This novel is either very great or
over-directive. I cannot decide.
Steve’s Bookers – Wyl Menmuir THE MANY
This was a strange choice for the Booker Longlist. It opens as with echoes of The Wicker Man – ordinary ‘urban’ middle class couple enter a remote fishing village. One expects their naivety to be shattered, almost as a generic expectation. But all expectations are shattered as the novel proceeds and the landscape, objects and persons of the drama increasingly resemble symbolic or allegoric (though a richly layered allegory) images. It reminded me of George Macdonald’s Phantastes more than any other novel I have read (or the more Gothic parts of Lewis Carroll).
As with that novel, nothing can be taken to be what it appears on its surface or ‘mean’ what it appears to convince you it means. At its centre is the drowned – or in some ways lost (we think) -‘character’, Perran. But who or what Perran is or means constantly changes and even multiplies to become the ‘many’ of the title – breaking from its confines underground or under the sea – and is the central ‘question’ in the novel and in its central character’s consciousness.
It is like Macdonald because as in Macdonald, the sea is increasingly a symbol – of fertility, as in the earlier novel, but now a sea poisoned or corrupted containing toxic secrets – answers to questions that the hero attempts to ask but cannot even articulate.
The remainder contains ‘spoilers’ so stop reading now if you like to experience the novel’s symbolic resonance and failure to yield easy resolutions for yourself.
Male fertility is a difficult and deep subject – for men at least – and the nearest I get to knowing why this is an interesting novel is that it does begin, quite unusually, to query feelings about the felt loss of male infertility, consequent on the loss of a baby, a baby we eventually remember and who has the name, Perran (a truly Cornish name). Here is the internet definition:
Perran is a form of Piran and is generally pronounced like "PEER an". This name is mostly being used as a boy’s name. Perran is a variant spelling of the Cornish name Piran. St. Perran (Piran) is the patron saint of Cornwall and tin-miners.
We see here a mythic basis for the novel and for Perran’s association with both underground mines (and burrows) and the sea. It is also the seed of male progeny, like the pale semen like fish pulled from a poisoned sea outside the barriers of a number of ‘containers’. It explains how the title of the novel relates to the theme of Perran’s loss – as a principle of the meaning of Cornish masculinity, of Timothy Buchanan’s feelings of sterility after the loss of a child and a breakdown in his relationship, of a world whose means of reproduction and sustenance have been corrupted by pollution. Here is the key passage – my emphases:
They emerge in their hundreds, or perhaps in their thousands, pouring out of the sea and he cannot believe the sea is able to hold so many of them. They emerge in numbers too great for him to take in and, overwhelmed, he turns away from them, only to find them emerging too from the b arrows and are filling the fields. Perran upon Perran upon Perran. … (p.112)
You need to read on because it is not the meaning of single words here but the flow and excess: ‘they continue to come until they block out the light from the moon and the darkness takes him’.
I do not think this is merely a masturbatory fantasy but it is certainly that – a man unable to reconnect to the meanings of the life he had, unable to reunite with his wife – unable even to act ‘like a man’ and mend his own car. Unable even to connect to the ‘strong and ‘firm’ implied in the Hebrew name Ethan. A man who sees his attempt to rebuild the home that Perran inhabited as doomed to failure – either because it is wrecked by a community unable to absorb either him or Perran or drowned by rising and surrounding seas.
I think it can be read more richly – like all good allegory (from Edmund Spenser to Macdonald) there is no one meaning to any one symbol – only a 'flooding' excess of meaning. There is no solid ground here not vulnerable to a too ‘fluid’ sea of unstable meanings. We try to contain the meaning of the sea, of course, in the novel and try to move beyond those containers (the fishing trips of Ethan and Tim).
If the sea is sterile and its fruits always bought up by a forbidding authority, and if returned to their owner, then buried.
My worry is that this novel may be Christian allegory, of the kind once championed by William Golding, and therefore a too easy answer to a world that finds it difficult even to imagine a religion that means something, and the same thing (at least emotionally) to everyone. What are we to make of the central metaphors of the ‘fisherman’ who was once ‘firm’ (Ethan) and of Tim’s dream that he can walk on water. The end of the novel suggests the tired trope of a Godless world that has lost its hope:
… he shifts his focus once more to the Great Hope, and he watches it for a while as it bobs on the surface of the sea, aimless and without direction, before he turns away.
Is this a Bunyan allegory of the modern Age? Another go at the Golding of Pincher Martin? Or is the directionless of human purpose to be embraced and lived with – the actual condition of a postmodern and post-religious world. I suspect the sea in the novel is the ‘sea of faith’ that ‘was once like this’ in Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, also a work of art about failed faith in a married relationship.
I do not know though. This novel is either very great or over-directive. I cannot decide.
All the best
Steve