booklit

When Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio was named laureate for the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, I was like many others in wondering who? His standing in English speaking nations, save for a couple of low profile translations in the States, was practically non-existant. And this is an author who has published over forty books since his 1963 debut. It’s been a frustrating wait, then, for publishers in the UK to rush release some backlist titles into print. No doubt translators up and down the country are soldiering away at more of his works.

The citation of Le Clézio, by the Swedish Academy, described him as “author of new departures, poetic adventure and sensual ecstasy, explorer of a humanity beyond and below the reigning civilization”- a soup of intrigue, hinting at so much while retaining a cryptic aura. Having looked at the rereleased titles, Terra Amata (1968) seemed to best fit the citation. In fact, it doesn’t so much fit as describe it.

Terra Amata concerns itself with life on earth. It’s the story of Chancelade, looking at his unremarkable life and capturing all the detail and adventures he overlooked.

You’d never done playing all the games there were. A prisoner on the flat face of the earth, standing on your two legs with the sun beating down on your head and the rain falling drop by drop, you had all these extraordinary adventures without really knowing where you were going. A pawn - you were no more than a pawn on the giant chess-board, a disc that the expert invisible hand moved about in order to win the incomprehensible game.

The narrative drops by special points in Chancelade’s life, following from young boy to old man, then pushing beyond. We see the young Chancelade playing in the garden, God to a number of beetles. (”When the boy realized that he was the potato-bugs’ god, with absolute power of life and death over them, he decided to act.”) and teaching them a lesson. We experience his father’s death, follow his sexual development, witness him becoming a father, and ache with his old age.

Le Clézio’s delivery is a hyperreal tour de force, lush and dense, designed to obverload the senses. His focus is on the minute, regularly picking up on grains of sand, pebbles on beaches, and insects in their nests, inverting the microscopic worlds they inhabit to cosmic concerns. Questions of life and death occur, Chancelade occasionaly wrestling with his own mortality, echoes of which appear in the cigarettes he regularly smokes:

It was a perfect action, beautiful as a play. A tragic action. It had a beginning, when the spurting flame met the cigarette. A development, with unity of time, place and action. And when the cigarette was finished, the same hand that had lit it put it swiftly to death, crushing it against the side o the ashtray. And it was really rather as if you were dead yourself, extinguished, suffocated in your own ash, your inside quietly spilling out of your skin of torn paper.

What’s interesting about Le Clézio’s prose is that he is able to capture a new slant on looking at things. In life, everything is an adventure to be embraced full on. He sees objects strewn around as potential communiques between other entities - between men, animals, and the inanimate forces of nature. There’s a language in everything, and we see Chancelade explore this idea in some brief, yet tedious, episodes of Morse code, sign language, and a babelian stew of words.

While much is made of our time on earth, and how little we fully appreciate it, Le Clézio goes beyond humanity, exploring tens of thousands of years ahead to an enjoyable section in a museum, speculating about how we will be remembered, surprisingly quashing humankind’s achievements in favour of guesswork from archaeological digs, much like the conjecture about the real Terra Amata site in France.

Maldec man seems to have lived in communities, in tall concrete houses divided into rooms. His was essentially a working and fetishist civilization. Wars were frequent and deadly, as is proved by certain burial-places recently discovered. These wars were probably due to to racial or religious differences. The civiliation of Maldec man was also ritual, nationalist, and based on the family. It thus belongs to the polymorphic pre-desertic period, which lasted about 5,000 years. It may be that Maldec man was contemporary with the beginning of the great drought which occurred at that time and which caused his civilization to disappear.

Terra Amata, while living up to the aforementioned citation, is perhaps overlong. At just over two hundred pages, it easily feels like three or four hundred. The detail Le Clézio plunges into is often startling and wondrous, but there’s the feeling that he’s retreading the same ideas on occasion, just presenting them differently. There’s a metafictional thread running through the novel, especially evident in the prologue and epilogue, which brought to mind Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler, but doesn’t really bring much to the story itself.

Where Terra Amata succeeds is in holding up a candle to the possibilities of nature, to the potential of life. You may as well use it since you are going to lose it anyway, is the message. Big questions are asked, with no answers forthcoming. Who needs answer, though, when the possibilities are endless? So endless that…

… on the other side of infinity there may be a world just like this one only as if reflected in an enormous mirror: a world where light is black and ants are white and the earth is soft and the sea hard as a slab of marble. A world where the sun is a sooty dot in the sky and volcanoes belch torrents of muddy ice. A world in which you start by dying and end by being born, with the clock-hands all turning frantically backwards. And somewhere in the middle of a big town built downwards into the earth there lives a man perhaps with eyes that look inwards into his head. And perhaps this man has a strange name that can only be said by stopping speaking. Edalecnahc.

While Terra Amata can be reduced to two words - carpe diem - it works because it carries with it the force of infinite experiences. Le Clézio may be an “author of new departures” but he’s also the author of new arrivals on my book shelves.

Canada’s Michael Redhill was reportedly surprised to find his second novel had been longlisted for the Booker this year. If the content was given over to errors such as the misprint on the inside cover then I’d have been surprised too. But thankfully Consolation’s prose shows no such slips and it runs with two distanced narratives detailing Toronto past and present that eventually come together by the novel’s close.

Professor David Hollis, in his latter years, was suffering a debilitating disease. Having been ridiculed by his peers for his latest claims, concerning a boat under a landfilled lake, he drowns himself. Left to pick up the pieces and determined to prove him right is his wife, Marianne. Helping her is John Lewis, her daughter’s fiance, the attention shown to her mother - and her father’s claims - rocking the boat. But if they don’t prove those claims then it’s possible that the proposed stadium could bury forever the glass plates of early photos documenting Toronto rumoured to be on board.

Meanwhile, back in the 1850s, Jeremy Hallam, late of England, has come to Toronto to expand his father’s apothecary business. However, that trade already has its fair share of aggressive competitors and, after a meeting with Sam Ennis, an Irish photographer, and his model, Claudia Rowe, Hallam takes his first steps into the world of photography, a path that seemingly leads to the sunken ship and the photos speculated 150 years hence.

Of these two narratives, despite both being well polished, the historical sections shine more. Perhaps the distance helps - presenting times past surely requires more effort to evoke than does modern life with its cars and televisions. There’s a need to create a sense of place - warm coals do it; central heating is taken for granted. And so, to make the modern (well, the nineties) sections more interesting, it’s dialogue that spurs them on - exploring the triangle of John, Marianne, and daughter, Bridget.

While Hallam follows his photographic ambition and Lewis chases the claims of David Hollis, the star of Consolation is the city of Toronto itself, appearing both in its infancy:

Streets paved with little more than the accumulation of grit pressed into them by boots. Wooden sidewalks put together with penny nails. Tar-acrid log shanties with bank buildings made of Kingston stone in their backyards. German and French spoken freely in the streets and canoes out in the lake with actual Indians in them, spearing salmon at the river mouth. Then that same lake, frozen to stillness between December and April, ice-clenched with nothing coming in or out of it. And centred in it, with misplaced pride, a stuttering attempt at making an English town out of nothing, like a voice straining to be heard from a great distance. It would actually be funny, Hallam had thought, if he didn’t have to live here.

And in more mature years:

North of the main thoroughfare, the big houses that had been built in the fifties and sixties were slowly being returned to their original forms, with two-career families snapping up the properties at second-best prices and refurbishing to their hearts’ contents. But south, the houses were smaller; they were still better earners than sellers, and the area was full of tenants.

At its core, Consolation is about history. It looks at how the past only really means something when it is the past - the present doesn’t matter. One only has to imagine the bewildered expression on the Deputy Mayor’s face when Hallam shows him recent portraits of Toronto. (Why would someone do such a thing?) Also given the spotlight is the passage of time: history is always being created and nobody cares about it, even the hotel room where, once you’ve checked out, your presence is wiped away, forgotten.

Consolation is certainly a story of two halves and, with a twist thrown in (perhaps a tad predictable) it gives a good account of itself. Its strengths are in its attention to detail and the wonderful sense of atmosphere in the historical sections, and, while Redhill’s dialogue is well wrought, the modern sections are less engaging, in part because the characters were not strong enough to be noticably individual. I enjoyed this novel but, like the aforementioned hotel room, I suspect that with the next read this novel will be easily forgotten, which I’m sure is no consolation to the author.