But the simplicity and straightforwardness of this opening belies the rest of this novel. It uses a 'stream of consciousness' technique in which the narrative is supplied by the main character's internal monologue which includes, without formal distinction, his thoughts, his memories, his observations, events that happen, and the dialogue of the other characters:
- "Alistair Berg, alias Greb, commercial traveller, seller of wigs, hair tonic, paranoiac paramour, do you plead guilty? Yes. Guilty of all things the human condition brings; guilty of being too committed; guilty of defending myself; of defrauding others; guilty of love; loving too much, or not enough; guilty of parochial actions, of universal wish-fulfilments; of conscious martyrdom; of unconscious masochism. Idle hours, fingers that meddle. Alistair Charles Humphrey Greb, alias Berg, you are condemned to life imprisonment until such time you may prove yourself worthy of death."
- "Oh Lor’ I’m sorry, have I hurt you Aly? Aly there now, what is it? You are a funny chap. Oh dear I nearly trod on it, I mean him. Of course he’s very possessive, I mean was possessive, I couldn’t even look one-eyed at another man and he’d threaten to slit the poor chap’s throat."
This usually worked very well: I could always distinguish the dialogue of others but sometimes I got confused. I also found it difficult to believe that Berg's lower middle-class upbringing and education would have furnished him with the extensive range of literary allusion (from Sophocles to Milton to Shakespeare and beyond) that clouded his thoughts; eg:
- "He drew a circle in the mirror and wrote NON OMNIS MORIAR."
- "To take his father’s corpse back home to Edith—the trophy of his triumphant love for her! In a Greek play they’d have thought nothing of it"
- "George into ‘Georgina’, the exchange of sonnets, in remembrance of Michelangelo, Rimbaud, Valéry, Whitman, occasionally Milton; you, Lycidas sleeping in the river valley, head cradled only by grass and the wind; body lulled by sunlight."
- "Because he’s not coming back, he’ll never be back, because he’s full fathoms five. For why should he intrude now when he was never there when the blades of corn struck the wind, and the trees whispered go home, go home, the hour of play is over, away from the tree’s trunk with its skin of a toad, the bees swarming below; bees with ruby eyes that would fly in after the goodnight kiss and the door closed."
The point about stream of consciousness, I suppose, is that it is a stream, and Quin represented this by using very long sentences with multiple phrases separated by commas. This sometimes led me to becoming confused. There were also moments when Berg's thoughts became either obscure or pretentious:
- "Threading experience through imaginative material, acting out fictitious parts, or choosing a stale-mate for compromise. Under this fabrication a secret army gathers defeating those who stalk the scaffolding of comparisons. Yet they still haunt with their pale perplexities, and resentful airs."
- "Squatting furniture—senators in conference."
One of the obscure elements revolved around Berg's sexuality. In his memory, there are suggestions that he might have been sexually abused by a man when he was a boy, there are hints of of childish fumblings with girls, there are suggestions of humiliation (through impotence?) in a heterosexual encounter. At one stage he dresses up like a woman. Fundamentally, Berg is like Oedipus: not only does he want to murder his father but he listens through the thin walls of the boarding house to his father having sex and longs to replace him ... but the women is not his mother but his father's mistress.
The first half of the plot seems to be based on Hamlet (there are suggestions that Hamlet is based on the story of Oedipus). Berg's aim is to kill his father, an intent motivated, perhaps, by revenge but also by jealous disgust as he listens to his father making love to his mistress (as Hamlet is motivated in part by disgust at the incest of his mother and his uncle). Berg, like Hamlet, repeatedly hesitates.
The turning point comes at the 50% mark; from there on Hamlet is abandoned and the plot mutates into farce. For most of the second half, Berg is under as misapprehension; I don't know whether Quin intended the reader to be aware of Berg's mistake (I certainly was) or not.
Berg was Quin's first novel, published in 1964. She was at the forefront of contemporary avant garde fiction of the time, together with others such as Eva Figes, William Burroughs (eg Naked Lunch, The Wild Boys, The Soft Machine), and Alexander Trocchi (Young Adam, Cain's Book). She lived in Brighton, the seaside town on the south coast of England, dying there at the age of 37 by drowning, possibly suicide (she had a long history of mental health issues).
Selected quotes:
- "She was, without doubt, a good deal younger than his father, attractive, he supposed, in the artificial style, and who would wish to go beyond the surface in a woman anyway?"
- "Can one compare a landscape that remains, though the evolutionary surfaces suffer unlimited contradictions?"
- what is gained by delving into such linguistic labyrinths?
- "He placed the razor against his neck—not there you fool, the wrists, the wrists."
- "that’s what is always so unforgiveable, the fact that everything will go on with or without my existence."
- "How separated from it all he felt, how unique too, no longer the understudy, but the central character as it were, in a play of his own making."
- "the problem arose from that store house in the mind, where all things unpleasant are wrapped up for a time, until something—a self-imposed injection—perhaps makes it react, or a knock hardly at the time felt, but later confronted by the bruise."
It's a very short book but the experimental style can make it difficult to read and, fundamentally, the stream of consciousness seemed to be that of the author rather than the character.
September 2023
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