Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer's Reviews > Stretto

You have to follow the vectors, follow where the words dry and riderless lead. I also see now what you mean by the 'special interests and their tendency to loom large, freezing out everything else. Here is the jumper I have put on backwards, here is the shopping list I left at home, lacking all importance. And here is the Bach fugue I am playing silently on the table-top, here is the gleaming eye of a cat on a fence I have had to stop and study: you have to follow where the fugue subject leads, leap into the well of the cat's eye, there is in that moment nothing else. The train is not free to leave the tracks and randomly cross the terrain. Is this determinism then. No, it is freely chosen. There is no terrain, only the track. And is there movement, really, have I not always been there, been here. De Selby [my note – from Flann O’Brien’s “The Third Policeman] would travel by entering a wardrobe and thinking of his destination, then emerge to a sense of uncomprehending rage on not finding himself there. But it works, I have done it. I cross the mountain landscape and notice a church and, entering, find a stained-glass window and passing through it find myself in a mountain landscape where I notice a church and, entering, find a stained-glass window, not this again, I am moving from one side of the glass to the other, turning madly on the spot, what figure of speech am I looking for now. These are not symptoms; these are figures of speech. So what are you suggesting I do, doctor. I call you doctor, but you are also the addressee, the reader, moving forwards and back through the text at your leisure. In this sense you are, have become, as much me as I am. Thank you for reading. How do you feel it's going? Now turn the page.

This is the first novel by David Wheatley – an Irish poet and critic who now teaches as a Professor in the School of Language, Literature, Music and Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen – and poetry, Language, Literature, Music and Visual Culture feature heavily in this auto fictional book.

I have read a number of novels by poets and many have a fragmentary almost spiky language reflecting the author’s more familiar milieu: here if anything I found the language for the most part rather slow, with unwinding passages (see my opening quote) in an almost consciously old-fashioned register – starting with the opening sentences “The more difficult it becomes to deny the failure of my years abroad, the more my thoughts return to the memory of a mountain village on a reservoir in the region of my youth. I say 'my long years abroad', though I write from there now and hardly think of it as abroad anymore; it is simply where I happen to be. But this too is a part of my failure, for reasons that will become apparent.” . I was surprised to realise the author was only in his early 50s as this felt at time like a book written by someone already well into middle-age, but in say the 1980s – some of this though I think is a very deliberate nod to “modernist” forebears such as Beckett and other Irish poets and authors as well as Sebald (with a passage on the crumbling East Coast of England, a slightly clumsy “Rings of Saturn” link).

The fragmentary poetry influence I think comes in more strongly in the book’s meta-structure: which is told over some 101 chapters each around 1.5 pages long (other than one 3 page poem) – making the book much more like a poetry collection than an entirely coherent novel.

And returning to Sebald, rather than the now beyond cliched out of focus black and white photographs, we have instead a book about the vivid contrast of light and dark – beginning with the opening chapter of the novel when the author looks back on an influential visit to a nearby church in his youth as he contemplates a modern stained glass window:

I have stated that I am not religious, but find my response to the window crystallising into a standoff between light and dark. It is a dull autumn day, and amid so much encircling gloom I have discovered a window of light. It seems crucially important, therefore, and for this moment at least possible, that I pass through the window to whatever lies beyond. And so I do, imaginatively at least. The effects of this resolution have continued to unfold down well beyond that moment, while also leading me to the failure recorded in my opening sentence. How this came about will form the burden of the notes that follow. .

Two chapters later similar ideas of light, reflection, transition and so on return rather beautifully (and for me incredibly evocatively) in an image (from the narrator’s student days at Trinity) of Dublin pubs, with the pub doors as “portals into concealed realities” with the “transformative powers of the pub [as] less about drinking than access to a new physical realm, a space of light and dark, as when a glass of beer is raised to a gaslamp in a windowless back room, and held aloft momentarily before consumption”

And quickly in the following chapters we find two artistic inspirations for the novel’s structure – one from classical music: “Yet even as I travel the sound world of a Bach prelude or fugue I double back, find windows opening within windows. Stretto is a fugue technique where the melody - the subject - is repeated in another voice” - and one from language “Years later, I am reading a volume on rhetorical tropes and encounter one called, I believe, metalepsis. It involves the passage from one narrative frame to another, as when a film begins with a page from a book, showing the words spoken by the narrator, with an illustration of for instance a house or some skaters on a lake, before the illustration comes to life and we enter into its world.”

In other chapters we have train stations and passing trains and a mirror seen through window seen on a daily commute; a clever image of a window covered in lace curtains – standing for the way in which the narrator on moving to English suburbia suddenly realises windows there are for keeping people’s view away rather than letting it in

For the first part of the book, I felt I therefore had a handle on the ideas and the way in which each fragmentary chapter was looking to explore these similar ideas.

And while some of the references were lost on me but I enjoyed how the author seemed to mix different mediums (drawing on all the parts of the school at which he teaches) and culture from highbrow to popular/mid brow to low brow. So for example we have: Irish poets and novelists; various classical and post-classical musicians and musical techniques; the Russian art-house/science fiction film “Solaris”; Matisse’s paintings within paintings; the voyages to and back from other worlds of Mr Benn; the Mr Men and the world of Mr Right and Mr Wrong;; The 1982-83 Cup Winners Cup Final; Terry and June; ready-brek commercials (at times the book can seem like a 1970-80 nostalgia show).

But then as the book continued, and particular as the focus shifted more towards the narrator’s journeys and travels I felt that a number of the chapters matched the drifting of the narrator and seemed to move away from the central theme and/or seem more like one-off experimentations with style or content: to use the Stretto example it felt like we mixing a tightly planned piece of classical music variation with some free form jazz.

Overall – and it seems an odd comment for a book which is effectively 150 pages long, this really needed to be a much shorter book. I think editing it down to say half the entries – those which are more clearly related to the overall theme – could have produced an excellent novella (in the style of Luis Sagasti or more to the point Jack Robinson the Psuedonym of Charles Boyle who as CB Editions was the publisher of this novel) – rather than this too inconsistent collection.

3.5*

No plans have been made for the disposal of my papers, or the retrieval of this report from aged laptop or print-outs stuffed down the back of a filing cabinet. As I have written about the village and life here, there is I suspect a subcurrent of distance, assuming as I have worked that I am talking to a reader far from here and now, and whose remoteness will form our paradoxical point of connection. I even imagine them as the final portal through whom this tale might pass, onwards, outwards and free of its author at last. But I see now I am more likely to be turned back on myself in a posthumous silence, my papers neglected, dispersed, destroyed. So perhaps it is best to proceed on that assumption, that the portal may be less portal than frame, and what it frames less a way through than a fated dead-end. Sacrilegious thought. One elegant solution to the pain of this realisation would be to have my papers buried with me, for perusal at my leisure. I write in the present tense. In which tense are your reading me? Your doing so at all means which of the above-sketched outcomes, I wonder. Reach out a hand. What do you touch? Whose face is that in the dark? How close are the walls? Don't answer that. Or not yet. Now turn the page