An Appreciation of Louis de Bernieres.

 

I am amazed at Bernieres' chameleon quality of style that manages to take on the tenor and cadence of a culture's language, climate and geography...

 

I read his first South American ones years ago and felt myself in that dreamland of magic black panthers and the disappearing villages he created there... and then couldn't believe he'd also written 'Red Dog' - with the harsh, tinny, treble nasality of Aussie phraseology dinging out of the character's mouths in that vast lonely land.

 

'Notwithstanding' has an English damp, green, grey, faintly dream-like quality that's just right too, and you can hear the Major's and General's English accents and expressions booming off the pages.

 

I think that a kind of evolution is happening among the best modern writers. I loved Marquez and Rushdie and Vikram Seth, but I don’t remember them sublimating their own style to a culture, language and climate in this chameleon way that Bernieres and Rose Tremain do. - But what a great reason to read them again after so many years with this in mind.

 

Maybe you need to know that as a musician and singer, I hear everything I read. 1 don’t understand its content as information formulae or ideas or just facts or suggestions - I hear it spoken to me in my head from the character's or author's mouth. So for me authors also develop a character with a voice quality, tenor, resonance and cadence. THAT's where I feel Louis and Rose are different - in managing to sublimate their egos and let the characters of that geography, climate and culture speak the volumes.

 

Thoughts on  'A Partisan’s Daughter' by Louis de Bernieres...

 

Sad! - How we may live in hope and fear and deny ourselves fulfillment and so can’t move on - Or, we live in a dream world of guilt and submission… And how TACT!!!, can be a self-delusionary, deliberately self-blinkered excuse for not asking a simple question or two for clarification - as that honesty might just destroy our fragile dream... So the whole story relationship was of a huge fabrication of friendship - balancing on a matchstick neither wanted to topple over...and so Chris never asked the actual truth about her life as a prostitute - for fear of offending Roza and she never told it for fear of losing his respect and affection, and so it ended a tragedy of loss - due to tactful assumptions.

 

Ex-Pat connections with Rose Tremain's 'The way Home'. and a converse picture of freedom from guilt about the natural realities of sexual needs are in 'Restoration'... But, they are all studies of how people become entrapped and disappointed with each other in their 'using' ways, and illustrate that marriage hasn't necessarily got anything to do with love. It's a contract of ownership.

 

As usual I seem to be gifted by a guiding to groups of books and films with connections during the same time and in Louis de Bernieres’ 'A Partisan’s Daughter', one character - Polish Roza - makes a comment about religion never seeming to do anyone any good (" Look at Tito and my country" she says) - and then the other main character, Christian! - who is trapped in a marriage with 'A Great White Loaf', muses that maybe that's why puritanical, perverted religionists insist on sex only in marriage - because they know after the contract's honeymoon, married people will usually have less sex than if they were free - unlike Robert Merivel and Charles the 2nd. in Rose Tremain's 'Restoration' - whose realistic, guilt-free attitudes were liberating - until 'Love' messed everything up!

 

'Flying man' by Roopi Farouki has a similar non-judgmental vision of reality. I haven’t had time to research her but I wouldn't mind placing a small bet Roopa has had nurse or midwife experience as she's very graphicly down to earth in places.

 

Roza lives in an abandoned, due for demolition, patch of old housing ‘remnant’ near Archway in London. Many, many years ago - maybe 20 - I remember getting lost in Archway - trying to walk from Kings Cross to somewhere and feeling the extraordinary peculiarity of this arch tunnel in the middle of nowhere... And, it was grey and cold and had a weird lonely atmosphere - as in the book.  I remember standing out of the drizzle under it, wondering which way to go - no maps making any sense - and eventually back-tracking to Kings Cross and abandoning the project entirely and I haven't been back there to see how its changed – probably demolished.

 

Another similarity between Rose and Louis' descriptive abilities can be found in Rose's 'The Way Home' and 'Restoration'. If you have lived in London and walked some of its oh-so-different old 'village centers' - now absorbed into the vast urban sprawl, or if you visited friends living in others, several times, you will be pleasantly reminded of their unique atmospheres, noises and moods – e.g. of Earls Court, Hampstead, Putney, Kew and more.

 

Memorable phrases:

Love is a 'fall into fascination' 

'Eau de streetwalker'

Wives become sisters or enemies

Muddled sources - sorry! 'Folorn by forty'.

Rose Tremain’s ‘The Darkness of Wallis Simpson’ is also about the dis-satisfactions of marriage contracts.