My Sunday Guardian column.
Those
who continually claim that the novel is dead are simply those who have closed
their eyes to its potential. It remains unmatched as a form to, among other
things, ask questions that have no neat answers and explore how we react to
changes. Importantly it’s also a vessel for linguistic experiment. Alas, too
few novelists nowadays attempt to take advantage of these possibilities.
The
Portuguese writer Gonçalo M. Tavares isn't among them, as his four-novel
Kingdom cycle amply reveals. These novels are loosely linked by overlapping
characters, themes and a prose style that depends on defamiliarisation – almost
as though a Martian was sending a postcard home from Earth, to borrow from
Craig Raine. Such boldness and versatility has earned the young writer a clutch
of awards as well as encomiums from other novelists. After he won the Jose
Saramago Prize for writers under 35, the author after whom the prize is named
commented, “In thirty years’ time, if not before, Tavares will win the Nobel
Prize, and I’m sure my prediction will come true... Tavares has no right to be
writing so well at the age of 35. One feels like punching him.”
The
punch delivered by one of the novels in the Kingdom series, Joseph Walser’s Machine, is a good
example of Tavares’s style, which has been called that of "alienated
recognition" by one critic. Set in an unnamed European city, the novel
follows the fortunes of Joseph Walser, an unassuming factory worker. Tavares
delves into the symbiotic relationship between Walser and his shopfloor machine,
riffing on the differences between the human and the mechanical and “the
swiftness with which [machines] transform causes and necessities into
beneficial effects”. Chaplin’s Modern
Times was a comment on the mechanization of labour; Tavares takes this a
step further to expose our double-edged dependence on means of production,
making a distinction between things crafted by the hand and those created by
the mind.
The
novel now starts to fill in more details of its protagonist’s life and world.
His wife is having an affair with his philosophical and garrulous factory
overseer, and this personal invasion is matched by an invasion of the city
itself: a war is underway and citizens live under occupation. These events too,
as translator Rhett McNeill points out in his introduction, are described “as
if they were occurring for the first time, divorced from both their historical
resonances and their usual linguistic milieus”. This leads to several
penetrating observations. “To be a patriot in peacetime is to be a coward,
because it’s too easy,” writes Tavares, and then again, in a statement that
echoes the rhythms of his prose: “Every man in time of war, individually, on
his own, founded, as it were, a Ministry of Normality, which established,
essentially, repetitions. Because only repetitions…allowed each individual to
wake up to find themselves human the next day.” People make history, but
history also makes people.
For
a novel that’s so short, there’s a lot that Tavares manages to pack in, and
this without making the whole appear inordinately rushed. Allied to the Janus-faced nature of machines
and the citizen’s experience in times of war is the role and nature of
unpredictability and choice. This is brought out in scenes where Walser engages
in games of dice with his friends who are later to rage against the war
machine. “There were six numbers stuck to the die and they weren’t going
anywhere,” Walser thinks. “It was this precision that excited him, this
precision that was well-defined by immutable limits that, nonetheless, allowed
room for his peculiar decisions.”
History
and morality, unpredictability and determinism, people and objects: these,
then, are the axes around which Joseph
Walser’s Machine swiftly rotates. Large themes indeed, but Tavares
demonstrates the skill and insight to do justice to them. One of his earlier
novels is entitled Learning to Pray in
the Age of Technique – and that’s not a bad way to think of this one, too.
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