THE DROWNED SON by DAVID GUTERSON

People like to talk about the calm before a storm, and that is true, there is a close stillness in the air and the sensation of hanging in limbo, the potential electricity crackling loudly in its absence. People rarely talk about the calm after a storm. The washed-out feeling, the silence when the rain finally stops.  Alaska comes from the Aleut word for ‘the place against which the sea breaks.’ Off the coast of Alaska, a storm hits the fishing boat on which the son is serving. He dies with vomit on his lips and a flashlight in his hand. The sea breaks against his family too, his mother and father blaming each other and feeling no forgiveness and living in the silence after the storm.

There is bitterness here, there are the angry words of those who no longer understand why they ever loved each other. There is the selfishness of grief, the recognition that it makes people ugly and the hatred of ugliness in someone you used to find beautiful. There is the man who survived the fishing boat, who brings ugliness into the memory of their son, by disclosing his imperfect past and undignified death. There is an internal and external despair at the self.

It is a book without hope. The father’s personality, his hardened stance against cowardice, his only comments about his wife and daughter being their unattractiveness, seems more deep rooted than a reaction to grief. The mother’s icily stiff words and refusal to blame herself even slightly shut her off from sympathy. For the son, with his dreams of reading psychology and opening a pizza parlour, hope is futile for he is dead within the first sentence. Alaska is wild and open and beautiful, yet the novel is claustrophobic and dark. It is a book for the beginning of winter, and it is as perfect a tragedy as one could hope to read. 

The Drowned Son, Bloomsbury Birthday Quids

THE BRIDGE OF SAN LUIS REY by THORNTON WILDER

To what extent is life governed by external forces? Everyone who has caught the eye of a stranger in a crowd must surely wonder what their life story is, how they came to be standing opposite you at this precise moment, and whether you have anything in common with them. Then you pass on your way, and forget their face, for meetings of this nature are fleeting and private, and not really meetings at all. When the Inca rope bridge collapses, killing those standing upon it, Brother Juniper observes and collects the life histories of the dead, trying to find a pattern and to make sense of the apparent chaos.

            The dead are tangentially connected, primarily through questions of familial loyalty, love, and geography. The Marquesa de Montemayor, a great writer of letters, whose ugliness led to isolation in high society, dies with nothing but love for her indifferent daughter. Her companion, a young girl raised in a convent, feels lonely but cannot express her misery through letters, and the two realise that they share a life of cowardice. The twins, Esteban and Manuel, were raised in the same convent as the companion of the Marquesa, and have the closeness that only twins can obtain. Love for a actress drives them apart, and the blood tie is strained to breaking point. The casual nature of disease kills one, and the bridge the other. The actress’ valet is also on the bridge, pained from the realisation that his protégé has become the mask that she donned to fit into the high society shunned by the Marquesa for being superficial.

            The empty vanity of the actress, the Gatsby-esque dream of raising oneself, forces her away from those she loved. Yet the ephemeral nature of her beauty is shadowed by the fate of the ugly Marquesa; society has many barriers outside birth and status, and those rules shape the lives of the people who fleetingly touch that world whether they understand them or not. The twins and the Marquesa’s companion are drawn from the opposite end of society yet they cannot escape the slow destruction of mutual relationships any more than those with money and power.

            Brother Juniper’s collection of work on the destruction of the bridge is considered heretical, and he dies in the name of knowledge and truth. Those on the bridge die as their love dies, as their families fall apart, as consistency and justice and loyalty collapse just as the ropes under their feet collapse. There is no peace for those who crossed the Bridge of San Luis Rey, it is not a punishment from God nor a release from their shattered lives. The book is neither sorrowful nor joyful in its conclusion, but it is as delicately written as the lives of those within it. 

The Bridge of San Luis Rey, paperback Penguin Modern Classics, 124pp

LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES by JEAN COCTEAU

I know it sounds like a bizarre thing to say, but I had the consistent feeling, through Les Enfants Terribles, that I was reading an Enid Blyton story gone bad. 

This, like much of Blyton, is a tale of children without adults.  From the outset, Paul's and Elisabeth's mother is ill.  She then quickly dies and other adults occupy only minor roles in what is essentially a modern take on a Greek tragedy written, so I gather, during Cocteau's cold-turkey period in 1929 when he was breaking a serious opium addiction.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, the plot is strange.  A tale first of two, then three then four children, all orphans, who live together - closely together - first in Paul's and Elisabeth's mother's Paris house and subsequently in a house owned by Elisabeth's momentary husband who dies in a car crash immediately after the ceremony leaving her to understand marriage as a series of meetings with lawyers.

A normal English version of the title is Children of The Game and it is The Game, a mental journey played in the interstices between sleeping and waking which drives the first three children (including Gérard, Paul's schoolfriend) through their later youth and adolescence.  The Game requires mementoes, treasures, a need to be together and to create a Blytonesque camp in the bedroom (a room seldom left - at least by Paul).  

A key treasure is a photograph of Dargelos, with whom Paul was obsessed while at school and whose stonefilled snowball,  which strikes Paul in the chest, results in Paul never attending school again.  But Dargelos doesn't fade; Agatha - a nascent mannequin who joins the group in the second-half of the book - turns out to be the spitting image of Dargelos re-establishing the obsession and unwittingly tightening the incestuous coils which tie Paul and Elisabeth together.

The pair are indeed terrible, consistently striking each other - even on a rare holiday in public - making faces at all around them, stealing, undertaking consistent verbal attacks and yet, at the same time, bathing together, defending each other, indeed loving each other.

This combination of unrequited incest and the reappearance, at least by letter, of Dargelos, forces the end.  Gérard is always in love with Elisabeth and later, Agatha falls in love with Paul and he with her although neither gets the chance to tell the other as Elisabeth, turned Greek Fury, intervenes to block such expressions of feeling and to persuade Agatha and Gérard that they're the natural (if unhappy) pairing.

When the four reunite after the wedding, Dargelos, the uncaring or malicious god of the piece, has sent Paul poison knowing Paul to be fascinated by such symbols of mortality.  Eventually, Paul takes the poison and Elisabeth shoots herself.  Bring down the final curtain.   

Written very quickly and gaining from that, Les Enfants Terribles, is a product of the febrile 20s when societal rules had been destroyed by the First World War.  It is a shocking tale magnificently constructed. 

Les Enfants Terribles, Penguin (my copy 1973) - translated by Rosamund Lehmann