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Book
Review
Heavy
Water and Other Stories
As
he has descended from the lofty perch of the satirist, Martin
Amis's fiction has become--dare I say it?--more soulful. The
best stories in his new collection Heavy Water and Other Stories--"The
State of England," "The Coincidence of the Arts,"
"What Happened to Me on My Holiday"-- attest to
the increasing range and resonance of his fiction.
 Nowhere
is this more apparent than in the final story in Heavy Water,
"What Happened to Me on My Holiday." Ironically,
the emotional resonance of this intensely autobiographical
tale is deepened by means of a linguistic device that may
initially alienate many readers. The story is narrated by
an eleven-year old boy, a fictional version of Amis's son
Louis, whose summer holiday in Cape Cod is shattered by the
death of his step-brother (Elias Fawcett, the son of Amis's
first wife Antonia Philips, who died at seventeen).
Amis represents
Louis's response to this loss by means of a highly stylized
phonetic speech (part American slang, part British phrasings)
that is the verbal equivalent of the estrangement and stupefaction
death leaves in its wake: "I dell id thiz way--in zargazdig
Ameriganese--begaz I don'd wand id do be glear: do be all
grizb and glear. There is thiz zdrange resizdanze. There is
thiz zdrange resizdanze." Reading the story aloud, as
I did to my 10 and 14-year old children, the reader feels
Louis's grief as a physical presence--thick, hard, unyielding.
Wordsworth's
"still, sad music of humanity" sounds throughout
"What Happened to Me on My Holiday," preserved in
a meticulously crafted fugue-like structure in which the voices
of other characters and nature itself contribute to the theme
of loss. Louis plays with his younger brother and his four-year-old
cousin, catching crabs and minnows, understanding all too
well (as his cousin does not) that a dead sprat will never
return to life. He sees in the natural world intimations of
the mortality he is now struggling to understand, observing
the "gloud of grey" he sees rising from a pond on
the day he hears that his stepbrother has died back in London:
"nat mizd [mist], nat vag [fog], but the grey haze of
ziddies and of zdreeds [cities and streets] . . . and nothing
was glear." Elias now inhabits the distant land of memory,
where Louis imagines him hurrying about "with bags and
bundles . . . jaggeds and hads [jackets and hats], gayadig,
vestive [chaotic, festive]".
Meanwhile,
another of Louis's cousins goes into the pool without his
arm-floats and must be rescued. At the end of his holiday,
in the car on the way to the airport, the word "grey"
returns again, like a haunting melody--the melody of mortality:
"Greynezz is zeebing ubwards vram the band. And nothing
is glear. And then zuddenly the grey brighdens, giving you
a deeb thrab in the middle of your zgull." Now all the
notes of the story converge, all the deaths come together,
and Louis thinks of his brother: "one vine day you gan
loob ub vram your billow and zee no brother in the dwin bed.
You go around the houze, bud your brother is nowhere do be
vound."
For readers
new to Martin Amis, Heavy Water will serve as a bracing introduction
to his arresting vision and his remarkable artistsry. It will
assure the rest of us that his artistic quest is nowhere near
its end.
Source:
www.richmondreview.co.uk
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(R) thedailystar.net 2005 |
