Very flat, the Wash
John de Falbe
PEACETIME by Robert Edric Doubleday, £12.99, pp. 357. ISBN 0385602979 There aren't many novelists whose new book I would read without question (Banville, Marias, Proulx) but I would read a new novel by the Yorkshireman, Robert Edric, even if its blurb told me that it was about a monk calculating how many angels could dance on a pinhead. This seems improbable considering the dramatic settings of some of his recent works — Franklin's Arctic (The Broken Lands), Kurtz's Congo (The Book of the Heathen), Tasmania in 1864 (Elysium). But in his new novel Edric avoids any hint of the exotic. Returning to psychological terrain that he visited in In Desolate Heaven, which was set in a Swiss spa town in 1919, Peacetime takes place at an isolated spot on the Wash in 1946. Mercer, a demobbed Engineer, has been sent with some recalcitrant labourers to drain the ground and prepare foundations for a new coastguard station. On one side, some German PoWs are breaking up an airfield. On the other stand a few doomed cottages, whose occupants include the adolescent Mary with her mother and father, the aptly named Lynch; he spent much of the war in a military prison. Among them is also Jacob, an Auschwitz survivor who is dying. Mercer is engaged in construction. but what we really hear about is destruction and collapse. Everyone is constrained to live in a world where their sufferings count for nothing. They are beyond hope, beyond redemption, eviscerated by their losses — ghosts, like the landscape itself.
Although the landscape of Peacetime is almost featureless, its role in the novel is fundamental: It was an open, exposed place, and yet there did not seem to be the smallest part of it which did not possess its secrets.' It is nowhere made explicit, but the vast, potent image of the marsh pervades the book and Ethic displays an acute sensitivity to its metaphorical possibilities. Water flows unexpectedly beneath surfaces; attempts to dig drainage channels are subverted by forgotten relics of the past, like gun emplacements; flooding disrupts their efforts. What Mercer does with landscape, he also does with people: they come to him and tell him their stories, as if he is equipped to provide some sort of equilibrium. But though he constantly works on his charts, they seem no more helpful in negotiating the place than preconceived ideas will help to understand or comfort the people.
Edric's language is also critical to his uncanny ability to evoke a landscape's atmosphere. Without being in the least flashy, it is distinctive. It has a mythic, almost biblical quality, where every word carries due weight and you have the eerie sense of things being left out: this happened, then that happened, and it was so. 'Mercer left the room and waited on the high metal platform until his eyes became accustomed to the darkness beneath him.' The perfect balance of this sentence endows the image with immediate resonance, while the steadiness of the surrounding rhythms gives authority to the In common with Edric's best novels, Peacetime describes a practical, professional man, bearing the tools of civilisation, going into the unknown to bring order. Instead of the grateful and submissive raw material that he is led to anticipate, he finds a world of unremitting harshness, where the people and the landscape are set against him from the outset; where cruelty is routine and the ramifications of past sufferings reach inexhaustibly into the future. But of course the real engagement is not physical but moral. A checklist of questions that are explored would include individual/collective responsibility; guilt of the perpetratorionlooker; the nature of loss, forgiveness, atonement, and many more. But what makes Edric's writing profound is his refusal to be tidy or dogmatic: he remains true to character and situation. An illustration of this is when Mercer remembers a picture sent to him by his mother of a dog that had died. This apparently banal memory is lifted into something illuminating when he recalls that it was the image of the room in which the dog was photographed rather than the dog's death, which 'rendered him speechless with sadness'.
Edric's restrained, elegant irony refreshes moral situations again and again as they reflect in new ways on one another, Thus when bystanders watch the vile Lynch throwing a stone at one of the German PoWs without intervening, there hangs in the air the question of individual German culpability in the Holocaust; and this event is echoed in the final scene (Edric is so good at endings). Reading about Jacob's guilt at what he perceives to be his failure to keep his sister alive, we are torn between thinking how inappropriate such a feeling is to the circumstances and the ludicrousness of supposing that propriety has anything to do with it: for Jacob's sense of guilt is in fact very much more acute than anyone else's. Similarly, it is conspicuous that Lynch, the person who inflicts his grievances most obnoxiously on everyone else, is the one with least to complain about — most of it his own fault. Yet his sense of loss requires no justification; it is enough that he feels it: `...men like Jacob, and like Lynch — were tethered to... [the] past as they were to their own bodies.' It is shocking to find Lynch likened to Jacob in any way whatsoever, but true.
Although he has received considerable critical acclaim, the prolific Edric has not reached a wide audience. It is tempting to explain this by the bleakness of his vision, but unpersuasive when considering the success of, say, Coetzee. Nobody read Faulkner for a laugh, either, or even Anita Brookner. So why? Besides this new one, only three of his 12 novels are in print, although the superb The Broken Lands has just been published in America (Thomas Dunne Books, ISBN 0312288891). It's a shame because he is a great novelist. If other novels deserve this year's Booker Prize more than Peacetime, then they must be very remarkable indeed.
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