All about Evas
Francis King
Taboo Eva Jones (Cape £6.50) Waking Eva Figes (Hamish Hamilton £3.95) When a reader enters the world of a novel, he at once makes an effort, however unconscious, to orientate himself. In the case of Eva Jones's Taboo, this process is not easy. However bizarre, a fictional world must, as in the case of Gulliver's Travel,s or The Lord of the Rings, have its own inner logic; but that inner logic is precisely what this novel often seems to lack.
Vincent and Marie are an orphaned brother and sister. both in their twenties; and it is Marie who acts as the narrator of the story of their doomed passion for each other. But each talks, and Marie writes, as though they were weighed down with experience and years. 'Come on, woman, I'll take you home.' Stupid boy!' Repeatedly, the idiom is subtly wrong.
The siblings live in a hotel above a river; but though their names and the names of the other characters suggest that they must be either English or American. there is little sense of either nationality or place. Perhaps the river is the Thames, perhaps it is the Hudson. It might no less plausibly be the Seine or the Rhine.
In the first half of the book, brother, sister, another man and another woman. set off in a red roadster across the desert of an unnamed country of North Africa, where, curiously, they meet with unveiled women. have no difficulty in procuring wine, and are able to converse with the poorest of the natives, presumably in either French or English. At one point they are obliged to abandon their car, which has broken down: but, miraculously, nothing is taken from it.
Marie's narrative reads like a literal translation from a foreign language; but what that language is, it would be hard to say. The smell of your coffee — so full and tender, so exquisite.' French'? 'You little skunk, daring to criticise me, me! who tried so hard to please you.' Italian? 'It is my very dearest wish to accompany you.' German?
Once Marie and Vincent have succumbed to their incestuous and totally obsessive love for each other in a mountain cave — 'I feel him inside me, his head next to mine, his teeth piercing the flesh of my shoulder' — Marie's health begins to crumble, as her resistance has done before it; and. at this half-way point, the novel becomes much better. Marie is diagnosed as suffering from gall-stones and enters a clinic for their removal; and she sees this illness as her body's response to the guilt of having broken a still potent taboo. Hard as stone, cold as stone — are not these the phrases applied to people sexually unresponsive? And was stoning not meted out to sexual offenders in biblical times?
The book also ends well, with a Liebestod in which the doomed lovers sail down the river in a yacht that Vincent. a highly successful photographer, has purchased for their pleasure. He feeds the gulls; and they, envoys of the angry gods, suddenly begin to tear and peck at him. Eventually. Marie lies down beside his blood-stained corpse and swallows the sleeping-pills that she has hoarded from her time in the clinic. It is all faintly absurd, like that far more famous Liebestod: but it provides a firm close to a book that has tended to wobble.
That the cover of Eva Figes's Waking should describe it as a novel seems an infringement of the Trades Description Act. At a time when one can pay £4 for a quarter of a pound of smoked salmon, perhaps no reader should complain at paying almost that sum for 25,000 words of print; but there was a time when a story of this length would have been merely one item in a collection.
Miss Figes's work is, in effect. a Seven Ages of Woman. With her central character waking up on seven mornings spaced out through her life. She is a child, waiting for her parents to stir before she can leave her bed: an adolescent, trapped in her parents' by now loveless marriage; a young woman. the slave of domesticity; a mature woman.
concealing her lover from her children; an aging woman, whose son would like to see her out of her house; an old woman, who describes herself as 'a ghost in a faded photograph'; and. finally, a bundle of skin and bone, awaiting the tide of death that will carry her from the world.
`A lava of sweat has cooled between my breasts. flaccid hills with volcanic tips. and trickled down to the small round tarn of my navel. Odours of marsh and hog come from it when I move slightly. I shift the hard rock of my pelvis and feel how it runs, sticky, through the bushy thicket from the pothole, the dark passage of rock with its cave beyond . .
This passage, typical of the book. might but for • its physiological references, have been written by Virginia Woolf: and the lack of particularity — the woman is any woman, the lover any lover, the children any children — is similar to hers. Clearly, she has been a potent influence.
Both Evas, Jones and Figes, were born in Berlin: hut whereas Miss Jones.seems, as it were, to have retained a foreign accent, Miss Figes shows herself completely mistress of the language of her adoption.
Previous page
