Metaphorical
D. J. Taylor
he experimental novel is stirring again, 1 and with a fiction list containing Josipovici, Maggie Gee and now this ex- traordinary first work by Sue Roe the Harvester Press emerges as its principal backer. Estella: Her Expectations is not so much a novel as a theoretical tract — its most obvious stylistic debt is to Jean Rhys, but I detected the lingering influence of heavyweight critics such as Barthes and Foucault — characters from Dickens's novel set down in a penumbral, feminist en- vironment, inexactly defined, though the setting appears to be French. Estella is a dreamy adolescent, Miss Havisham an age- ing dancer. Pip makes a fleeting appearance as one of Miss Havisham's pupils. The book's faults are those of every experimen- tal work since Joyce. It is solipsistic, static up until the final page: readers who prefer what Martin Amis called 'the staid satisfac- tions' of plot, pace and humour will find none of them here. Miss Roe's style is described in the blurb as 'highly original', which means that it is elliptic (there are a great many sentences without verbs) and towards the end, when describing Estella's sexual enlightenment, quite unbearably breathless. The book could best be describ- ed as a reverie in which Estella imagines herself in various female roles; a French maman, a gypsy's doxy, a writer. These are her 'Expectations'. One is continually ir- ritated at being unable to distiriguish dream from reality. On one occasion, after the departure of Estella's lover, we are told that 'the door shuts and he's gone. This is a / dream says Estella...' — an ancient device which. induces annoyance rather than ad- miration for the author's tricksiness. It all seems utterly opaque. Yet the con- fusion engendered in the reader's mind is quite deliberate. For Estella: Her Expecta- tions declares itself, without much prod- ding, to be a novel about the difficulty of conveying truth via the medium of words. Miss Roe's contention appears to be that fiction cannot , be 'true' because it tells stories (which might be regarded as an ax- iom). Estella tells Miss Havisham 'Writing's impossible. You can only tell stories, that's the problem, if you want anyone to read it. I wouldn't be able to keep the story moving. I'd want to write a still life'. Yet even if you dispense with plot there remains the difficulty of getting 'bet-
Estella: Her Expectations Sue Roe (Harvester £6.95)
ween writing and what you're writing'. Miss Roe's solution involves the techniques of painting. Only then can one describe 'the real world, the world of light and fashion, the surfaces of art'.
Fundamentally, this means nothing much more than a greater recourse to metaphor and Miss Roe's experiments in this depart- ment are erratic. Estella's sexual initiation at the hands of someone called Jonathan is 'a slither, a slice, of the stark, fine light, the , fine lines and breaths-of this night, to keep forever on a page', which is a memorable sentence but elsewhere a lot of the densely figurative language seems rather slipshod. What I think we are witnessing here is an overdose of critical theory vitiating the art of a gifted writer. Miss Roe is capable of moments of startling, if more conventional, perception, for instance in her description , of a pub bar-propper who 'when he moved, made a tangible absence behind him'. However, for once the blurb is telling the truth. The book is both extraordinary and original, reminiscent in some ways of the late Brian Johnson and destined to follow the fate of all his books — it will be review- ed as a curiosity, and sell abominably.
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