Pursued by the Furies
Digby Durrant
THE CALLIGRAPHER by Edward Docx Fourth Estate, £.10.99, pp. 353, ISBN 1841155438
Two men stand reading a handscripted copy of Donne's poem, 'The Legacy'. Eventually one speaks; 'I know you can get a long way up your own arse but even so that poem there is pure 100 per cent bollocks.' The calligrapher, Jasper Jackson, concedes that his companion may have a point. He's as used to the grating vulgarities of the shopkeeper who provides the food his fastidious palate requires as he is to the hours of concentration his calligraphy demands and the nights of boozing and sex that follow.
Orphaned early but raised by a grandmother who is an expert on mediaeval documents, Jasper is sat down in the Bodleian at the age of six and told to copy an illuminated manuscript. He asks what it says and is told it is a monk's prayer asking God to deliver him from the women who haunt his dreams, a prayer Jasper will need himself one day. His grandmother's career takes them to Avignon, and Heidelberg where Jasper chases girls and reads for four happy years before three unhappy ones at Cambridge, 'amongst the most confused and neurotic people in the whole world'. He becomes a calligrapher. Restaurant menus and the like are all he gets until a millionaire commissions him to select 30 poems from John Donne's 'Songs and Sonnets' as a present for his wife-to-be.
The poet is not just an intellectually provoking companion but a tolerant mentor who would approve of Jasper arranging a fire alarm to go off at the Tate Modern so he can ditch his girlfriend, Lucy, and go off with the one who winked at him near Rodin's 'Kiss'. Hadn't Donne written, 'Must I, who came to travel through you, /Grow your fixed subject, because you are true'?' Donne may pardon sexual treachery but Lucy does not and summons up the Furies to exact a revenge while Jasper is pursuing another girl, Madeleine, convinced she is to be the one. However, Madeleine seems too sisterly, too nice. Jasper fumes: 'Who the fuck has time for nice?' But Madeleine is not nice. One day she reads the manuscript on his easel: 'I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I /Did till we loved?' and then gives him the kiss that will undo him.
The ingenious revenge is biblical in its severity and completeness, transforming Docx's first book from what was fast becoming an overlong and tedious look at today's crop of Bright Young Things into a harsh moral fable. It's a crime to dissipate a God-given talent and even more of one to damage other people in the process. Jasper is to repent at leisure and redeem himself by work. The party's over. An arresting debut and promise of more to come.
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