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the womb with a view
Charlotte Moore
FLESH AND BLOOD by Michele Roberts Virago, £14.99, pp. 175 My mother was my first great love, she was my paradise garden.' So says Fred- erica, one of the several narrators of Flesh and Blood. Or are they really several? Frederica, the pregnant artist, has evolved from Fred the androgynous matricide, has merged into Federigo, adolescent observer of female transgression. Time runs back- ward, and is then dispensed with; male slips into female and back again. Michele Roberts contructs her book — one hesi- tates to use the term 'novel' — like a set of Chinese boxes, or Russian dolls. Each episode links to the next, each narrator takes on aspects of his/her predecessor. Roberts mixes memory and desire, blurrs the boundaries between imagination and reality, between the conscious and the unconscious self.
We are led in this way from 20th-century Soho via the France of the Impressionists, the France of Marie Antoinette, the Vene- to at the time of the Inquisition, and the timeless world of the Northern European fairytale — the late Angela Carter is the presiding genius of this book — back, ulti- mately, to paradise. Cultural and historical layers are peeled off like onion skins — to the point where language is little more than the articulation of a heartbeat and identity becomes an irrelevance — the nar- rator becomes 'Anon'. The poem or chant at the centre of Flesh and Blood indicates that paradise is the womb, the `bodysong', when mother and baby are as one, the pearl within the unopened oyster. This blissful state, Roberts implies, is at the heart of all our longings, all our imaginings. By taking her 'character' back and then leading him or her forth to start the track of life afresh, much is mended, much restored. Back we travel, through similar scenes in reverse order. The frozen mother escapes from her block of ice, freed by her daughter's tears. The Italian mother con- trives her sinful daughter's escape from the Inquisition; two haggard French prostitutes (We are but two but we speak as one') find their stolen daughter in a circus cage.
Michele Roberts vaults over the usual constraints and expectations of novel writ- ing. Few episodes are alike. Poems, diaries, pornography, interviews, television scripts — Roberts handles an astonishing range of form. Everything depends on the sensuous- ness of the writing. The sense of smell — that midwife of memory — is dominant, but the book is full of taste, touch, sight and sound as well. Food, fabric, flowers, costumes, colours, are interwoven to pro- vide strength and coherence to the narra- tive. The preparation or consumption of a meal, for instance, can reveal all we need to know about a relationship:
Two white hands casting the red chops mar- bled with fat into the black pan, two red lips parted, the meat seared and scorching as the juices caramelised . . . Felicite smiled and smiled as she took up the spoon and fork and dug the silver prongs through the crackling skin into the red flesh underneath.
Symbols are resonant, and are employed with satisfying ambiguity. Form mirrors content. Just as the chapters are construct- ed like connecting rooms, so, with the 'characters', we are drawn into a series of small chambers — a bake house, a costumi- er's shop, a snow-bound garden shed. Are we about to discover Bluebeard's inner sanctum or the heart of Paradise? The suc- cess of Flesh and Blood is that it does not let us know for sure.
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