Of love and death
Anita Brookner
FALLING by Colin Thubron
Heinemann, £10.95, pp.152
he obsessive love affair used to inspire more novels than it does today, as if obsessive love were the one commodity that our consumer society could not afford. Colin Thubron dealt with such an affair most effectively in his last novel, A Cruel Madness, and he returns to tile theme here, giving it a new dimension of strange- ness. Yet what emerges from both novels is the very old-fashioned Romantic notion that love and death occupy the same mysterious terrain, that the one leads inevitably to the other, and that a death, however crazed, however compromised, is the fitting conclusion — indeed the only conclusion — to the type of love which exceeds the norm, which is baroque, ar- dent, unsociable, and possibly, in its in- tensity, one-sided. The Romantic move- ment acknowledged this kind of love as vampiric, sadistic: it was seen as a gran- diose affliction, from which only one of the 'We have the know-how, we lack the know-why' two unfortunates involved could possibly survive.
But what kind of survival would be appropriate in such a case? Colin Thub- ron's hero (and in Romantic terms one must call him a hero) begins his story in a prison cell. His crime is not nameless but it is kept under wraps until two thirds of the way through this short, tense, absorbing novel. Indeed, it begins as a story of prison life and it is only in hindsight that Mark Swabey is established as a journalist in his early thirties, with an invalid mother and a deeply respectable girl friend who designs stained-glass windows. The girl friend is called Katherine, a name that might have been invented for the kind of dark haired, passive, well-behaved character bound to lose out to the wrecker who confounds her expectations of a happy life. The wrecker in this case is called Clara — Clara the Swallow — and she is a circus acrobat.
From stained-glass designer to circus acrobat is an effective metaphor for a love affair that is in every sense unorthodox and fraught with danger. Clara's aerial effects are to be contrasted with Katherine's masterpiece, which depicts a vision of the fall of Lucifer. This clue having been planted, it is not too difficult to anticipate what will happen to Clara: 'Falling' is not only the title but the theme of the novel.
There follows a painful and grief- stricken account of Clara's injuries and the way in which they are eased. Other voices join the account — Mark's cellmate, the prison chaplain, Katherine herself — but this device is not perhaps quite strong enough to justify the intrusions: a single- person narrative would best suit the Romantic tradition in which this novel should be placed. A coda to the main story is provided by the sight of a fellow-prisoner going over the wall. Once again, a cable takes the weight of a human body, and the penultimate image is of arms with frag- ments of mirror thrust out through the bars of cell windows as inmates try to follow the progress of the man making his escape. For my money the final image is the best: a banal street, the one that leads to the railway station and the newly released Mark's return to a normal life.
What Falling lacks in amplitude it aug- ments by a twist of sadness that might in an earlier age have been called doom. For all its arcane imagery and signposting names it racks up a quota of strangeness not too often come by in these days of the post- modernist novel. Short, as perhaps it had to be, and authentically painful, it concerns itself with extreme states, as this author so often does. It has nothing to do with the kind of urbanity that makes novels popu- lar. But Colin Thubron's voice is unique, and Falling may well turn out to be a
genuine curiosity. It deserves to be: the author's voice, once heard, is difficult to forget. Those stricken lovers of the past, so common in the 1830s and 1840s, might well claim him as one of their own.
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