Pa for the course
Archie Powell
THE FAVOURITE by Meredith Daneman Faber, £14.99, pp. 163 In her first novel for ten years, Meredith Daneman tackles a weighty subject. The Favourite deals with the self-examination of a woman coming to terms with her obsession with her father. Set alternately in the narrator's youth and married life, it confronts its fragile subject-matter frankly and in detail.
The 'I' of the novel is Rosalind, a woman deeply preoccupied by a childhood in which she was burdened with the responsi- bility of being her father's favourite. The father is an elusive and errant figure, seem-
ingly tortured by self-induced professional and marital instability. In this emotionally charged context, the young Rosalind becomes the family mediator, the one nom- inated to make her father stay when he would leave for what her mother euphemistically describes as 'business'. Switch to later life, and the now fortysome- thing Rosalind watches with horror as her husband, Frank, begins to betray her, stir- ring up similar emotions to those induced by her father. Amidst all this is the emerg- ing truth surrounding her father's dramatic death and how it affects her attitude towards her present relationship.
In switching from childhood to adult- hood, from adolescent gropings to middle- aged sexual preoccupations, Daneman ignores conventional narrative. Her inten- tion is to construct an overall picture of Rosalind's Electra complex through the accumulation of emotionally resonant moments. The story is also pinned down by crucial periods of transition, such as those from childhood to adolescence and from adolescence to adulthood, culminating in a mid-life crisis of marriage and identity. The switch is a geographical one, too: from Rosalind's Australian upbringing to her present English residency which, in turn, points to cultural juxtapositions.
In her discursive prose, Daneman shows that such accumulation can come close to repetition, especially within a fragmented and episodic structure. The novel suffers from lack of character development, partic- ularly in Rosalind's father and husband. In the case of the father, Daneman is irritat- ingly unspecific about his profession or the details of his infidelity, a character who is meant to be intriguingly ambiguous and elusive appears more flimsy and undevel- oped. More effective is Daneman's evoca- tion of the young Rosalind's childlike and idealistic vision of her father, her poignant inability to accept his flaws and her con- fused understanding of their relationship. Best are the childhood and adolescence: Rosalind's deep envy of her schoolmates' packed lunches; the acute embarrassment of her first awkward tumble on the the beach with her T. S. Eliot-quoting boyfriend; the intrusive presence of her vomiting friend, Nancy, while she tries to flirt with the same boyfriend on a Sydney ferry. The most intriguing element is Dane- man's description of Rosalind's cartoonist husband's warped reproductions of his own family, in his cartoon strips. This is made more significant by the fact that the novel itself works as a series of strip car- toons: a kind of grotesque Posy Simmonds, short on laughs and long on incest. Yet it is precisely this aspect that makes the novel a series of fragments rather than a cohesive whole.
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