The Rowing Lesson

Not instruction in the noble art, but a novel I discovered via the dovegreyreader blog and also amazon's recommendations based on my order history.

Anne Landsman, The Rowing Lesson (Granta)

Steve Fairbairn, the father of modern rowing, described the rowing stroke as an ‘endless chain’. While The Rowing Lesson alludes to a pleasure boat rather than a racing shell, Fairbairn’s image is an apposite one.

It is the chain of her roots that draws Betsy, the narrator, back to her native South Africa from her adopted, married New York home. She returns to the hospital bedside of her dying father, to sit out his last days with her brother and mother in the very hospital – Groote Schuur – where Harold, the father, undertook his medical training.

The endless chain thus links past and present, memory and experience. The narrative structure is unusual: the action is seen through Betsy’s eyes, yet she slips into the second person, imagining and inhabiting her father’s past as if it was her own. Her eye takes in his childhood, the son of a Jewish shopkeeper generous to a fault as he has known what it is to suffer; his times as a medical student in Cape Town, while the Second World War – the adventure of a lifetime that Harold is not allowed to join, for he must qualify and secure his future – goes on half a world away; as a general practitioner, ‘Doctor God’ to his devoted and diverse patients; an often irascible father and husband, married above his station to Stella; and now, lying in a coma in the very place where it all began, the great doctor reduced to a frail body.

Each episode is framed by a rowing expedition to Ebb 'n Flow, the source of the Touw River, back in Wilderness near to where Harold grew up in the Western Cape. Like these trips, the narrative ebbs and flows between past and present, taken in by Landsman’s harmonic, lyrical vision which is, at times, dreamlike, echoing Harold’s present-day state. She exploits the potential of language, its consonance and resonance, and is generally playful without being tricksy.

The narrative structure, coupled with the ebb and flow of time and imagery, blur boundaries in space and time as well as in relationships: the psychosexual father-daughter relationship is played out in this context. Betsy is both of, and separate to, her father’s body and his blood. He is her doctor, too, and so that relationship is transposed upon the family one: an unsettling state. Both body and mind are inhabited by father and daughter and, ultimately, connected in the final scene, combining father and daughter, doctor and patient, blood and blood.

All this is played out against the starkly beautiful South African landscape, an unforgiving land that here, is a cipher of both beginnings - via the motif of the Coelacanth - and of otherness. The initial homecoming is now a standard of modern South African writing, but The Rowing Lesson is not an ‘apartheid’ novel: the historical and political is there only for context. We are assured of the family’s liberal credentials – Harold treats anyone, regardless of creed – but there is nonetheless a sense of separation, as evinced by the hospital staff speaking Afrikaans, a forbidding edifice of linguistic granite that cows Betsy, her mother and her brother.

The Rowing Lesson is Anne Landsman’s second novel, and it is an ambitious work. The strict narrative structure largely prevents the lyricism running unchecked, but it is occasionally overwhelming. Landsman could also have benefited from a better proof-reader, but these are small complaints. This is a substantial and important novel.