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.

More books

Following on from yesterday’s post, there is of course a variation on the game: Bookershame. Or, how many of the Booker Prize longlist have you read?

I’ve read none of this year’s and, looking back, have read a mere thirteen of all nominees:

Zadie Smith, On Beauty
Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty
Barbara Trapido, Frankie & Stankie
Yann Martel, Life of Pi
J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace
André Brink, Rumours of Rain
Molly Keane, Good Behaviour
J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun
Keri Hulme, The Bone People
Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger
A. S. Byatt, Possession
David Malouf, Remembering Babylon
Zoe Heller, Notes on a Scandal

Bookershame indeed. As ever, if I count the books I own, it all looks rather more respectable …

While generally sceptical of prizes, it is pleasing to note the Booker’s enduring recognition of South African writing. Not just the usual Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee, but also Dan Jacobson, André Brink, Christopher Hope, Justin Cartwright, Damon Galgut and Achmat Dangor. More, counting Doris Lessing, and Barbara Trapido’s nomination for the superb Frankie & Stankie.

Listmania, or Firing the Western Can[n]on

I like lists. It’s something about their order, the accumulation of what has been or the promise of what is to come.

Once, when I was about fifteen, I spent a number of days compiling a list of books I wanted to read. It runs to several pages of tiny handwriting in a square-papered French exercise book. I uncovered it recently and flicked through, expecting to confidently cross off, or rather put a neat tick (for that was the method I had chosen) next to most of the books.

Not so. I managed one or two, here and there. Recently another – Postcards from the Edge – but the mass remains unread.

Lists of books are tricky, subjective things. The perennial lists of what is ‘good’ – best books, top books, favourite books – almost seem confined to the same library, a combination of GCSE and A-level set texts (Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre), other books which are perceived to be ‘good’, a smattering of reasonably modern works then, of course, The Lord of the Rings and, latterly, the septiform Harry Potter beast. Nothing too experimental or self-consciously difficult, and most of them read before we reach majority: my reasonable acquaintance with the Western Canon is entirely down to my approximation of a modern classical education by some enlightened teachers.

Yet I always count how many of them I have read, expecting a respectable number, but generally managing less than half. For example, of the BBC’s 2003 ‘Top 100 books’, I have managed thirty. Of the 1001 Books to Read Before You Die, less than a hundred. (Though am pleased, if a little surprised, to note the prominence of South African writing on that list).

Of course, I have tried to be scrupulously honest, to tick off only books that I have read all the way through, in its original form. I don’t think my Black Beauty picture book counts. But if I count, along with the books that I have read, the books I feel I have read, the number looks infinitely better (especially if you also count the books I own). Like Clive James, I never quite got round to reading Middlemarch, though I did manage an essay of passably scholarliness for a first-year undergraduate, and there are many others. I’ve at least heard of most of them, even if they inhabit some dim literary hinterland where it’s a little too dark to tell if it’s Flann O’Brien or Flannery O’Connor.

But are lists good things anyway? Limited at best, prescriptive at worst, I prefer my free-range habits, my reading ratio of one ‘proper’ book to be savoured and considered to one ‘junk food’ to be gulped down and galloped through. Books lead on to each other, an organic process rather than moving down a list: I read Gillian Slovo’s Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country, then immediately ordered 117 Days by Ruth First from amazon, something I had meant to do ages ago, when I read The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs.

I suspect it’s the lists that I like, not the instructions they contain.