Review of The New Suffolk Hymnbook: Jacqui L’Ange
The New Suffolk Hymnbook
by Ben Oswest
- This review of my novel by Jacqui L’Ange was originally published in the 7 July 2006 Cape Times.
- Purchase The New Suffolk Hymnbook.
Your perceptions of meaning and self will be challenged by this read
A lot of books wrestle with the idea of meaning, the eternal quest to understand. Ben Oswest’s book may well be one of them. But I’m not entirely sure.
This is the challenge and the delight of the book, the paradox that it plays with inside its covers (I think), delivered amidst a most blindingly dazzling display of wordsmithery. Who cares what he is saying, when he says it so brilliantly?
I’m not ashamed to admit to being challenged in my meaning-quest, because I am in good company. No less a literary luminary than Ingrid de Kok, speaking eloquently and at length at the launch of The New Suffolk Hymnbook, admitted to being rather baffled, at times, by the book. But she was also, if I understood her correctly, also entirely blown away by it.
It’s difficult to describe a work like this without overstatement. One could say that Oswest’s prose is not just muscular, it is acrobatic – no, make that ‘contortionist’. JM Coetzee – it has become de rigueur to emblazon book covers with the laureate’s pithy blurbs – talks of his ‘supple, elegant prose’. His metaphor feels like a dancer, but I prefer that of a highbrow funfair (oxymoronic images are allowed; this is, after all, the realm of hyperbole) with Oswest presiding over a house of mirrors.
Many of those mirrors are turned inward. Oswest traverses this inner landscape, showing his readers some overarchingly beautiful, discomfortingly familiar, and quite confusingly changeable territory.
He conjures daydreams; he captures with aching accuracy the intimate code created between lovers; he formulates the way baby minds feel out the world, summoning just the right words to describe the pre-verbal.
This strange and haunting book requires you to attend closely, even when you do not understand where you are going. Oswest doesn’t simply inhabit the spaces he creates, he charges around their many dimensions, whisking you along with him; you are spiked, stimulated, craving more, and then perplexed, wondering – what exactly was that?
But it is his flip from inner to outer voice that is the most dizzying, most challenging to negotiate. It feels as if Oswest is having a love affair with italics as he toggles between voices (perhaps also time and place) and script-styles. Is one person’s inner monologue cutting through another’s dialogue? Is the interruption an outside communication from a higher mind? Or is it simply that our post-modern, media-infused magpie minds flit to other, inner (if not always deeper) thoughts and meanderings even while we are engaged in interaction with the outside world?
It may be a bit of all three. The mind extends beyond binary.
But while Oswest’s experimentation with form sometimes obscures meaning, it does not irritate; rather, it entices. Nadine Gordimer failed to do that, for me, when she tortured grammatical structure in Get a Life; that felt less like wordplay than sloppy editing, and so frustrated me that I wanted to throw the book against the wall. Oswest’s verbal twisteage, on the other hand, makes me want to go back again and again to pick up (find meaning?) in any bits I may have missed. The words are that lovely, the insights that profound.
Some descriptions are precociously ecstatic. Take one man’s experience of a train station: “stimuli – colporteurs’ cant, vendors swearing billingsgate, malingering plainclothesmen, eleemosynary squabble between derelicts and urchins, the raving of mattoids, and behind all the tramp of dailybread earners – provoke near lycanthropy in his temperament.� You just gotta love this Bladerunner world.
There are nine tightly told stories in this collection, each one a small masterpiece of layered detailing and hidden truths. They are told by nine voices (nine lives?) – three of them are called Secondo, although Oswest teasingly suggested at the book’s launch that they might not be the same person.
Secondo is a vagrant spirit, a devilish feral child, or an untameable innocent; fast as lightening, he blazes like thought through and between the stories, and hovers, bird-like, over the visual landscape of Suffolk, which is where it all evolves.
Jonah is an academic and poet whose known world is already ending, in a tempestuous Shakespearean manner, when he is blindsided by a tragic personal betrayal.
Miss V is a teacher who sees in her class a microcosm of the ways of the world. She tries to introduce some unpredictability to her method, but is distracted by a flash of otherness (Secondo?) on her peripheral vision.
Piety is an executive on the up, a black man negotiating white man’s territory, pulled back to his past, then flicked forward to claim his future, in love.
Jarvis is a trainstop of a person who may be terrifyingly perverse under his ordinary exterior.
Jane is an impervious outsider (she’s all italics) who comes to observe the working of a parish and finds herself almost captive to its ways (how quickly our inner worlds change when outside forces dictate that it must be so).
There is a final character in the book: Suffolk itself – and the journalist whose notes map it for us, leaving a trail of clues, like crumbs, to meaning. (Hacks will thrill with recognition to his modus, and his conceit.) Where, or what, is Suffolk? It is not the one in Britain (which Miss V calls “that depressing island�); it feels tantalisingly like Cape Town (the author’s home base). It is coastal, has been colonised, the restorative innocence of its pastoral outskirts are romantically described, its cathedral is “evenly celebrated & maligned�. It is a place where black and white fight for space and supremacy (which, admittedly, could be anywhere in the world but feels tellingly familiar).
Suffolk’s people exist somewhere between extinction and progress.
On its surface are played out issues of race and place, of colonisation become rampant consumerism, claimed ownership and dispossession, of insiders and outcasts, the individual vs the group, home or abroad (the book is prefaced with a quote from Chinua Achebe’s Home and Exile).
It is Secondo – one or all of him – who shows us how only the homeless, the truly dispossessed, are entirely free to move between worlds. (Secondo is also the name of a place – an Italian village that provided refuge in wartime. The name was passed on to a new baby because it represented home and peace – something Secondo will not find in this story.)
Jarvis is both train station and menacing everyman. Is the girl really pilloried in Jarvis kitchen, or merely in his imagination? What is real, what is not? When you are jumping between levels of consciousness, boundaries become blurred. It is in this way that atrocities – towards ourselves or towards others – occur. But where indeed is the line between self and other?
Like a hymn to italics, a truckdriver (or is it Secondo’s voice?) delivers a silent soliloquy to the power and meaning of prayer: “Where else but home can you anticipate the thoughts of others in such a way that your prayer will go unmolested? Where but home will your artistic instincts flourish into visions and where else may you pursue these visions with adequate intensity? At home you may sniff out the last dark corner of intuition. But abroad you keep a gun.�
And where is safety, if not at home? Is Oswest’s nom de plume another clue – East, West, home is best?
Is this, ultimately, what he means us to know? He tells us that Suffolk’s story amounts to “a wayward feeling for beauty, a misguided response to suffering… In the rippling waves of grass details shimmer and dart, beyond grasp.� But Oswest has, ultimately, held his story, and all its artfully rendered details, firmly in his grip.
This book’s greatest strength, its gift, will be that it can mean something unique to each of us, wherever it touches familiar places in our own internal scapes.
Perhaps Suffolk hymns are what we tell ourselves to make life bearable, to find meaning, to find connection. To bring us home.
