The Second Circle
Review
JUSTINE
by
Alice Thompson
reviewed
by Fin Keegan
SPEAKING TO "Time Out New York" recently, novelist Patrick McCabe
(The Butcher Boy) made the point that the narrators of his novels tend
to be Social Fantastics, that is, unreliable to a degree that allow a
novelist to remain a Realist while, in the guise of depicted reality,
including material drawn from the far shores of human possibility. Don
Quixote is the greatest Social Fantastic in literature, though
Cervantes affords us the company of the sceptical Sancho Panza--as
most contemporary Social Fantasists do not--so as to play up the
richly ironic contrasts between the "real" world (sheep; windmills)
running alongside the hero's fevered imaginings (knights; damsels).
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JUSTINE
by
Alice Thompson
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AMERICAS,
AFRICA,
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& ASIA
EUROPE
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The modern Social Fantastic, from Nabokov's Charles Kinbote to
James Kelman's Sammy in How Late It Was How Late (and, one could
argue, Harry Potter) is a character who radically reorders their world
in order to stave off psychological or emotional extinction.
Deciding to use this device is a veritable Open Sesame for contemporary
writers, hemmed in as they are by the strictures of Fictional Realism,
since writers, unlike dramatists or filmmakers, can play endlessly
and fruitfully with the intrinsically allusive nature of the written
word. (Thus the recent film of Don Quixote fails at the first fence,
being unable to simultaneously present us with both Quixote's and
Panza's mutually contradictory perspectives).
And, now that we all live in a space
of mutually agreed mediocrity,
governed by the twin poles of advertising and consumption (if you can
read this, as the bumper stickers say, you're too close) neurotic
mental states transformed into full-blown Guernicas are increasingly
tempting for First World novelists, hide-bound by the spiritual and
philosophical deprivation of their communities and, by and large,
their own lives.
I know little of Alice Thompson's day to day life but the unnamed,
hedonist-dilettante of her short novel Justine is a thoroughgoing
Social Fantastic, taking us around the bend of the bifurcated reality
which gives rise to this book: our hero slides off the rails of
contemporary FCUK/KFC London in grand style, in a Poe-like story heavy
with the putrid scent of literary debauch.
The novel follows an Art collector's search through a shadowy,
sulpherous London for the model of one of his portraits, a painting
that periodically comes to life before him as he loses himself in the
"lilac spirals" of opium. But one should always be careful what one
wishes for: a la Hitchcock or Bunuel our young man finds this
mysterious creature not once but twice over, in the shape of sisters
identical in appearence but utterly opposite in character.
Thompson, a one-time member of the Woodentops (an
Eighties rock
band, folks, not a revolutionary movement) is preserved from the
ultimately shallow roots of the contemporary genre that has sprung
from Social Fantasy by a sharp authorial eye that has earned her
comparisons to fellow Scot Muriel Spark: this, together with the
intense brevity of the chapters, also bring the late Penelope
Fitzgerald to mind. This is a fine little book.
Fin Keegan
Read Chapter
One
of this book.
Other reviews
by Fin Keegan at The Second Circle:
The Blue Flower by Penelope Fitzgerald
The Palace of Dreams by Ismail
Kadare
Omon Ra by Victor Pelevin
The "Loire-Atlantique" Cycle by Jean Rouaud
The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald
Pereira Declares by Antonio Tabucchi
Justine by Alice
Thompson
Brief Reviews including Donald Antrim and John Lanchester
A Profile of
the Harvill Press
A Profile of
the Editions de Minuit
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