Powerful, provocative, and ultimately hopeful.
Naee
m Murr is a story-teller extraordinaire, speaking to the reader so directly it’s as if he’s sitting at your elbow, whispering into your ear. The reader’s sense that an author is carefully constructing his tale, which is so often a part of “literary” novels, is absent here–the construction being more subtle and hidden in the background, as if the author and reader together are “discovering” the story, the mysterious events from the past that have led to the main character’s current difficulty with his relationships.
What a tale this is! With care and sensitivity, Murr creates a complex psychological portrait of Daniel Mulvaugh, the people who have affected his life, and those who have been affected by him. Feeling “incomplete” as a personality, and guilt-ridden about some events from his childhood, Daniel, now thirty-eight, admits that “it was when feeling was expected, needed, directed, that something in him refused to respond.” Having always chosen to avoid, rather than confront, emotional challenges, he has never been able to expiate his sense of guilt for actions from his childhood, and is now virtually alone, unable to function successfully as an adult. His best friend from childhood and his mother both died when he was a youth, he grew up without a father, and his wife has been living in a mental hospital for three years and now wants a divorce. Looking back on the events which have brought him to this guilt-ridden state, he comments, “When I think of Christ, the god of the fatherless, I think of the essential thing his adherents leave out of his life: that terrible act he must have committed in his youth to have developed his cult of forgiveness.”
Growing up in a “council estate,” the British equivalent of low-income housing, Daniel was best friends with Galvin, with whom he shared adventures and his deepest thoughts. Daniel, firmly rooted in a bleak and fearful reality, needed Galvin, whose imaginative escapes into other worlds provided both of them with a way of coping with the lives they faced. Neurotic and timid, Daniel carried the weight of the world, suffering from panic attacks and acrophobia, sometimes fainting with fear, and constantly worrying about his mother and Galvin, the friend on whom he depended.
As Daniel’s story moves back and forth between childhood and the present, we also see him at age thirty-eight, a social worker with a heavy case load who is still suffering from acrophobia and panic attacks and the inability to “feel” and respond appropriately to the needs of his adored wife. After recovering from a breakdown three years before, Sally, his wife, has chosen to remain in the caretaker’s cottage on the grounds of the hospital, rather than return to Daniel, and now seeks a divorce.
Eventually, we discover some of the events from the past with which Daniel has still not made his peace, one of them the death of his mother and its aftermath. Following her funeral, Daniel had simply abandoned the apartment and his life in it, never clearing it out and never returning to it. Years later, into his life comes Amos Radcliffe, an elderly client, who is now living in the same apartment Daniel and his mother once shared. More importantly, as Daniel discovers when he calls on Ams, he’s living with all the furniture and possessions which Daniel left behind upon his mother’s death . As Daniel continues to visit Amos, Amos tells him stories of his life as a sailor, the people he’s met, the sins he’s committed, and the guilt he’s felt, and the parallels between his own life and that of Daniel are unmistakable. Returning again and again, Daniel finds that “Amos’s voice, in this place, had…become a kind of refuge [for Daniel]. It cohered him…” Amos himself, however, is also seeking some kind of atonement for guilt, telling Daniel, “I’m on my knees. I’m at my last stand…I’m giving myself up to you.”
As Amos continues 
his story and the nature of his crime is revealed to Daniel, and as Daniel continues to try to make some connection again with Sally and with his acquaintances from work, the reader observes their parallel searches for love and communication and their mutual need to confront the past and themselves. Some readers may question whether or not Amos is “real,” or if he is a figment of Daniel’s limited imagination, but that is really not important. Daniel himself believes he is real, and the reader, who has pinned his/her hopes on Daniel’s ability to learn from the past through Amos’s stories and insights, accepts this. The parallels between their lives are unmistakable, the coincidences are extraordinary, and the similarities in their relationships with others are clear. Murr has created a novel of intense feeling, and in his depiction of lost opportunities and lost chances at communication, one of immense sadness. He stirs the reader’s sympathy for his characters and ultimately, the reader goes way beyond the mere “suspension of disbelief” to share in Daniel’s life.
Murr is able to accomplish this literary magic not only because of his sensitive psychological insights, but also because of his finely developed style. His observations are acute, and his descriptions, sometimes appearing almost as “throw-aways,” are unique. He describes a group of men as having “simple lizard brains; they had to blink to swallow their food,” a woman as “an impeccably maintained cul-de-sac of feeling.” The dialogue, through which Murr reveals much of the story, is lively and natural, sometimes filled with black humor. The ironies, both in plot and character, are striking, and Murr’s comments about the nature of imagination and the nuances of language are insightful. This is a beautifully wrought, carefully constructed, and totally absorbing novel about selfhood, our need to deal with our pasts, and the role of imagination in making life bearable. Powerful, stunning, and ultimately hopeful, this novel is a thought-provoking can’t-put-it-downer. (On my Favorites list for 2003)
Notes: The author’s photo by Alan Cross and a brief biography appear on his website: http://www.naeemmurr.com
A council estate: http://www.virginmedia.com
In this novel within a novel, Australian author Thomas Keneally returns to the political themes which won him prizes for The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Voices from the Forest, and Schindler’s Ark. Keneally has always been at his best depicting ordinary people facing extraordinary pressures, especially from governments bent on totalitarian rule, and this contemporary allegory is no exception. Taking place in an unnamed oil-rich country in the Middle East ruled by a tyrant who calls himself Great Uncle, the novel centers on a man named “Alan Sheriff,” a short story writer given one month to write an “autobiographical novel” for which Great Uncle will take full credit. Sheriff, we learn in the opening chapter, is telling his story to a western journalist at a detention camp in an unnamed desert country, where he has languished for three years.
mma Woodhouse, “handsome, clever, and rich,” is the 21-year-old daughter of the elderly owner of Hartfield, the largest estate in Highbury. Though only a couple of hours away from London by carriage, Highbury regards itself as an isolated and virtually self-contained community, with the Woodhouse family the center of social life and at the top of its social ladder. Emma, doting on her hypochondriac father, whom she represents to the outside world, has grown up without a mother’s softening influence, and at twenty-one, she is bright, willful, and not a little spoiled.
persuading Harriet that the vicar, Mr. Elton, is falling in love with her.
possibilities, and as Emma’s matchmaking fails again and again, causing grief to many of her victims, Emma begins to recognize that her pride, willfulness, and love of power over others have made her oblivious to her own faults. Austen shines in her depiction of Emma and her upperclass friends, gently satirizing their weaknesses but leaving room for them to learn from their mistakes-if only they can learn to recognize the ironies in their lives. Though Emma may be, in some ways, Austen’s least charming heroine, she is certainly vibrant and, with her annoying faults, a most realistic one.
Susan is considered part of Jane Austen’s “juvenilia,” having been written ca. 1805, it was not published till well after Jane Austen’s death and is still not counted among her “six novels.” In fact, this seventh novel, though not as thoughtful or thought-provoking as the “famous six,” is one of her wittiest and most spirited. Written in epistolary style, it is the story of Lady Susan, a beautiful, recent widow with no conscience, a woman who is determined to do exactly what she wants to do, to charm and/or seduce any man who appeals to her, and to secure a proper marriage for her teenage daughter, whom she considers both unintelligent and lacking in charm.
omewhat atypical Jane Austen novel, Austen abandons her precise characterization and carefully constructed plots, usually designed to illustrate specific ethical and social dilemmas, and presents a much broader, more complex picture of early nineteenth century life. Though the polite behavior of the middle and upper classes is always a focus of Austen, and this novel is no exception, she is more analytical of society as a whole here, casting a critical eye on moral issues which allow the upper class to perpetuate itself.
someone else, and introduces a romantic, new sexuality into the novel.