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Friday 5 December 2008

The Standing Pool

The intelligentsia head south

Jonathan Beckman reviews the latest novel from Adam Thorpe

The psychotic element in the story is played out by Jean-Luc, a loner and the village punch-bag, who becomes obsessed by the Mallinsons and spends his spare time building a sculpture out of found objects that is part fetish, part monument to his uncle Fernand who was killed by the Nazis. The after-effects of the past has always been an abiding concern of Thorpe’s, particularly the way it sizzles underneath even detached, antiquarian interest. Houses don’t need ghosts to be haunted (Thorpe engineers a brilliant misidentification to underline this point). The Mallinsons, as keen historians, dabble in some local research, blithely unaware of how the uncertain wartime activities of Jean-Luc’s father and uncle still determine his strained relations with the rest of the villagers.

Nothing much happens in the novel because essential to the crafting of its characters’ psychology is the fact that these are people to whom nothing much happens. And if their lives are petty, peevish and narrow, perhaps it is overkill to expend 400 pages exposing them as such. But Thorpe writes with such elegance and care in defining his characters — Tammy, the Mallinson’s eldest, is a wonderful portrait of someone discovering morality and tact without having abandoned yet the cruelty of childhood — that he can mostly be forgiven. What cannot, however, is the schlocky, false-bottomed ending, which even the author tacitly renounces, and which mars the conclusion to a sensitive and intelligent novel.

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