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In Zodiac Light

The pity of it

Robert Edric
Doubleday, 368pp, £16.99,

P.J. Kavanagh

Wednesday, 23rd July 2008

P.J. Kavanagh on the new book by Robert Edric

This book opens with a bang; things are suggested rather than described, in short paragraphs, mostly dialogue; the impression is of a (very English) Hemingway. A party of six inmates, two orderlies and a newly arrived doctor, Irvine, are being taken on a bus from Dartford Asylum to view a whale beached on the Thames estuary. Dartford Asylum is a real place, containing for the most part men mentally damaged by the war, and the event is carefully dated, Spring 1923.

The other passengers shy away from the silent inmates, sometimes even crossing themselves as though from fear of contagion; the bus driver is deliberately unhelpful and the orderlies are insolent to the new doctor. (Did people cross themselves in England in the 1920s? Possibly, one has to pay attention, this writer knows what he is about.) They find the whale, dead, unreachable because it is stuck in mud. Desultorily, some of the party throw stones at it, and then they all return to the asylum.

We know that Irvine is new, because he has not unpacked. His luggage contains mementoes of his dead father, a country doctor and a nationally famous keeper of bees. Bee-keeping is a constant theme of the book. It frequently switches from the asylum to Irvine’s happy childhood, helping his father and mother and elder brother (later to be killed in France) with the bees.

Bees become infected, hives have to be burnt, with tainted bees inside them, new swarms encouraged. Is an analogy being made between this and the asylum, filled as that is with hopeless cases? Is England itself tainted, exhausted by the war — the flinching passengers on the bus, the lazy insolence of the asylum staff? Is England also waiting for new refreshed swarms? The reader has been put on the qui vive for such parallels.