Inconvenient truths

People who’ve read Justin Cartwright’s previous novels possibly won’t be too startled at what they find in his new one. The main character is a clever, well-read media man of about Cartwright’s age, who lives in London but ends up feeling the tug of a more primal culture — in this case by clearing off to the Kalahari for six months. His thoughts are conveyed in a quietly glittering, often aphoristic prose. The book ponders the big questions of love, religion and the nature of the self, while also scrutinising such less abstract social phenomena as rap videos and lobster sandwiches.

When the novel opens, David Cross, a former TV anchor and foreign correspondent in his early sixties, is adjusting to life as a widower. Among his guilty secrets, though, is that he’s happier than when his wife was alive. He doesn’t seem too upset either that the world is passing to another generation, leaving him and his friends to fade ‘like frescos in unvisited churches’. On the contrary: he’s rather enjoying the freedom that comes with being ‘genuinely not interested in what most people say most of the time’.

But, of course, this sense of acceptance never means that David’s feelings go unexamined. In fact, for a book which regularly suggests that there’s no such thing as a true self, To Heaven by Water does spend a lot of time wondering where it might be found. ‘Why are you always trying to analyse everything?’ somebody asks David at one point. His response is to analyse why she’s asking — although the obvious answer is surely, ‘Because I’m the protagonist in a Justin Cartwright novel’.

Happily, such careful analysis remains one of Cartwright’s greatest strengths.