Acting strange

Reviewing Lindsay Clarke’s Whitbread-winning The Chymical Wedding a small matter of 20 years ago, and noting its free and easy cast and wistful nods in the direction of the Age of Aquarius, I eventually pronounced that it was a ‘hippy novel’.

Reviewing Lindsay Clarke’s Whitbread-winning The Chymical Wedding a small matter of 20 years ago, and noting its free and easy cast and wistful nods in the direction of the Age of Aquarius, I eventually pronounced that it was a ‘hippy novel’. Slight anxiety when Lindsay Clarke then appeared on the bill at a literary festival I was attending — authors, you may be surprised to learn, don’t always care for these off-the-cuff judgments — was quickly dispelled. No doubt about it, Mr Clarke affably deposed, ‘hippy’ was exactly the right word.

Oh well, I thought to myself, a third of the way into The Water Theatre, an altogether ominous narrative rife with intimations of family fracture and post-colonial trauma, not much sign of the beautiful people here. In fact this was a hopeless misjudgment, for while outwardly concerned with such subjects as emotional score-settling and the horrors of modern Africa, the novel turns out to be as full of mysticism, sex, spiritual quests and vagrant petals tossed wantonly upon the stream of life as an Incredible String Band album from the summer of 1967.

We first find Martin Crowther, Clarke’s veteran war-reporting hero, on his way to Umbria sometime in what I take to be the 1990s. His task, carried out at considerable personal cost (there are cross and ultimately discontinued phone calls from a feisty American girlfriend) is to appease a dying man, long estranged from his children and ripe for reconciliation. Stroke-felled Hal Brigstock is revealed as a left-wing ideologue from the era of the Winds of Change, who by dint of his friendship with its first president, contrived to midwife the birth of the fledgling African state of ‘Equatoria’.