FICTION: The Detour By Gerbrand Bakker, translated by David Colmer Harvill Secker, 230pp. £12.99
FLIGHT SEEMS THE ONLY option for Agnes, an academic who has committed a taboo crime by sleeping with a now vengeful student. She has other problems as well, but the Dutch writer Gerbrand Bakker prefers not to give too much away in his intelligently thoughtful if slightly undeveloped second novel. This works fine in the early stages, when the central character is preoccupied and not given to small talk, as all who meet her quickly discover. As a city girl, she appears intent more on looking at her new surroundings, which consist of the landscape around the remote Welsh cottage she has rented.
In addition to the general tenacity of nature, even in winter, two distractions emerge: the perils threatening the resident flock of white geese and the lingering smell of the former occupant, an old widow named Mrs Evans, who had tended the birds until she died. Between the geese, which disappear one by one, and the surprise visits of Jones, a nosy local farmer whose sheep remain on the land, Agnes realises that a certain level of tension is undermining her solitude.
Bakker has confronted the challenge of following an outstanding debut. The Twin,published in Dutch in 2006, won the International Impac Dublin Literary Award in translation (also by David Colmer) in 2010. In it, a middle-aged narrator reviews a life spent on the family farm. His university plans and possible career have died with his twin brother in a car crash. In Helmer, the laconic narrator, Bakker caught the voice of Everyman who has watched dreams blown apart by the unexpected. It is wry, ironic, utterly convincing, precise and understated.
This time, however, Bakker's cryptic flair often falters into sketchy allusion. Most of all, though, there is the weighty shadow cast by JM Coetzee's superb 1999 Booker-winning Disgrace, in which another academic sets off on a journey of self-discovery, also in the wake of a sexual scandal.
In The Detour, although Agnes seems to have been restless and unhappy as a wife, she marks her arrival at the cottage by adding various domestic touches and seeking out the nearest gardening centre. She has also brought some material on Emily Dickinson with her for a projected biography, and the American poet is at times referred to less than reverentially.
Bakker’s prose is cool, exact and as detached as would be expected of the low-key third-person narrative voice, which contrasts dramatically and disappointingly with the ironic tone that was so well sustained in his first novel, in which dialogue and characterisation consistently impress. Yet Bakker cleverly balances Agnes’s outward efforts to remain busy with the darker moments of reflection that trouble her.
The most interesting of these memories concerns an uncle who had one day walked fully clothed into a pond at the hotel where he worked. “The water refused to come up any higher than his hips. Other staff members pulled him out, gave him a pair of dry trousers and sat him on a chair in the warm kitchen (it was mid-November). Clean socks were not available. They put his shoes on an oven. That was about it, or what she knew of it, anyway, no one ever went into any more detail.”
The episode is very important to Agnes, who feels its symbolic resonance, particularly now during her personal crisis. The scandal has hurt her, but there is more and, curiously, although Bakker appears to be striving for oblique effect, it is clear that something else is wrong. The encounters with the locals are well handled, and the arrival of the youth and his dog, if predictable, is a minor flaw when compared with the tentative introduction of the cuckolded husband who barely emerges as a character and whose friendship with an unusually helpful policeman fails to convince on any level, particularly when they set off together to Wales on her trail.
All too often Bakker concentrates on observation without using these details to consolidate either the narrative or the other characters.
Agnes dominates; it is her story, her mistake. There are flashes of humour, such as when she attempts to sunbathe and is bitten on the foot by a badger. No one subsequently believes in the attack, as badgers are nocturnal. The initial exchange between an offhand doctor and an exasperated Agnes in his surgery is one of the strongest sequences in the novel.
Meanwhile, back in Amsterdam, Agnes’s caricatured parents become increasingly concerned. Late in the action her husband – whose foot injury and its impact on his driving merely echo the difficulties experienced by Agnes – receives a phone call from his mother-in-law. He and the policeman are driving through Wales. “I’ve got my mother-in-law on the line; she says ‘the flesh is weak’.” Bakker’s handling of the response is masterful: “The policeman glanced at him. ‘Can’t argue with that,’ he said.”
What begins as a potentially intriguing novel almost immediately settles into being a competent one, apparently because Bakker became caught between revealing too little and describing too much.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent
