FICTION: How to Paint a Dead Manby Sarah Hall, Faber, 289pp, £12.99. HOW TO create, how to live, how to survive. English writer Sarah Hall is confronting all of this and more in a dense tangled narrative that pursues its small group of characters with all the urgency of a hunter stalking its prey.
And it’s that urgency that almost succeeds in keeping her demanding fourth novel on the road to somewhere important. Its theme is a large one: art and the artistic consciousness, that driving impulse that nags away, determined to find an expression. At times this narrative appears to be articulating dark wonders. At others, you feel like shouting, “just get on with it”.
Either way Hall is attempting something different, although she has fallen back into that by now almost conventional device of a narrative built upon four smaller, loosely interlinked ones, one of which is not all that convincing.
That unconvincing strand, ironically, contains some of the best writing. In it a girl succumbs to a blindness that could be seen as symbolic. She lives in an Italian village and works in her family’s business, selling flowers. This in itself is an art. Annette is obsessed with a mythological creature, the Bestia, depicted on a church altarpiece. She imagines this monster, aware that “in the painting is a vision of him that was said to have sent the illustrator mad, trying to tear his own eyes out, after its completion. ‘I have opened the gate of Hell,’ he wept to the doctors. ‘I have brought something unspeakable back with me’.” Annette is drifting out of the ordinary, while all the while becoming more intently a part of the closed world about her. Hall’s problem is that the girl never quite becomes real. The other characters, however, are real – all too real.
Elsewhere, meet Peter, rampaging old artist, yelling and screaming and living life to its fullest, although perhaps not as wildly as he once did. Previously caught up with a crazy woman artist, dope head and genius, he is now safely, gratefully bound to Lydia, a calm Earth mother who gave him twins, both grown.
The tragedy is that one of those twins, who lived his adult life as a man-boy, is dead, killed in a freak accident that had a suicidal dimension.
The Peter sequences are not about grief, they are even more immediate. The artist, having set off to climb the local mountain, has had a mishap. His foot is trapped between stones. Try as he might, this angry, raging man is caught. Again the symbolism is powerful; the feisty artist is old, contained within age. It is as if he is being forced to peer intently at the northern England landscape that has dominated his work.
At the heart of the text are entries from a journal kept by another artist, a man who had lived a reclusive life in that same Italian village as the young blind girl. The artist was a mentor of sorts to the very much younger Peter. It is all connected, too connected, yet, to Hall’s credit, never too easy.
This new book comes within two years of Hall’s impressive, apocalyptic tale The Carhullan Army. It is a futuristic, forceful, prophetic book, if admittedly, in the wake of earlier forceful, prophetic books. There are echoes of Margaret Atwood. Hall is an opinionated writer – she tells stories, but she also notices everything. There is a bite and an anger; she is alert, reluctant to let an opportunity slip away. It really is a case of everything but the kitchen sink. No, the kitchen sink is there too. Before Peter has his fall, he is driving along the moor. Winding down the car window, he inhales the clean air and thinks about hares. “The hares seem bigger this year, bigger every year. Haunches, whiskers, paws: he’s sure they’re expanding. Maybe it’s Sellafield’s radiation, reaching inland. Maybe it was that lurid rain drifting over from Chernobyl . . . Come the apocalypse it’ll be the super-size hare owning the country, with its lengthening backbone and its shrewd alien face . . . ” Meanwhile he realises that the dairy cows trudging along the road “are relics of another era”.
Susan is Peter’s daughter. She is also an artist, a photographer, and married to kind, shadowy Nathan. At least he seems kind, because he is relegated to the role of sympathiser. Nathan stands by and waits as Susan grieves for her beloved brother.
Although not the most beautiful prose passages – they belong to the Annette sequences – Hall evokes Susan’s pain with a visceral force that splatters language across the page much as an artist would hurl paint upon a canvas. Her loss is physical and expressed through vivid recollection. Her dead brother, Danny, emerges as a zany reactor who snatches at life. There is something deliberate about his death, as if he sees it as his work of art. He wants to have a funeral pyre. Susan’s response to ordinary things is heightened, intense. When she cries on the train heading north it is as if her lamentation fills the space – her tears becomes a public experience.
Years before, one of her friends suffered an asthma attack that has left her in a coma, lying in a hospital bed like Sleeping Beauty. Susan resents the grotesque inertia of it. Meanwhile, another friend has encouraged her to work with her in the gallery she runs with her husband. Central to Susan’s grieving is her frantic sexual encounters with her friend’s husband, which are described with a detached physicality that conveys the utter lack of emotional engagement. It really does depict sex as an impersonal performance, no more, no less.
Hall is bold, daring, unlike many of her English contemporaries. She likes big gestures. This book is pulsating, heaving with emotional energy. There is a flamboyant confidence and an articulation of the helplessness of loss. Susan is drifting, in pain and yet anaesthetised. Peter is trapped on the mountainside, we all are. The writing has a surreal fluency, poised and yet full-bloodedly hasty. It can arrest you with a phrase and leave you feeling remote. Longlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize, there is an interestingly eerie, predictable ambivalence at work, similar to finding yourself sharing a meal with a person you may or may not know, you may or may not like.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
