Fiction: An old artist travels on horseback from Italy to France. With him is his small team of students. It proves a demanding journey. Their project is to design a chateau and its parkland for the French king. All of this soon becomes irrelevant as the story develops into a study of the changing seasons, writes Eileen Battersby.
Time and its passing is the central theme. Michèle Desbordes evokes a sense of daily life in a country house in which work is supplanted by creativity.
The artist and his students are well tended by the maid, a woman of no particular age who appears both ageless and ancient. Her weariness is the product less of life than of domestic routine. At first, the artist appears simply aware of the woman's presence, she becomes interesting through her ceaseless activity. For her the party's arrival means diversion as well as a purpose.
Set in the Loire valley countryside in the 16th century, this is an impressionistic, austerely romantic book, full of shared feeling rather than mindless passion. It is their grasp of a shared humanity that establishes the relationship between artist and servant. The narrative is slow-moving, even ponderous but sustained by long, complex sentences. Possibilities and ambiguities shape the story.
There is also the fact that an artist's eye serves as an all-important recorder. A world and its individual epoch may be captured far more completely in a painting than in any number of words. Desbordes has written an impressive first novel that is closer to painting than it is to fiction. She is looking at feeling when it has moved beyond romance and emotion.
Over the course of two years, the seasons arrive and depart. Changing light and growth, and most particularly, heavy summer heat and the endless days of June and July are well evoked. Desbordes has a strong, though unsentimental response to the natural world. Initially the narrative reads as a melancholy pastoral. It is as if she is trying to create a series of pictures recording a particular moment. Gradually, her focus shifts to her two main characters, the artist and the maid.
He is aware of his waning powers, but not as an artist or as a lover, merely as an individual whose time is becoming shorter. Memories, both general and specific, infiltrate every gesture, every look. "He talked about the light, and how the shadows weren't the same, about Tuscany and its great heat, childhood summers." Recalling his mother who one day became one of those little old women "worn out by life who no longer had anything to lose or fear, not death or even unbearable abandonment". As time passes, the maid finds it easier to speak and becomes equal in the business of remembering. She appears never to have had all that much to lose. Desbordes gradually reveals that there had been a man, selected by her mother, and there remains a boy who is seriously handicapped. The artist is preoccupied with his own death, as well as by his awareness that she too will die: "the end was coming for him and for her . . . They would die offered up and consenting, they would leave without memory or regret". It all sounds very morbid, but this novel is not a lament. It is a gentle confrontation of the inevitable. The portrait of the servant, a lonely woman who begins to assert herself, is touching and sympathetic in its uninhibited desperation. "At one moment or another she raised her eyes and looked at him, she now seemed to be seeking his eye, sometimes went so far as to attract it by being provocative and clumsy; he observed the challenge and the clumsiness, the confusion." The request of the title is in itself an important statement. It also carries the weight of resignation. She wants her existence noted as it is now. The maid is described as a woman "used to expecting and hoping for nothing but the end of things and who by dint of turning over and over the same sad and weighty memories did not even fear death". Although the artist imagines her keeping vigil at his dying, it is she who travels first. Having left the house for the few days required to bury her son, she never returns. This is a solemn, thoughtful tale. There is a detached assurance about the writing, although the translation at times appears laboured. Far less Jamesian than suggested on the jacket, it offers realisation and acceptance, not tension. Her characters are not battling, all angers have faded, they understand.
The story works well through the vivid physical description of the locale and its response to the changing seasons, which also seems to reflect the essence of lives lived in the shadow of a final farewell. Through two characters, a random everyman and everywoman engaged in watching, remembering and waiting, it develops into a cautionary, unsettling ballet for the reader, who becomes more witness than voyeur and is left wondering and thinking.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
The Maid's Request. By Michèle Desbordes, translated by Shaun Whiteside, Faber, 148pp. £12.99