Tag: Paul Griffiths

As we live by metaphors so we die: The Limit by Rosalind Belben

Ilario watched Anna waiting to die.

For months on end he is forced to sit beside a person whom he loves—very much—whose poor head must be filled with thoughts, and images of death.

Spare and unflinching in its depiction of an unconventional love and a most conventional death, Rosalind Belben’s The Limit presents the story of a middle-aged English woman, prematurely aged and ravaged by cancer, and her much younger Italian seaman husband, as the one gradually loses her ability to function and the other copes with his feelings of growing distaste and deepening love for his ailing wife. It is one of the strangest books I have ever read, but one that, beyond its often coarse, blunt descriptions of both lovemaking and illness—sex and death—lies a portrait of an unlikely love affair grounded in a shared sensibility that defied the many sharp contrasts between them and that will endure beyond the grave.

As Paul Griffiths notes in his helpful introduction, The Limit, Belben’s third book, first published in 1974, was a marked departure from her first two. Although other writers were, in the 1970s, determined to “shake” up the English novel, Belben’s writing “was like no other and remains startling half a century later.” Her narrative style is idiosyncratic. Temporality can be compressed or expanded in unexpected ways, syntax continually surprises, and sentences are often abruptly shortened or laced with a series of colons. Perspective shifts abruptly from third to first person, slipping in and out of Ilario’s or Anna’s thoughts, depending on the chapter. And the chapters themselves are thematic, with each theme repeated three (and in one case, four) times, but they do not follow a regular sequence, nor are they chronological but together they build in intensity and intimacy, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the often harsh bluntness of the narrative with its moments of ugliness and beauty.

Belben’s themes—Transmigration, Rapture, Grief, Sea-Change, Childhood, Future—all take their titles from definitions found in the Hamlyn Encyclopedia World Dictionary.  The Rapture chapters, for instance, are titled “The Carrying of a Person to Another Place or Sphere of Existence,” Grief is “A Cause or Occasion of Keen Distress or Sorrow,” Transmigration becomes “The Passage of a Soul at Death into Another Body.” Yet as lofty sounding as these chapters may sound, Anna and Ilario are not believers:

God had been disposed of long ago.

Neither she nor I acknowledged the divinity. Our faith lay in mankind, not in its mythical maker. She showed little sign of abdicating conviction for a god she spent her life denying. We agreed upon the possibility of a different reality: but that did not leave Anna any hope.

Thus she embarks into a dark journey, one which her husband must now help her navigate, but on dry land his seaman’s skills leave him feeling ill equipped. In their relationship, Ilario confesses, she had always directed and guided his way. “Without a wife, without her, I am nothing, I am useless. Was always useless.”

Anna’s side of the narrative is internalized. She is past conversation; she thinks of dying. Her memories carry her back to childhood and to earlier times in her marriage. But the man attending to her at home or sitting at her bedside in the hospital barely registers in the present. He is alone—save for the passing companionship of other husbands visiting their own sick wives and awkward interactions with Anna’s siblings. Yet as time passes, he feels closer than ever to the “elderly” woman slowly fading away. His wife.

The Limit is not an easy read: Ilario’s descriptions of Anna’s body, in their intimate moments and his later ministrations in her final days, are frank, at time uncomfortable, but oddly not without a certain tenderness. Meanwhile, Anna’s childhood memories hint at the pain and dark secrets in her respectable English family:

Protect me from my mother. Make my father beloved come alive.  Rise: my dog from the dead. But prayers are seldom if ever answered. Anna is born in 1922 (twenty years will pass before his birth): childhood proves unsatisfactory, an unsalutary experience: and to it the Anna grown up is irreversibly linked, to it pieces of her now are related: they are part of her score yet do not, repeat not, determine her whole works. Simply, her machinery lacked oil in the past. I hate my mother.

She revisits disturbing events from her youth, their lasting impact. When she meets Ilario, it is unsurprising that she is forty and still a virgin. Yet, it is the unlikely love that binds this odd couple together that makes this novella so intriguing.

One can imagine that in choosing a partner so different in age, culture, and class, Anna is freeing herself from the constraints of her family background. We don’t know enough about Ilario’s past to know what might have first attracted him to this plain, older woman. “An iron maiden. Forged in a landscape of snow.” But, scenes  drawn from their decade of marriage indicate strong mutual interests. They both harbour a love of travel and a love of the sea. Anna, before illness overtakes her, is a sturdy, adventurous woman,  unbothered when she and Ilario find themselves facing a man dying of leprosy in North Africa, nor does the threat of a tempest at sea frighten her. Quite opposite, in fact. The Sea-Change chapters each offer snapshots of their time together away from England, of their shared companionship in calm and in adversity, but the third such chapter is especially exhilarating. Ilario as a young captain, awakes to find his ship facing a life threatening storm at sea—all while his wife is onboard:

Ilario wished she could be spirited to landfall. He noticed a glittery expression: she adored the crisis, the whole situation. Not a clue did she have, la poverina, unreal in an unreal world. Addicted to unreal drama.

He assesses the heavy and unstable loads down in the hold. Orders them secured and secured again. Comforts his experienced bosun whom he knows well:

Fear not: soon we shall plough on through our appalling conditions, trusting a stability we in reality don’t possess. He smiles, loving his ship and his wife, his wife and his ship: Ilario takes heart. The tops of the waves already sprinkled the bridge: it could hardly be mere spray. But he relaxed, eating a marmalade sandwich.

Ilario’s love is steadfast.  Sometimes its strength even seems to surprise him. And as the Future chapters show, even as other adventures and women cross his path, no one can dislodge the place Anna continues to hold in his heart. Illness and death, dying seen from the inside and from the bedside, may be the central focus of this novella, but at heart it is a story that demonstrates just how inexplicable and enduring love can be, a work not soon forgotten.

The Limit by Rosalind Belben with an Introduction by Paul Griffiths is published by New York Review Books Classics.

What are we going to do now? The Tomb Guardians by Paul Griffiths

Four was a good number.
So now we’re three. What difference does it make?
We knew where we were, then.
And now we don’t?

It’s an unusual premise. Three Roman soldiers, charged to guard the tomb of a “local rebel,” have awoken from their unintentional slumber to find one of their number missing and the heavy stone rolled away from the mouth of the cave where the body had been laid. Panicked, they try to assess their situation. How had they allowed themselves to fall asleep on the job? Where has their fellow guard gone? And how are they going to find a way out of this predicament without even fully understanding what is at stake?

Their debate in its own right might offer material for a light comedy of errors, but our three guardians simultaneously exist, sound asleep, in individual portraits painted by sixteenth-century German master Bernhard Strigel and currently housed in Munich. Meanwhile, in the present day, an anxious lecturer is afraid that his pending presentation about these paintings, and their relationship to a fourth portrait, now in the UK, that somehow became separated from them, is falling apart at the seams. As he and a friend review his arguments about the artistic and theological questions raised by the images—included as four full colour plates—the subjects of the paintings try to imagine a way to get themselves out of an awkward situation, as uninformed bit players at a profound moment in Christian history. As the text weaves its way back and forth between these two conversations, further questions about history, truth and faith arise in clever, unexpected ways.

And it all works like a charm.

The Tomb Guardians, the latest novel from the prolific music critic, writer and librettist, Paul Griffiths, is inventive, witty and wise. This short novel, so simple in its conception and yet so extraordinary in its execution, should be read, on its own, in one or two sessions, rather than slipped in among other reads. It is not difficult, but is best met without distraction so as to appreciate the full effect of the two interlaced dialogues that drive this singular text.

The lecturer works his way through his presentation, responding to his friend’s interruptions and encouragements, beginning with the artist’s depiction of ordinary sleeping figures—unique in his oeuvre and the art of his time—and moving on to consider the possible inspiration to illustrate guardians at all. Most widely known official accounts beyond the Gospel of Matthew make no mention of any watch being set. At the same time, the soldiers, their conversation set apart in italics, have very little understanding of the circumstances that led to this assignment. They try to sort out what they do know and craft potential explanations, from the mundane to the supernatural, to offer their superiors should they be discovered in dereliction of duty or decide to report to their camp. Not surprisingly, consensus is hard to come by:

Whoa, can we please discuss this a bit?

“As to the –”

Yes, we should be very careful what we say here.

“As to the soldiers sent to stand guard, Matthew indicates that they didn’t just drift off but were shocked into sleep by the appearance of the angel.”

We can’t just say we fell asleep. Anyone would say we should’ve been taking it in turns. Anyone would say that.

“Now how does Strigel deal with this? Observe this fellow here, seated on the ground, resting his head on his left palm, while his right arm dangles.”

Did we try taking it in turns? Did any of us suggest that?
Wait.

“Look at him with his half-open mouth.”

We have to be very careful here, even in what we say just to each other, because you say something, and somebody else’ll remember it, and then little by little it becomes the truth, you know, it becomes the story, it becomes what we all of us remember, even if it never happened that way at all.

As the novel proceeds, the guardians’ musings range wider while the lecturer’s concerns begin to focus more on the likely intention behind the paintings’ commission, how they fit into the shifting religious politics of the Reformation and how one portrait came to be separated. The quoted passages from his presentation are framed within the comments and inquiries of his friend. Against the academic tone of his developing thesis, the guardians’ debate offers a critical and entertaining counterpoint. Speaking in anything but Biblical tones, they are as delightfully anachronistic as their Renaissance dress and weaponry. Together this dual-strand narrative forms a work that richly rewards return visits.

The Tomb Guardians by Paul Griffiths is published by Henningham Family Press.