Sebastian Faulks' new book announces itself as 'A Novel in Five Parts'. I'm not going to trouble to look up the dictionary definition of 'novel', I suspect it would say it is a work of fiction, usually in prose, but many would expect it to be one narrative, and of a piece. The five parts of A Possible Life have no common characters, are set in different places and in different times and nothing apparently carried over from one part into the next.
On that evidence, Joyce's Dubliners, generally recognized as a set of short stories, is more of a novel than this. But if it says it's a novel I'm not going to take issue and that is not going to delay us any further, but if you prefer to see it as five novellas I don't think you'll be thrown out of your local reading group. You'll need to give them a better reason than that.
In Part I, A Different Man, we are in familiar Faulks territory in WW2, soon behind enemy lines and then captured and being treated to the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp. It's not easy reading and one stops to wonder if one needs to know any more. The writing is superb and unflinching but also, we do need to be reminded from time to time in our complacent little lives, lest we forget. Geoffrey Talbot survives and escapes and eventually returns to France in search of the lost love that had ostensibly betrayed him, but under what duress we can't know. And then he settles into an afterlife of teaching in one of those idylls of a dry, bygone England.
Possibly the best story is next, The Second Sister, in which a workhouse boy finds his way through London's underclasses to property-owning prosperity, and with the sister of his first love who he married, who eventually recovers from a trauma that had made her a long term psychiatric patient.
Of the five children that Billy is one of, it is explained that it can't be either of the eldest two, or the youngest, that must go to the workhouse, and so,
Me and Arthur kept staring at each other.
A tenuous and abstract theme is emerging in which an intense and shared relationship is by circumstances made unequal and, as the blurb says, a 'mysterious consolation' is achieved after the wonderful but finite love is abandoned.
The relationship between Elena and Bruno in Part III involves the study of 'brain activity', revisiting the world of Faulks' novel Human Traces, except set very bravely in the year 2029 and onwards. This story has more of a twist in the end than the others, captivating though they all are. The question arises perhaps of how special our emotional attachments are or how much no more than the inevitable chemical result of such things as synapses within the otherwise non-individuated portions of flesh and nerve-endings that one human being might be.
Part IV is of spiritual enlightenment in the end, and memorable at the time until Faulks delivers his finale with a masterpiece that almost overshadows even the first two parts with You Next Time, an account by musician Jack Wyatt of his relationship with the successful singer-songwriter, Anya King.
It is a brillianty observed study not only of the music industry per se but also of how an artistic career- a pop music one here but it might be in any genre- is at its most exciting and creative before the commercial necessities of touring, recording and other treadmill activity that are visited upon the successful reduce it to drudgery and unglamorous pressure.
Faulks' prose changes key and foretells the inevitable end of the relationship well in advance of Anya's need to move on and Madeleine Peyroux-style disappearance. Jack has already jettisoned a perfectly exceptional girlfriend in Lowri, who gradually gets the message off-stage, as he takes on the role as Anya's manager. The fragility of such deep and unfathomable attachments tangentially reminded me of those in Banana Yoshimoto's stories, who seem at once transcendentally fulfilled by a mutual need for each other but have an endless chasm of loneliness inside them.
As the story reached its final few pages, I was sure I was going to cry like a baby at any given moment. Jack marries someone else eventually and has two children and sentences as disarmingly simple as,
and Becky indulged me by giving Pearl the second name of Anya.
threatened to breach the dam of tears with one gentle stroke. It didn't quite come that although there was moisture there for sure.
The story ends on the more complex idea that for all that we might make indelible marks on the lives of others, or more importantly, them on ours, and be a part of each other, it is also worth wondering how much we are a part of our own.
At Anya's last concert, one song is changed so that,
it was no longer a kind of novelty anti-love song ...it was a self-critical account of her inability to give herself to another person.
And, in the life afterwards, Jack is in a position to say,
It was no longer a matter of envy when I saw a beautiful woman sharing plans with laughing men.
It has sometimes been said, and sometimes by me, that Sebastian Faulks isn't going to write another Birdsong, but I was always very happy with other titles of his, too, and now there's this one I don't think we should see it like that.
After Julian Barnes and Alan Hollinghurst last year and the recent McEwan and Winterson, I think it's fair to say that the mainstream of British literary fiction writers are in fine form, as good as they've ever been.
There might be an advantage to a novel in five parts. Who would settle for having their heart broken once when you can have it done five times in the space of a few days.
