Craig Raine - Heartbreak

Craig Raine, Heartbreak (Atlantic)

Last year Sean O'Brien published a debut novel and provided the quintessential O'Brien elements mixed into it. This year it's Craig Raine providing a book with his own fingerprints all over it. Neither book could have been by anybody else. Raine's offering even goes that extra mile to make you wonder if it's a novel at all, as one might expect of him. It has a central theme rather than central characters and could easily be mistaken for an essay, a meditation, a collection of short stories or an aesthetic tract.

And if the central theme is advertised romantically as heartbreak, it often looks more like jealousy.

A recurrent theme in Raine's poetry has been the strange appearance of genitalia, and there's plenty more of that here and when heartbreak is really only jealousy it is most often sexual jealousy. In the episodes described, one half of a sexual relationship moves on to another partner or tires of the besotted other.

Raine's writing, as ever, displays Raine's learning. Having been impressed once or twice, we are required to be impressed continually with modernist or late Romantic references. Taking this intertextuality to self-referential extremes, he even dares to include his own highbrow journal, Arete. It is all so clever and self-consciously clever that it is difficult to find it moving and yet in flashes, repeated flashes throughout, Raine's writing is brilliant in the very same way that his poetry was in his early 'Martian' mode,

He had the uneven wide thin lips of an alligator who has remembered a joke and is wondering whether to tell it.

Elsewhere Benjamin Britten's hair is,

Hard-wearing, waterproof hair for everyday use. Harris tweed for the head.

And he can do a nice line in jokes of a philosophical kind, as when talking about the one surviving Mozart Bassoon Concerto,

Two others have simply disappeared, with a trace. (Obviously, or we wouldn't know about them.)

By its fragmentary nature, its insistent intellectualism, almost worrying pre-occupation with sex and what it looks like, it is a difficult book to love and one admires it in parts rather than as a whole. That is until the last little story which occupies less than seven of these small and sparely-printed pages and heartbreak is finally achieved. It was just about worth waiting for.