‘That can hammock around her in any direction’ – The Blue Book by AL Kennedy

My first encounter with AL Kennedy was her 2007 Costa Prize-winning novel, Day, which just about knocked me sideways (and won more than a fistful of prizes beyond the Costa); second was her short story, Frank, in The Book of Other People, a short story anthology commissioned and edited by Zadie Smith; third, Now That You’re Back, one of Kennedy’s own collections; and fourth, Looking For The Possible Dance, her first novel, a lovely study of intimacy and anxiety (and creepy bosses). The moral being, I’m quite the fan, and am very much looking forward to getting stuck into the rest of her back catalogue. The way Kennedy uses language is unusual and precise, and her characterisation is just heartbreakingly accurate (I’m thinking of the eponymous Frank and Mr Day, here). So, I was definitely excited when The Blue Book landed on my desk (read: sofa). And I was more than casually disappointed when it didn’t live up to my expectations.           

Before I start to nit-pick and grumble, though, let’s get through a quick summary and the positives. The Blue Book’s about a fake medium, Arthur, and his one-time girlfriend and colleague/accomplice, Beth; now, years after their relationship has ended, they have occasional hook-ups in high-class hotels. Meanwhile, Art’s still making a go of it as a medium, tricking gullible millionaires out of their cash and easing his conscience by providing pro-bono, if morally dubious, consolation to the more fragile bereaved. When the novel opens, Beth’s about to set sail on a fancy cruise ship with her safe, reliable boyfriend, Derek, who’s planning to pop the question. What Derek doesn’t know is that this trip was supposed to be Beth’s latest chance to rendezvous with Art. With her jealous and miserable ex on one deck and her seasick almost-fiancé on another, Beth has to make a choice. Plus, she’s got a secret that might change everything…

What did I like? The setting’s fantastic. A cruise-ship: it’s exactly the gaudy, claustrophobic, performative, limited stage that should make for a fantastic novel. Alan Warner grasped a similar opportunity in The Stars In The Bright Sky; whether you like the book or not, the Baudrillardian non-space of the airport setting thrusts his characters together in a brilliantly pressurised situation. Likewise, Kennedy’s characters lurch from cabin to dining area and back again, dodging the on-board classes in poker and bridge and stamp collecting – each one designed for Entertainment and Experience Enrichment – not to mention the fake-sunset photo-ops, for those who don’t want to brave the promenade deck to stage their own shots. So, the ship’s excellent. What else? The medium business is a fascinating one (see also Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black; not my favourite of hers, but well worth a look anyway) and Art’s agonies of conscience give you plenty to mull over. I don’t think Kennedy gives us enough of either of those things – ship or medium – but there’s definitely enough there to keep you engaged. Plus there’s a clever metafictional device going on with the narration that I won’t spoil because the reveal is very late on in the text and it does refigure the way you perceive the book – but it gives an extra spin to things, which I liked.

Where it fell down, for me, was the voice – or a combination of the voice, punctuation and typography. Beth’s a very elliptical narrator – her story’s not only deliberately disjointed and gappy (which is fine, because it’s justified in the end) but her very sentences are strewn with ellipses and dashes, which (and this may be a personal bugbear) makes for very irritating reading. The dialogue in particular suffered here – it read more like a transcript of actual speech, hesitant, repetitive and meandering – which is realistic, of course, but not what I’m after in fiction. (You may disagree.) Art’s got a couple of speeches that last for over a page each, strewn with apologies, hesitations and false-starts; they made me impatient and irritated with him, which was probably counterproductive, given the thought-provoking contents of the speeches themselves. As Beth’s love-object, he’s not supposed to be uncomplicated, but I did find it hard to see the lovable side, and I’m inclined to blame his speech patterns. (As a spoken-word performance, mind, he’d probably be very compelling.) Then there’s also a massive surplus of italics, representing Beth’s thoughts, but when she’s thinking a lot – as she frequently does – that makes for pages and pages of italics, which is pretty tiring on the eyes. And the sentences themselves are long, run-on, overly-emphatic constructions that, to my mind, lack the taut precision that I admired in Kennedy’s earlier work. Example:

Then he swallows and frowns and drops into a sense of her skin – this isn’t a sexual process, this is knowing – this is, in a way, being known – this is water over her surface, their shared surface, over the no-longer-needed body, the attempting-to-forget-itself body, over the scar on her collar-bone. 

Or:

For a moment she can’t see, can’t breathe, is simply held – the shock of the weather, its beautiful offence prevents thought – and then this joy comes, this immense, horrific pleasure in every gust that comes at her like a big dog, that flattens her clothes to her body in a knock, that maddens her hair, that can hammock around her in any direction, every direction, and push her, stumble her where it likes and the sky is above her and swooping to each horizon, a howl of blue: a tall, fierce ache of blue and its cloud in lines, in streamers, banners, dazzles, flares – it is all alive and makes her laugh.   

I can see what she’s going for – a Woolfian onslaught of sense-impressions and raw reactions – but instead it feels sloppy and indecisive. If she’d cut these sections to the bone (I love the ‘beautiful offence prevents thought’) then they’d have had more impact and the whole novel would have been shorter and snappier and, I think, more readable. As it is, it reads more like a draft, a slamming down of ideas, full of enthusiasm, but lacking in specificity. I can see why Kennedy’s chosen to adopt this style; her description of the medium’s work shows how it relies on repetition and lulling and key-words planted in the magician’s patter – and The Blue Book is narrated by a former medium, daughter of a magician. So there’s a reason for the style, but I’m not sure that it works.

Finally, I found that the almost relentless bleak intensity of Beth’s psyche and her relationship and engagements with Art meant that it was hard to root for them, as a couple; there was no sense of joyful attraction or fun, just a steady turning-over of their problems and complications. And Derek, the alternative, was fairly one-dimensional, which made Beth’s choice a rather clear-cut issue (leaving out the issue of her deep, dark secret, which we don’t discover until the very end anyway). Some of the peripheral characters, though, were lovely – Bunny and Francis, for instance, the elderly couple on the ship, were really touching. Still, when there’s not much tension around the main character’s choices, it makes it hard to get through almost four-hundred pages.

Any Cop?: If you haven’t read Kennedy, I’d say get your hands on Day - or anything else of the back-catalogue – or wait and see what she does next. She’s depressingly talented and I don’t think this is representative of her best work. That’s not to say that The Blue Book hasn’t got its attractions – the basic ingredients are there with the magician/boat set-up – and if you’re happy to wade through the layers of simile and hesitancy, then you’ll like it well enough. (But do read Day. It’s ace.)

Valerie O’Riordan