Novelists to Watch: Thomson, Timm, and Forbes - Excerpt

Literary Review, Summer, 2000 by Burton Raffel

Rupert Thomson, an Englishman born in 1955, has recently published his fifth book, the first to attract even a fraction of the critical attention he deserves. For it is as true now as it was in 1987, when his first novel, Dreams of Leaving, appeared, that "When someone writes as well as Rupert Thomson does, it makes you wonder why other people bother ..." Even after reading that fine but somewhat uneven book, I thought the British critic's claim might contain more than a little exaggeration, and perhaps a dash of envy. And then I read the rest of his work and understood (to quote yet another English writer) that "oh, `tis true, `tis true."

Only two of Thomson's novels seem to me absolutely perfect, the third, Air & Fire (1993) and the fifth, Soft! (1998). (The sixth and most recent, The Book of Revelation, appeared after this essay was written.) Significantly, these books are each perfect in strikingly different ways, the first far more tender than chilling, the latter, though still beautifully compassionate, essentially somber, with Thomson's ever-present subdued wit at times quite starkly barbed. But both the first, Dreams of Leaving, and the fourth of his novels, The Insult (1996), are for the greatest part of their somewhat rambling length gripping page-turners, filled with tautly active portraits of almost fiercely interesting characters. And even his second book, The Five Gates of Hell (1991), is disappointing only by comparison. It too is very nearly as absorbing, powerfully drawn, at times compelling in the sheer force with which, as always, Thomson conjures for us.

Here, for example, is the very opening of Dreams of Leaving--two paragraphs so tensely, impeccably fashioned that the reader is, though he or she may not yet realize it, hopelessly hooked:

      It was a hot day to be wearing black. The coffin-bearers counted
   themselves fortunate. The coffin resting on their shoulders measured less
   than four feet in length. It was also empty. The child's body had never
   been found.

      Very few people had turned out for the funeral. A gaunt bearded man, an
   ungainly blonde woman and five police officers. Two men in shabby black
   suits took up the rear of the procession. One of them, Dinwoodie by name,
   wore a sling on his right arm. He had pale swivelling eyes and long hair
   that was prematurely grey. The other ran the village greengrocer's shop.
   Their heads tilted sideways and inwards like two halves of a reflection so
   they could hear each other without raising their voices. They had allowed a
   small gap to open up between themselves and the five policemen. That they
   were linked, as if by an invisible cartilage, to the main body of the
   procession was obvious from their conversation.

Is it possible not to read eagerly on? With the kind of unerring rightness given only to the born novelist, Thomson marshals (with apparent ease) narrative sequences structured on both details and omissions, and of a deceptively simple exactitude marvelous to behold. Fewer than ten words, in the first sentence, put us smack-dab into the scene, its immediately pressing emotional externals (hot), its immediately pressing emotional internals (discomfort -- which we are told of without a need for direct statement). But wearing black in the heat also evokes solemnity, formality: a wedding, perhaps, or a funeral. Deftly, but without hesitation, Thomson tells us this is a funeral and, at the same time, pulls us still further into the feelings of the pall-bearers: they count themselves fortunate because (and note how carefully objective the language becomes) their load "measured less than four feet in length." And then he doubles the nature of their good fortune, in a seemingly straightforward four words informing us that there is nothing inside the coffin. It is a stroke worthy of that quite incredible plotweaver, Wilkie Collins, and his very nearly equally clever but far more profound friend and colleague, Charles Dickens. The seven words of the paragraph's final sentence sharpen the point of the plot-harpoon: for reasons we are not yet allowed to know, but deeply desire to learn, the child corpse has been sought but never found.

The second paragraph exhibits the same consummate skills, and yet another. It is permitted to expand, to offer us more than a hard, focused close-up view. We do not yet know who the "gaunt bearded man" or the "ungainly blonde woman" might be, but the very fact that we are deliberately not informed makes us determined to find out. And the magician's sweepingly casual tag-line to this same sentence, "and five police officers," swiftly piles on a veritable host of possible plot implications. One policeman at a child's funeral, even a child whose body "had never been found," would surely be significant. But five?

Thomson swings away from all of this, to "two men in shabby black suits," distinctly and deliberately walking to the rear. Shabby suits? Are they poor, disreputable? Are they, as they rather seem, outcasts of some sort? We are not told what Dinwoodie does, or is. But we are carefully given the information that the other man, nameless, runs the village fruit and vegetable store. Again, notice how powerfully compressed, but absolutely clear, the double plot implications are: the proprietor of a retail food outlet, we know, is hardly what anyone might consider an outcast--and, with a single word, we also know that all of this is taking place in a village. That this fact too has major plot implications can readily and accurately be predicted by the most casual of readers.