Thursday, March 18, 2010 Previous editions
Monday, October 12, 2009
FOR his latest novel, In Zodiac Light, Robert Edric frames the post-war life of Britain’s lesser known war poet and composer Ivor Gurney.
Robert Edric
Black Swan; £7.99
Edric’s novel may succeed in placing Gurney among the pantheon of war poets where he belongs alongside, with the likes of Owen and Sassoon but similarities with Pat Barker’s Regeneration, stop here.
The story begins in 1922 where Gurney is detained at the City of London Asylum having served in France, after beingwas gassed in the war and invalided back home. Unlike the equivalent asylum in Pat Barker’Regeneration’s Craiglockhart mental hospital is a place of hope.s Regeneration, Dartford is an altogether different asylum – a house of despair, run by a megalomaniac and controlled by bullying orderlies.
Edric’s narrator Doctor Irvine is a young psychiatrist and has genuine apart from the nursing staff, is the only medic at Dartford with empathy for the patients under his care. Irvine’s own skeletal emotional scars form a backdrop to the main story, explaining his ineffectual but well intentioned personality. Treated with disdain by his boss and as a joke by the orderlies, Irvine’s best intentions towards his patients never pass the post. He describes how Gurney is befriended by a musicologist he knew at the Royal College of Music who believes that his talent is his salvation.
She persuades Osborne, the asylum’s head, to put on a concert of Gurney’s music to which he begrudgingly agrees in the hope that he will bask in its reflected glory. "And what if he is a genius?" "Then we shall parade him before the world, as proof of the effectiveness of our regime here,"’ Osborne tells Irvine in answer to his question.
Edric’s novel pivots around the orchestration of the concert, its effect on Gurney and his friend Lyle, incarcerated because of his involvement in the conscientious objectors’ movement. Woven into the story are dense symbolic moments that revolve around restoring the asylum’s beehives. Descriptive narratives of smoking bees and setting fire to diseased colonies are pitted against images of gassing and death in the trenches.
Rendered in spare un-showy prose, Edric fills the narrative with many questions on the nature of madness. Primarily investigated is whether Gurney’s problems are a prerequisite of his genius or the produce of his experiences on the Western Front. Many characters in this novel live within narrow boundaries and looming black horizons. Edric succeeds in painting an atmospheric dystopia that is at once unsettling and frightening and laudable for its skilful evocation of doom and the despair.
© Examiner Publications (Cork) Limited, City Quarter, Lapps Quay, Cork. Registered in Ireland: 73385.
