VANISHED PRESENCES

Rosie Jackson on recent fiction with a `wide-angle’ lens

It’s an unusually auspicious time for fiction with an other-worldly view. After decades of novels obsessed with narcissism or narcosis of one kind or another (of course many still are – on my last trip to a bookshop I noted such worthy titles as Trash, Desecration, i love bad boys, tart noir) there is finally an upsurge of work awakening us to the invisible and numinous: to angels, to lovers who have put on immortality, to the `ushering strangers’ who appear to the dying, to the denizens of heaven. And while a skeptic might dismiss this as merely a new age fad, a fashionable trend in publishing, I believe it’s more: that some deeply established assumptions about the novel’s scope and purpose are finally dissolving, ceding to a wider and more mystical notion of what fiction can be.   

As a devoted student of literature, I was taught the novel was a genre dealing with the fixities of this world. Its history coincided with the rise of the bourgeoisie and its preoccupations mirrored the values of its middle class audience: it dealt with money, marriage, morals and social manners – along with all that threatened these from the shadow side: crime, chaos, adultery. Its picture of reality was narrow – mundane, temporal, materialistic - yet it was this supposed `realism’ which came to dominate mainstream fiction; more subversive or experimental versions of the world were relegated to sub-genres of ghost fiction, Gothic, romance and fantasy. Even the impact of magical realism from South America and elsewhere has not hugely dented what has been essentially a secular vision: the novel has never had much time for the gods.

But there are signs this is shifting. The award of the latest Man Booker prize to Yann Martel’s Life of Pi – whose main character floats on the seas with a tiger, and is preoccupied with religious questions – suggests we are ready to celebrate fictions which do more than replicate what we already know. Indeed, the recent and unexpected successes of Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold, or Miss Garnet’s Angel by Salley Vickers (one of the Booker judges), shows the hunger of the reading public for stories which go beyond the confines of life and identity as we have assumed them to be.     

Lovely Bones introduces an entirely novel and bold perspective. Not only might the dead live on in a new form, they might also be the sole narrative voice – the whole story is told directly from heaven by Susie, a fourteen year old girl who has been savagely raped and murdered in an underground hole. It is a brilliant technical risk by Sebold, and works triumphantly. More than that, too, Lovely Bones reverses the usual idea that it is the living who must learn to let go of the dead. Here, as Susie watches her family’s reactions to their loss, it is the dead who also have to relinquish their attachment to the bereaved, so they may be released back into full living.

For all Susie’s seeming invisibility, there is no clear or absolute demarcation line between the living and the dead; rather a sense of intense reciprocity between them – not in any sensationalized way, but simply and naturally – as if the wall between this world and the next were no longer in place. Even the scientifically minded doctor, Ray, comes to hold the possibility that `the ushering strangers that appeared to the dying were not the results of strokes,’ while Susie’s friend Ruth knows `the dead truly talk to us… in the air between the living, spirits bob and weave and laugh with us. They are the oxygen we breathe.’

This infiltration of the living by the dead – in a way that is more metaphysical than ghoulish – has become a theme in a number of modern fictions. Salley Vickers’ second novel, Instances of the Number Three and Carol Muske-Dukes’ elegiac Life After Death both have haunting figures of dead husbands returning to dialogue with their widows, the afterlife not so much separate from this world as permeating it, existing within or behind it, in the spaces, the interstices, if only we had eyes to see.

For all their subject matter, though, none of these novels is lugubrious. Even Life after Death, which includes some daunting scenes in a US mortuary (bleeding the body, with the possible danger of Aids; undertakers whose bodies have grown huge with their exposure to hormones) takes us beyond the macabre to a vision which embraces both mortality and what may lie beyond.

Vickers’ is more of a wry, intellectual exploration, with the dead Peter, `misty and congenial’, stepping through from `the windy darkness’ to debate with his widow, Bridget. When he accepts the invitation to sit on her bed to talk, it’s with a light humour - `there’s not the same need,’ he points out, `to take the weight off one’s feet.’

The `ghost’ of Freddy in Life After Death is less garrulous, but all the more credible for being remembered without nostalgia. `The worst thing about death, he said to me, was the clichés. He said he couldn’t stand all that tedious stuff about tunnels and flashing lights.’ Here too, as in Lovely Bones, there’s a sense that it’s the dead who need the living: visitations and witnessing complete and comfort those who have gone quite as much as those who remain on earth.

Deepak Chopra’s reflexive novel Soul Mate plays with similar ideas. When his narrator Raj, a doctor, loses his beloved, his sense of reality transforms as he senses her still connecting with him. `Death,’ he says, that `leap of the soul’, `has given her wide-angle vision’. The line between life and death is illusory: `Raj knew he was living on the edge of the impossible. The miraculous seemed close enough to touch.’ `When you see with the eyes of the soul, there is no difference between the living and the dead. All are naked together.’

Of course, there are dangers with this kind of fiction. Talking about the soul’s survival can become preachy, human reality can get lost in over didactic or saccharine ideas of love, and the plot can become thin as character and story get subsumed in abstract discourse about the afterlife and spirit. Any moral that God’s in His heaven and all’s right with the world, if not done with understatement or irony or a sense of the soul’s struggle, can eventually seem facile and trite - even Lovely Bones, for all its initial brilliance, succumbs to sentimentality towards the end.

But given that the `genre’ is still finding its voice, it’s perhaps inevitable there are some limits of realization, and these are relatively small prices to pay for extending the realm of mainstream adult fiction into experiences for too long deemed `unreal’. (Children’s fiction has been making privileged excursions there for some time, as in Philip Pullman’s inspired trilogy, Northern Lights, The Subtle Spyglass, The Amber Knife, which so well understands and dramatizes a daimonic reality).

Nor are the voices and shades of dead loved ones the only presences on the edge of this fiction: there are glimpses of other immortals too. Vickers’ wonderful first novel, Miss Garnet’s Angel, richly textured and beautifully wrought, dramatizes the spiritual (and sexual) awakening of a retired schoolteacher as she visits Venice, and her vision of the angel Rafael, in the chapel of the plague, is as exact and exquisite an image of the numinous as anything in modern fiction.

`Then it was she saw him again… a sheerness of presence, no more. It was as if he took the space from the air about him and against the darkness was etched, like the brightness which seeps through a door ajar, hinting at nameless, fathomless brilliances beyond…’

It is exactly such a `vanished presence’ with its `extraordinary incandescence’, which our culture so craves and is - at last, even in the most prosaic of places - starting to recapture.  

Rosie Jackson is a novelist and short story writer. Author of Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion and The Eye of the Buddha, she teaches and runs writing workshops in the UK and US.

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