Berg (1964), by Ann Quin
Ann Quin is a new author to me. I had heard her mentioned in the same breath as B.S. Johnson, but didn’t know quite what to expect – however, I was pleasantly surprised by this short novel of 1964.
The prose style is dense and stylised yet unpretentious and easy to read (though requiring concentration). There is no tagged dialogue, only reported speech, well blended with the main stream-of-consciousness narration. Despite this focus on interiority, the settings and events are vividly rendered, and objects take on a great deal of significance. The influence of Virginia Woolf can be seen, as can that of the Nouveau Roman, as developed by the likes of Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, and Nathalie Sarraute (with whom perhaps Quin has the most in common). There is also some common ground with her English contemporary B.S. Johnson, though Quin is aiming less for humour than Johnson often did. There is a sort of humour here, but only a grim absurdism reminiscent of Kafka or Beckett.
The plot of Berg (such as it is) concerns a young man called Alistair Berg, who, having changed his name to ‘Greb’, comes to a seaside town (probably Brighton) to murder his runaway father, who is now living with a divorcee. But this isn’t a Graham Greene style thriller. Greb rents the adjoining room to his father’s, separated by a flimsy partition wall, through which he suffers the noise of his neighbours’ lovemaking. The story develops with a surreal series of false starts, substitutions and mistaken identities, and is clearly aiming at mythic/Freudian symbolism rather than realism (surely Greb’s job selling hair-restorer is intended to resonate with the story of Samson’s emasculation?). Despite lacking a conventional story-arc, the novel is shaped in a satisfying way and, whilst not exactly a page-turner, does not lack narrative drive.
To put the novel and author in historical context, Ann Quin, b 1936, was an English experimental writer of working class origins who published a handful of novels in the 60s and early 70s, before drowning herself off Brighton in 1973. Her life and career thus strikingly parallels that of B.S. Johnson (1933-1973), who also died by suicide. At the time that Quin and Johnson appeared on the scene, there was a prevailing assumption that working class writers should stick to social realism, in the manner of John Braine or Alan Sillitoe. Johnson, Quin and their ilk went against this mindset, showing that it was perfectly valid for working class people to adapt the techniques of Woolf, Joyce, et al to their concerns.
I also have Quin’s later novel Three on my shelves, and look forward to tackling that in the future.