Berg

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A hair-tonic and wig salesman, Alistair is haunted by resentment for his philandering father, who abandoned him and his mother when he was an infant. Alistair, however, can’t bring himself to kill the father he doesn’t really know, in some part because of curiosity about who Nathy really is, ambivalence about the task he set himself, and his own ineptitude. Even when it seems Alistair has finally killed Nathy, the body he has lugged to the train station to, naturally, ship to his mother turns out to be his father’s ventriloquist dummy. (Nathy is an amateur ventriloquist when he isn’t sponging off the women he’s seducing.) But again, Quin doesn’t let the reader linger on Alistair’s latest failure or any other discovery for very long. She keeps moving along to the next absurd situation.

rarer still one that proceeds to do seemingly everything it can to avoid following the path its intention has laid. True, Quin’s novel teems with violence, but it’s violence offered as a substitute for a patricide that never quite takes place, and this substitute violence is almost entirely, even hysterically, absurd. While it is true that Quin has no time for conventional morality or prudery, this interpretation can be hard to square with the depictions of sex in her novels, where examples of liberating or affirming or even satisfactory sexual relations are conspicuously absent. Her work evinces no trace of naive hippie idealism. To the extent that her social consciousness is entangled with the carnal, it would seem to be fatally entangled. The pursuit of pleasure is always understood to be twinned with the good-old death drive. Quin invariably portrays desire as an uneasy dance between attraction and repulsion, dominance and submission. Just enough of a perspective shift to mess with me a bit, but not enough that I totally lose it, I think.To read Passages is to look down through clear water. It's absolutely lucid and blindingly reflective. It moves and you don't know how deep it goes. Perhaps there's a body down there. Perhaps it's your own.' Stewart Home

After her death in 1973 at only 37, Ann Quin’s star first dipped beneath the horizon, disappearing from view entirely, before rising slowly but persistently, to the point that it’s now attaining the septentrional heights it always merited. I suspect that she’ll eventually be viewed, alongside BS Johnson and Alexander Trocchi, as one of the few mid-century British novelists who actually, in the long term, matter.’ Lee RourkeOne of our greatest ever novelists. Ann Quin’s was a new British working-class voice that had not been heard before: it was artistic, modern, and – dare I say it – ultimately European.’ Juliet Jacques Quin’s first deflationary gesture, then, is to place us in such mundane circumstances—a true bourgeois tragedy—even while setting up a fair amount of tragedy-aspiring desire, which Berg himself frequently considers in elevated language: “I, the son, have every justification, people will sympathize, might even be considered a hero.” In fact, throughout his ongoing interior monologue, Berg, much like the ever-tragic Hamlet, harangues himself for his hesitation or failure to act, for being full of desire rather than decision. But this state-of-suspension-prior-to-action is also where Berg chooses to dwell. So, at the end of one chapter, Berg takes his father into his room to kill him, and, at the outset of the next chapter, congratulates himself on having acted: “At last I can rest in peace amen”; “At last action has supplanted idea and imagery.” Meanwhile the reader waits to know what happened in the space between the chapters: “The action, last night’s scene,” Berg thinks, teasing us, it seems, “let it take on a gradual formation.” Yet “last night’s scene” never does take on much “formation.” In place of action, or even the retrospective recounting of that action, we get a confusion of Berg’s self-questioning analysis interrupting the third person narrator’s account: S emerges from Three as Quin’s representative artist-figure. As Leonard and Ruth examine her tape recordings and diaries, it becomes apparent that S was an unsettling presence in their lives not simply because of the sexual tension she brought into their household, but because she presented them with an inverted image of themselves. Her youth was an unwelcome reminder that theirs is gone for good. Her exhibitionist tendencies (she was fond of swimming in the nude, Ruth notes with disapproval) showed up their staid sense of propriety. She was carefree and desirable, unlike the jealous and vain Ruth, who spends hours in front of the mirror and would prefer to conceal the fact that she has undergone plastic surgery to restore her fading looks. Grim ironies attend the novel’s erotic complications. While Ruth is making appointments at the fertility clinic and considering adoption, S falls pregnant and requires an abortion. At one point, Ruth ventures that S was “a little in love” with Leonard, which he parries with the assertion that S was merely “in love with love” and had a “father complex” – the condescension of the latter claim serving as a reminder that his hobby of making statuettes implies rather strongly that he is living in the shadow of his own father, a sculptor whose life-sized figures loom in the garden.