I tried to find a quote that I recalled, about the surprise and shock we receive when fiction reveals the harsh realities that lie beneath the surface. I did find something that veers very close to the narrative mode of this book, and it’s from Tim O’Brien: “That’s what fiction is for. It’s for getting at the truth when the truth isn’t sufficient for the truth.” There’s nothing oblique about the truth in Rachel Cusk’s Parade; she simply doesn’t use conventional scenes, actions or dialogue to exhibit it. The truths in the book do not flow from what John Gardner calls “a continuous dream” for the reader, but in deep, sometimes esoteric philosophical and aesthetic pronouncements.
The opening section (I don’t consider them chapters, because that denotes a continuous narrative sequence, and that does not exist for this novel in a conventional sense), called The Stuntman, an artist identified only as G begins to paint all of his work upside down.
People first thought the works were being hung wrong, but no. G’s wife immediately concludes he has “inadvertently expressed something disturbing about the female condition.” While I wouldn’t call this thought a “leap” in everyday thought, it occurs halfway through the very first paragraph of the novel, without foundation, or even a hint that it might be coming. And here is a passage that pops up on the second page, after a bit of history about how the artist G cannot forgive the critics who “brutally criticised” his early work:
“His was the type of strength not to withstand attempts to poison and destroy him, but rather to absorb them, to swallow the poison and be altered by it, so that his survival was not a story of mere resilience, but was instead a slow kind of crucifixion that eventually compelled the world to chastise itself for what it had done to him.”
This is the sort of no-holds-barred statement that fills Parade. Cusk presents the action obliquely, while placing the psychological, philosophical, and aesthetic issues in the foreground—usually, but not always, putting them in characters’ thoughts or words. There are bare plots to the four roughly equal sections into which the book is divided, but at times the action reads like a bare synopsis, or even a police report.
Reading Parade forces us non-athletes onto skis and down a steep slalom course with gates at unequal intervals and on unpredictable sides. Its chronological order is very difficult to parse out, and perhaps not all that important anyway. While there are several plots, it’s not usually clear whether they’re related. I will attempt to give you the timbre and substance of the book:
This is a novel about art, sexual politics, modern society and multi-generational family dynamics. The action, what of it there is, lurches forward through a thicket of erudite, sometimes startling, pronouncements, in which apparently the human action and interplay play only a secondary role, almost as if they’re included to provide examples. Highly literate and learned characters make these observations in erudite and well-framed statements, the author first and foremost among them. At times it felt like a book-length philosophical treatise. This book has definite attractions, especially if you like abstruse discussions of recondite psychology and aesthetics, and care, as we all should, about sexual oppression and bigotry. In this challenging piece of fiction, Cusk has wrestled the novel form, and pinned it absolutely to the mat.
It’s obvious from my review that I want to give this book more study. But this review is not the place for that, so I think I’ll end here.
Readers of Shirani Rajapakse’s poetry will be familiar with her anger and impatience in the face of the violent, bloodthirsty politics practiced in so many areas of the world. Children displaced or murdered, families ripped apart, men disappearing without a trace, beautiful, verdant valleys laid waste, legitimate democracies overthrown. Her righteous and justified anger, her outrage, burns the pages of this collection.
Readers of her poetry will also be familiar with her startling observations where she anthropomorphizes natural occurrences, like leaves dancing with each other in a breeze, or a tree waving to a neighbor. This collection doesn’t have quite the range of these charming offerings, thrust as it is in the service of the poet’s magisterial anger.
These accusing verses veer from anger to despair to resignation to hope; Rajapakse dwells on all these at some length and from a variety of vantages. She touches on class conflict in a way that I don’t recall her doing before. A woman’s homeland is invaded by privileged young people who tell her she’s not doing enough to decry the dictator. They tell her she must reduce consumption for the health of the planet. Reduce consumption?:
“…but of what? She wonders as she looks around meagre belongings, someone’s hand-me-downs old slippers with holes that can’t keep the dirt out, a pot in the middle of the only room she shares with her sisters and parents to collect the water dripping from the roof…” (from “Whose World Is It Really?”)
Rajapakse’s imagination ranges on: she waits for rain to bring water that a T-Rex may once have drunk. She remembers the age-old natural remedies, prepared from plants now plowed under in deference to Big Pharma profits. She suffers through dark nights of the soul, without sleep, without contact, and temporarily without hope.
At length, however, Rajapakse does see fit to finish on a hopeful note. In a poem called “I Will Rise,” she reviews more than a thousand years of being cut down and yet getting to her feet again; she cites monks with stakes driven through them; she recalls Nazis locking her “inside cauldrons of hate”; her tongue cut out so she could not accuse those who didn’t like what she says. After her house is set aflame by an incendiary device:
“…My words crumpled and turned to cinders and they think they have won. Yet I will rise. I will rise. For I am truth and I will rise.”
As we review this poet’s oeuvre, it becomes blatantly clear that she has the clarity, magisterial judgment, and comprehensive outlook to earn the title “Conscience for our Age.” Would that many many more would read her words, and be chastised into less destructive, and less murderous, lives.
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