After reading a novel...

 After reading a novel...

 

I first encountered Sam Mills when I answered an advertisement on Twitter (now X) about a book group that was meeting to discuss the novel, The Enchanted April (1922) by Elizabeth von Arnim. As I knew the novel well, I signed up to the Zoom account for “CarersFirst” the name of the organisation that was hosting the event. It was an organisation formed to help people who were looking after partners or relatives, with various degrees of illness and disability.

 

I myself was not in this position, although my mother had for a long time cared for my father during his struggles with MS which had led up to his death. I had myself suffered years of depression and anxiety which I linked to that event - or these ailments may simply have been a consequence of my own ‘sensitive’ nature as my mother used to call it. This had filled me with a strange anger and fuelled much of the performance poetry that I read in a Bedford pub during the eighties.

 

At any event I joined “CarersFirst” Zoom group to discuss The Enchanted April where I was welcomed by the group largely made up of women who were looking after their husbands. Sam Mills herself, since her mother’s death in 2011, was looking after her father who suffered from schizophrenia, and his condition had formed a part of her life for a good many years. I participated wholeheartedly in the discussion of von Arnim’s book and left the group feeling more than happy with my contribution.

 

I can’t remember exactly what the next book was, but I became very interested in Sam Mills’s work as an author. She had sent me in the post two books that she had written, one called Chauvo-Feminism (2021) about the “Me Too” movement, and the other called The Fragments of My Father (2020). In the first the title speaks for itself but the second was about the developing relationship between herself and her father after she had lost her mother. I found it a compelling read, being a fusion of the lives of literary figures, Virginia Woolf and Zelda Fitzgerald, who had suffered from the same illness as her father had, and I finished it in three days of intensive reading.

 

The caring role was axiomatic to my understanding of the book and I reviewed it in a piece for AuthorsElectric in June 2021, saying: Many of us will have experience of being carers, or will know someone who is, and as we get older it will most likely become something that we will all have experience of either as a giver or a recipient. At the end of the review I added a note on the positive outcome to Sam Mills’s caring role with her father. Meanwhile, I continued my membership of the group and my sister joined briefly while she was looking after her mother-in-law until her death. Other carers had varying degrees of responsibility for those for whom they cared but inevitably an ending would eventually arrive. The book group was key to my understanding of the role, and I reflected in my review about why it was largely in the hands of women to provide this care.

 

While I was reading novels like My Cousin Rachel by Daphne du Maurier and Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin with the “CarersFirst” group, Sam Mills was writing her own novel, The Watermark. In her acknowledgements at the end of the book, she says it took her twelve years to write it. Anyway, I gradually became aware that she had completed the book and I attended the launch of The Watermark at Daunts in Holland Park Avenue, London last month. There I met Sam and many people in real life whom I had hitherto only known online. It is remarkable how similar people are in real life to their virtual selves and I was cheered and renewed by this thought as my wife Sue and I took the train home, carrying with us a signed copy of the book into which I guessed the author had put so much of herself.

A Review*

I will try and do justice to the novel which was a challenging read even to me who had once tackled works like Absalom, Absalom and The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy as an undergraduate. Very simply, The Watermark is about how renowned author, Augustus Fate treats Jaime Lancia who has won a competition to interview him about his latest book. InThe Watermark, and it is a fairly lengthy novel, two characters Jaime and his girlfriend, Rachel, one a painter and the other a musician, are imprisoned in the author Augustus Fate’s novel in progress, and the book tells the story of how they try to find their way back home.

 

An attempt at a summary

The first section of the The Watermark is set in Oxford in 1861. Thomas, Jaime’s C19 alter ego, and his father visit Mr Gwent, a novelist and rival to Dickens. Gwent gives them Chinese tea to drink which traps them in a world thronged with magical elements. This includes time travel and at one point Gwent compares the modern woman of 2014 to the speckled moth who had to adapt to nineteenth century industrial times. Gwent is a kind of modern scientist who questions belief in God. He has lost his wife Mary and at one point we are told he places a dodo in her place on the table. (The dodo becomes a recurring motif in the book.**)

 

Thomas travels to London with Gwent. On the journey Gwent passes him a blackberry which is compared to the Zoetrope, a Victorian invention for animating pictures in sequence. He goes up in a hot air balloon with Gwent who throws out advertisements for his novels. Gwent draws out his blackberry again to give Thomas directions and after they land, he walks to a graveyard where he meets up with Rachel. He was previously acquainted with her during his university years when he was Jaime. Thomas confesses his love for Rachel who in the C19 world is a governess, and she kisses him. We are told that Rachel’s mother suffers from neurasthenia, a little understood illness of the time and we learn that Rachel too will be committed to an asylum like her mother. 

 

Together with his father and Gwent Thomas drinks soma tea and this has a powerful effect. We are told in the story that soma awakens you while Grand Kuding drugs you. As the section continues Thomas moves forward in time and he compares the drink to coca-cola. He mentions books by Dickens, some of which have not yet been published. He breaks a teacup and I sensed that this was a key moment in the book where the narrator seems to be in both the world of 1861 and the world of today at the same time. Thomas and his father are leaving a church where they have been listening to a sermon about a topsy-turvey world where snow is falling in the summer, and where the vicar has shouted angrily at Thomas abut Charles Darwin’s radical ideas. As they leave there is the sound of a helicopter overhead. It swoops down and crashes into the roof of the church. Mr Gwent tells Thomas that his real name is Jaime and he orders Grand Kuding tea to be made. 

Gwent reads from his own novel: “Jaime woke up to find himself in his flat in Manchester…” and we move to the second section.

 

A second attempt at a summary, filling in gaps

You, the reader, may by now be getting the picture. The book is a work of metafiction where the characters involved are aware that they are in a fictional world. The characters travel through time and space, and Jaime and Rachel in search of the Storyteller move from Victorian era Oxford - where the narrator, whose mother has died and whose father has corresponded with Charles Darwin is Thomas - to Manchester in 2014 where Rachel becomes the narrator. She and Jaime meet up: his chat-up line is that they are both characters in a novel. The second section is concerned with the practice of book-surfing, run by a group who operate from Liverpool, and when Rachel talks to the girl on reception about August Fate’s book, Thomas Turridge, the girl points out the dangers of inhabiting books: ‘Last week a man went into Bleak House and ended up dying of spontaneous combustion’, she says. This is just like what happens to Krook in Dickens’s novel, I thought to myself, and as I was reading I was  reminded of the problems faced by Jane Austen's Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey. We have be very careful about our novel reading and In a sense Sam Mills’s book is very much one for literature lovers like me who have undertaken their degrees. By all accounts English Literature is not such a popular university subject these days.

 

The story continues as the book-surfing girl offers them time in a Russian novel set in Carpathia in 1928. They have to have a double dose of Grand Kuding tea to get there. She tells them that there’s someone called the Storyteller in the book and in the third section we are taken to Russia where the search for the this character continues. The style and the typeface are now different. We are in Carpathia and the chapter headings are numbered in Russian script - pronounced adjin, dva, tree, chiteery and so on - which I remembered well from my O’ level Russian studies. The narrator is now Thomas again and Raisa is the name of the girl he is with. She is still a painter giving exhibitions and he a musician, but he has lost her and has to begin a search. At one point he is a soldier and during this search he becomes ill and is looked after by Eleanor, the other woman in his life.***

 

When we reach the fourth section the action has now moved to a very convincing science fiction setting in London 2047 where Rachel and Jaime, now married, are living. The couple navigate their careers, have affairs with robots and other humans, and try to bring up their son, Finn. At the end of the section is an interlude where the novelist speculates about the work of writers like Thomas Hardy and George Eliot, and Dickens, and whether the latter should have killed off his minor characters as he does with Krook in Bleak House. The author decides not to kill off any of her characters in this novel, however, and she moves us to the final part which returns the reader to Oxford.

 

In this section we are taken back to 1910, and the narrative is resumed by Thomas. This was for me the best section of the book and I added post-its, while I was reading. First Rachel appears to have died in the midst of completing a final painting and is brought back to life as a kind of ghost. Her conversation is always written in capital letters. Jaime is imprisoned for stealing apples and the description of his life in prison I found to be most compelling. Perhaps it is all those readings I did of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Jimmy Boyle in the past, but I always find prison life fascinating to read about and the author has done this really well. I could almost picture myself in Thomas’s shoes, lapping spilt gruel from the filthy prison floor under the eyes of the jailer, Millhauser.

 

In this section also the author brings in philosophical ideas such as the structure of matter and whether we should be able to put our hand through a brick wall. ‘IT’S ONLY YOUR PERCEPTION THAT IT IS SOLID WHICH MAKES IT SOLID. IT’S ONLY YOUR ATTACHMENT TO REALITY WHICH IS A FANTASY’, says Rachel. There is a meditation on 'good' actions, where Rachel says (in capital letters of course):  ‘…if we all do nothing then we get nothing. If we do some good each day, even a small thing, then it counts, and if you add up all those good acts over a lifetime, then the impact is huge.’

A possible conclusion 

 

This idea of collecting good acts really resonated with me and I continued with the book. The characters finally realise that it is they who are the Storytellers; Thomas/Jaime, responding to Rachel’s singing of Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’, is able to pass through the prison wall in order to reach her; Jaime calls in vain for an ambulance in to go to Fate’s house to look after him. (Jaime has earlier fought with Fate savagely and caused him injuries.) Rachel muses over current events and we suddenly seem to be in the time stopped world of the pandemic. The characters hear a round of applause as the NHS is thanked for its services, and the novel draws to a close. 

Notes

*For a review of the book by Toby Litt go to The Guardian, Saturday 31st August

**dodo ink is the name of the publishing company run by Sam Mills

*** This section is illustrated by Christiana Spens, a Twitter contact who I also met at the book launch