Corfu: a novel by Robert Dessaix
Sydney: Picador, 2001 ISBN 033036278X
I found this a strange book. A book without a story, but about stories. A book about love, but with little love in it. It is a book set in Greece, but not about Greece. I spent much of the time when reading this book wondering where it would go - in the end, I'm not sure it went anywhere. And yet I read it to the finish.
The narrator of Corfu is an actor who works in a small company rehearsing Chekhov (The Cherry Orchard) in London, where he comes into contact with William, a loose-limbed, happy-go-lucky set designer. There is a frisson between them, or so our narrator thinks. William and our hero (an appropriate term I think, as there is a connexion between our protagonist and Odysseus, as is touched on throughout the book) circle around each other, with our hero unable to understand the take-it-as-it comes attitude of William.
Our hero leaves William in a hotel room in Rome. Unable to come to terms with his feelings, he flees to Corfu, where he rents the house of Kester Berwick, an expatriate Australian actor who is in Athens for reasons that our hero never finds out. He soon becomes fascinated with Berwick, through reading his clippings and manuscripts, and talking to the other expats about him. He can never pin down Berwick's true character - views of him vary from charlatan to guru. Our hero is disturbed when he finds a photograph of Berwick with William...
He learns that Berwick led a life of loss, losing lovers to time and chance and the wheels of history. Meanwhile he hears that William is on his way to Corfu, and so he flees again, this time to Lesbos, where he encounters a group of witches trying to get in touch with the other side. Eventually he returns to Corfu where he meets with William again, and they consummate their relationship.
Our hero decides to put on a production of Uncle Vanya, using locals as the actors. He and William decide to go back together to Adelaide (where both of them, and Berwick, hail from), until, on the night of the performance, William says he's not going. An epilogue, set five years later, describes how Berwick and quite a few other characters have died, and that our hero has never heard from William again.
If this seems a thin and unsatisfying story, it's because it is a thin and unsatisfying story. It's hard to have sympathy for our hero, as he seems to veer between fear, shame and paranoia about William. Much of the novel is our hero's thoughts on Chekhov, Homer, the former Empress of Austria, C.P. Cavafy, among others. At times it seemed to me that this was intellectual posturing, but as I read further that feeling faded a little, although I still struggled to see how Chekhov fitted in with, let alone should have been such a major part of, this book (Dessaix has written extensively on Russian literature, and completed a PhD on the subject).
Dessaix muses in this book on the themes of life and love. Our hero has an epiphany when rehearsing Uncle Vanya, that the ordinariness of life is just as, if not more, important as the dramatic moments. Our hero too struggles with the idea of love, with the idea of giving oneself to someone, without knowing where that might lead. As he begins to think that he can do that with William, William leaves him, and "something inside went dead".
That seems to be what happened to Kester as well, ending up on Corfu to live out his life without wants (because wanting is dangerous perhaps?). I was disappointed to find out, after I had finished this novel, that Kester Berwick is a real person - I feel it is another failure of imagination in this book.
There is no doubt this novel is well written, and that Dessaix is a man of learning, but I found that the "soul" of this book - the something inside - was, for me, dead. I don't feel that I've come to the end of this book knowing more than I did before I started it - about myself, or the world. And that's a shame.
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