Reviews
Richard Poole considers Non-return, a novel of political engagement and human uncertainty.
Non–return
Dai Vaughan
Seren
£7.99 Paperback
ISBN 1854113917
The bare bones of this novel are easily sketched. After his ship is torpedoed, a seaman survives five days of exposure by clinging to a raft in the Atlantic. When he withdraws from life to his allotment, his wife transforms herself into the family's economic and dynamic centre. Their son becomes an engineer, but feels the pull throughout his life to write poetry. He marries a librarian and fathers a daughter. His wife leaves home to join the Greenham Common women. She returns three years later, but is dead within months of cancer. Her daughter takes up political protest in her turn, then marries and moves abroad. Her father retires and begins to draw his pension.
A simple structure, then, but Dai Vaughan is no simple writer – as Seren, again front–loading its mariner with the albatross of Neal Ascherson's "One of the most imperiously intelligent fiction–writers alive", is eager to indicate. Narrative – telling a story – ranks low among Vaughan's fictional concerns. What drive him are ideas. Ideas are the organs – liver, kidneys, heart, brain – that keep his new novel living and breathing. Non–Return is dense and ambitious. It strikes me as one of those novels in which the author sets himself to worry away at questions that have preoccupied him for a lifetime.
In order to make this exploration possible, Vaughan sites the six chapters that constitute the main body of the novel within the first–person subjectivity of a single unnamed narrator, whose life (and copious ruminations on its meaning or lack of meaning) we follow from his teens to his sixties. As a contrast to this procedure (and, perhaps, as a relief lest it become too relentlessly unifocal, restricting what we can know to what the narrator can tell us), Vaughan tucks between these chapters five short stories or vignettes that cast oblique and varicoloured shafts of light upon the narrator's situation and preoccupations.
Several key ideas occur and recur as the book evolves, subjects of debate between the narrator and other people, or for contemplation in the lockup of his head. One is the efficacy or otherwise of political action; a second the competing claims of science and art; a third the limits of language as a mediator and interrogator of experience.
Unusually, though by no means uniquely, Vaughan vests political commitment in his female characters: in the narrator's mother, his wife and his daughter. The narrator's father and the narrator himself are quietists, either indifferent towards activism (the father) or ambivalent towards it (the narrator). When the latter's wife Glynis announces that she's leaving home for a year to join the protest against the siting of Cruise missiles at Greenham, he submits to her decision and takes on sole responsibility for the upbringing of their young daughter Morwen. As time goes by he comes to see the Greenham women as "the indisputable moral centre of Britain", and never fails to take his wife's side when others criticise or abuse the protesters. Years later, he's shocked when Morwen turns up with a broken arm sustained in an unprovoked attack by carabinieri at the Genoa G8 conference, and senses her disdain for his attitude of disengagement.
I readily confess to knowing nothing about draughtsmanship or the mechanics of engineering; this said, I found Vaughan's portrayal of his draughtsman narrator convincing. There is a real sense of work undertaken and carried out in this book – something novelists often choose to skate over, or simply funk. Less persuasive is his portrayal of the narrator as would–be poet. It isn't that our man doesn't theorise about poetry, doesn't agonise over whether his work is any good or not, or fails to wonder if he's made the wrong decision in sticking to engineering ("What would a wrong life look like?" his father says to him); rather it's that no examples of his mature work are offered to give the reader the opportunity to judge. Instead, in the fifth interlude, in an ironic refraction of the theme, we're given a discussion of the verse of one Melchior Wright, a lately discovered minor Georgian bard who may have been invented by his editor, G. Myton.
The narrator worries about language, too. He's troubled by its tendency to develop of its own volition "beyond anything that can be checked against common experience". Perhaps, he thinks, the only language adequate to the reality we inhabit is mathematics. Perhaps reality itself is "shaky and imprecise". His friend Graham demurs. Graham is content to see the material as the real, and mathematics as one language among many available for its description (poetry and draughtsmanship, one might add, constitute a couple more). Nevertheless, by the book's end, the aging narrator seems haunted by his own insubstantiality: "Is that all my life has been, then: a succession of empty rooms stuffed with the illusion of furniture…" That this doesn't come across as a cheap post–modern conceit about the writtenness of literary texts is a tribute to Vaughan's control.
In its broadest sense, Non–Return seems to me to be about how the choices we make, or fail to make, determine our lives. There are people who take command of their lives and people who don't – drifters undermined by their consciousness of the complexity and ambiguity of experience. Our narrator is such a person, and this perhaps explains why he's never given a name. Not a few readers will recognise his uncertainties as their own.
Page(s) 75-77
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