By C. D. Rose.
Amy Arnold, Lori & Joe (Prototype, 2023)
You could argue, if you really wanted to, that the attempt to represent consciousness on the page is one of the things the novel is designed to do. Many, certainly, have tried. You’ll have your own list, no doubt, but it’ll probably include Joyce and Woolf, maybe Dorothy Richardson or Edouard Dujardin, Beckett even, or Proust arguably. And you’ll have your own opinion about whether interior monologue or stream of consciousness, or something else altogether, is the right term to use, or what the difference between them is. The techniques are often those associated with high modernism, but – thank goodness – it’s still a thing: Mike McCormack’s 2016 Solar Bones might be one example, and perhaps most notably there’s the work of Jon Fosse.
Amy Arnold’s first novel Slip of a Fish (And Other Stories, 2018) contained repeated references to Fosse’s Aliss at the Fire and while her graceful and unsettling new book, Lori & Joe, doesn’t reference the Norwegian writer directly, it shares many of his concerns, both stylistic and thematic.
Lori awakes one morning to find her life partner, Joe, has died unexpectedly. She doesn’t call a doctor, an ambulance, the police, or observe any of the rules, niceties or obligations which face you at the sudden onset of grief over a death unexpected. She pulls her boots on and goes out walking over the fell. That’s about as much plot as you’re going to get in this book, though there is of course much more to it. The novel is, as far as I can discern, circadian, in that its action takes place over the course of a day, but as Lori walks over the south Lakeland hills, her observation, memory and reflection open up that limited time frame, so that this becomes the story not of one single day, but of the accumulation of years.
While Lori’s internal voice (if we can characterise it so) is sometimes confused and confusing, this is because Lori won’t always acknowledge exactly what has happened to her, around her, and what she may have caused to happen. While we may be narrative animals, attempting to order and thereby explain our actions and our selves by means of creating a logical sequence for them, we are rarely successful at doing so. The lapses, evasions and blocks will never let us tell the full story, nor even perhaps know it.
In a way that might be troublesome for such a book, Lori however has little internality. You’d write a book of this kind to examine someone with a rich interior life, wouldn’t you? Arnold doesn’t. Lori is professedly unbookish, is left largely unmoved by the music (Bartók, Bach, Pārt) which Joe had loved so much and encouraged her to listen to, and doesn’t seem to even watch TV other than the perfunctory viewing of the news. Yet she is far from being a blank. Most of what she thinks, feels and remembers are her interactions with others. Though she is a very solitary person (crucially, with no children), conversations with others — partly real, partly imagined and remembered differently at every recall — make up who Lori is.
Lori’s initial apparent lack of interiority is also belied by her feeling for the landscape. As well as being about time and memory, Lori & Joe is also a book about place, though you will find no rhapsodic swells of new nature writing here, no purple passages about the storied beauty of the Lakes. The land is seen entirely from within that consciousness, close up. This is about being a body — and a streaming consciousness — in the landscape, the untouchable nature of the mind against rocks and rain and puddles and fog. And the importance of a good pair of boots.
In a recent review of Fosse’s work in the London Review of Books, Blake Morrison notes the counter-intuitive fact that Fosse’s style is actually very easy to read: ‘the prose is so repetitive and circling that the eye moves quickly down the page, unafraid of missing anything out since every new detail or revelation is sure to be dwelled on at length… what threatens to be heavy proves lightsome.’ It’s not quite the same with Arnold, partly because there are sentences, even though all are long and many of them break, but also because Arnold does require attention: it is precisely in those details, repeated and modified each time, that Lori’s story lies. The reader is aided by chapter-like segments, each headed with a comfortingly old-fashioned title telling the reader what’s going on (‘IT’S EARLY, IT ISN’T QUITE LIGHT, AND THE FOG IS DOWN OVER THE FELL,’ ‘LORI CLIMBS OVER THE STILE AT MOOR HEAD,’ ‘LORI LEANS AGAINST THE STONE WALL AT THE BOTTOM OF THE BRIDLEWAY’.)
To say that this book is an experiment in the representation of consciousness, however, would be to do it a disservice. It is more than that, as any such (successful) experiment is bound to be. This is a small book, but not a minor one. Lori is a great example of the person-of-little-to-no-importance type. The style, like Lori, never draws attention to itself: it is understated, quietly brilliant. This is a book which is about what memory does to time, and what time does to memory. And in its successful representation of consciousness it is also about the crushing fear of loneliness, and the accumulation of time’s work, put alongside the pleasure of putting your feet in a puddle or eating a dry scone: the minuscule and the massive co-existing. This is a story of the ‘ordinary life’ presented to remind us that no life is ordinary.
The novel offers little comfort or closure, there are no epiphanies and revelations are scant, glimpsed only. And yet, it does show us what might it be like to exist on this earth, in all its conflict and wonder, even if only for a moment, as another person. This is, after all, one of the unique things that such writing can do.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
C. D. Rose‘s three books The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure, Who’s Who When Everyone Is Someone Else and The Blind Accordionist form a loose parafictional trilogy about lost books and forgotten writers, about who is forgotten and who remembered, and how, and why. A collection of his short stories is forthcoming.
You can read an interview with him here. Twitter: @cdrose_write
