MEMORIES OF THINGS PAST
A retired general is spotted walking naked through a supermarket car park after confusing one town for another; a ghost spends the evenings in his garden rockery talking to the spirits of his dead family; while a spider in a potting shed is the unlikely confidante of three friends. Welcome to Notwithstanding, the fictional English village of Louis de Bernieres, author of the best selling Captain Correlli’s Mandolin.
A childhood spent in the Surrey hamlet of Wormley is the inspiration behind this wonderfully crafted collection of short stories which bring to life a world of eccentrics, genteel snobbery, and moments of touching profundity. De Berniere’s writing sparkles with wit and eloquence, while irony and observation add depth to its visual qualities. Obadiah Oak, the village’s “last peasant” with his “tombstone teeth”, seems as real as the phlegm he spits from his mouth, while the smell of animals, decay, and “stupefying halitosis” in the home of kindly spinster Agatha Feakes, is almost palpable.
Village life is a continuum of activity with characters taking center stage in one story and then popping up as bit part players in others. Some of the residents have a comedic quality that rings with Monty Python absurdity including the mother and son who live in the same house but who communicate via walkie talkies; pipe smoking Polly Wantage who wears plus fours and shoots squirrels with a twelve-bore shotgun; and newcomer Royston Chittock, a man “profoundly attached to the delusion that London is the centre of the universe” and whose downfall is precipitated by garden moles!
This is English humour at its best yet as De Berniere observes even Notwithstanding can hold back the forces of the real world. Yuppies snap up vacant properties for second homes, young people leave the village because they can’t afford to stay, while the elderly die from natural causes or the trauma of moving away from what is familiar. Change is inevitable but that doesn’t make it any easier to bear. Notwithstanding is a metaphor for what progress takes away and the traditions that somehow manage to survive in spite of it.
De Bernieres has richly delivered on the promise identified in 1993 by the literary magazine Granta, which named him as one of the Twenty Best of Young British Novelists. His work roll is impressive (The Troublesome Offspring of Cardinal Guzman, Birds Without Wings etc) and there’s no sign of a let up in the creative flow. Originally published in 2009, Notwithstanding enchants whilst questioning whether the English rural idyll ever existed. These stories are a departure from what we have come to expect from de Bernieres, whose previous works had been set in foreign locations. This time he has come home to Surrey where “the eccentricities are large enough”.
Reviewed by Juliette Foster
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