5 hours ago
5
Sophie Mackintosh has established a reputation for speculative literary fiction about young women’s desires and suffering at the hands of men. Her new novel, Permanence, is less plainly political than earlier work, concerned more with allegories of desire than oppression.
The novel begins in an uncanny hotel, where Clara wakes beside her lover, Francis. Clara works desultorily in an art gallery and shares a flat with a friend. Francis is an academic, an art historian married to a lawyer, the father of a toddler, but on this day he and Clara find themselves in a parallel world in which adulterous couples live in what seems at first to be a permanent holiday. The realised fantasy is bourgeois, north European: a cobbled old city where the sun always shines and there are many restaurants with clean tablecloths and good wine. There are parks full of perpetually blooming flowers, old stone fountains; markets offering ripe tomatoes, olive oil and bread; scented soap in clean bathrooms, and nothing for Clara and Francis to do but make love, bathe, eat, drink and stroll the charming streets. Clara finds pretty dresses, girlish pale blue silk and yellow cotton, awaiting her in the wardrobe, her favourite books beside the bed.
Hours, then days, pass. There is no way to leave, and also – apart from Francis’s wholly containable thoughts of his home life and his daughter – no reason to do so. Then one day they wake up in their separate, real lives and, as in children’s time-travel fiction, no time has passed and no one has missed them. Clara, forbidden to call Francis in case his wife finds out, pines. Francis gets on with his work and his marriage, until one day they simultaneously wish themselves back in the magic kingdom.
But as we know, the walled garden becomes a prison. Mysterious injuries, at first like insect bites, appear on the couple’s bodies each time they hurt each other’s feelings. The apartment begins to get dirty. They talk to other couples, who know the rules but refuse to share them. One day, they run out of the coins that were mysteriously appearing and have to work in the public gardens, and after a few more returns to reality even the soil in the park turns poor and dusty. But still, after some days or weeks of ordinary life, yearning for each other regathers and they wish themselves back to the disintegrating paradise.
It’s a rich, alluring concept, offering much literary fun. One timeframe runs realistically, the other hardly at all. Clara and Francis’s “real” lives are still pretty peachy by most reckonings, the only hardships those of love, but their quotidian concerns contrast with the wilder, scarier possibilities of the other world. The uncanny potential is understated, sometimes too much: the magic food is never more than “delicious” or “beautiful”, Clara and Francis’s frequent sex places Clara “entirely in herself and beyond herself” in largely abstract ways. Earth and plants call forth the most concrete writing, but even then it’s oddly factual, geographic: “the river widened very suddenly into a silted terracotta beach”. Is “terracotta” the colour of sand, or silt, or does the water run on baked earth? Has the river ended with the “very sudden” widening? Francis buys Clara roses “so preternaturally beautiful that it was hard to believe they had been grown, presumably, from the earth”. What were they like, I want to know, what was the colour and the smell, what made them so beautiful?
In some ways, the glassy quality of Mackintosh’s descriptive prose serves the purpose of the uncanny. Everything in the adulterers’ paradise feels like a poor simulacrum, and that is the point about fantasy and infidelity, but the writing about the “real” world shares this tendency. Francis “performed the routines of his day” with “the gusto of a man who had returned from the dead”, but this gusto is conveyed in the same muted tone as his rapidly staling alternative world. “It was wonderful to hold his daughter in his arms”, we are told, but not how or why it was wonderful. In an illustration of wonder, he reads her three stories and strokes her hair “until she protested”.
There’s much to admire here. I enjoyed Mackintosh’s willingness to centre two unlikable characters behaving carelessly. The timeslips are fun and the allegory is inventive and convincing. I just wanted prose that takes and gives more sensually in a novel whose engine, in theory, is pleasure and play.
Permanence by Sophie Mackintosh is published by Hamish Hamilton (£18.99). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
