The Emigre by
Joan Brady
hbk out January 99
Published by Secker Warburg
at £15.99
Joan Brady won the 1993 Whitbread Book of the Year Award - as well as France's Prix du Meilleur Live Etranger - for her second novel Theory of War. But The Émigré was my introduction to her work.
The novel gets off to a cracking start with the introduction of Nikolas Strakhan, a minor aristocrat and musician. Nikolas is ambiguous, one of those characters who live large on the page, and who we find fascinating. A truly literary character, who one cannot get enough of, but who one would hate in real life.
As the novel progresses, however, we realise that there is something much more insidious about and behind the character of this man.
What Joan Brady knows about is the essence of the emotional relationships between men and women. And she has a grasp of the art of language, of eloquence, that allows her to describe this relationship in ways that have never been accomplished before. In short, she is a virtuoso of her craft. An artist, no less.
The plot is not particularly original or even very interesting. Though it does finish with a bang. Brady is one of those writers who are more concerned with theme. Here her theme is evil, and what she knows about how it works is really the bulk of the novel’s content.
But the writing, the way she uses language, is really what held me throughout the novel. It was spell binding, the ability to change and hold mood without the faintest hint of falling over into banality or purple prose.
I wasn’t totally sold. For one thing, this novel reads as though the Feminist movement never happened, in fact there are times when one wonders if the author has been completely untouched even by Modernism. Virginia Woolf would ask: "Are we really given Nikolas, or just the illusion of Nikolas?"
And this business of Eve (What does that name remind you of?) and Nikolas (Old Nick), the connotations of the Paradise myth, simply left me with a headache.
The device of using the voice of Eve, first person, relating the story of Nikolas to us, almost as soon as it is related to her, is not convincing.
But the story of Nikolas itself, and of his proximity to evil, is totally fascinating, glued my eyes to the page.
Not a crime novel, but one of the few mainstream novels published lately that is worth spending time with.
(
John Baker
- author of the Sam Turner mysteries and one of Britain's most highly acclaimed writers)
The Emigre by
Joan Brady