Arnaud Cathrine
LA DISPARITION DE RICHARD TAYLOR
194pp. Paris: Verticales. 17.50 Euros.
978 2 07 078129 4
There are many curious things about La Disparition de Richard Taylor; the most immediate and striking is the fact that this French novel is set entirely in Britain. The characters are all British, though they refer to la Tamise, not the Thames, and one of them even asks another if he speaks French – he doesn’t. Among the very few English words in the whole book are pork pie and mushy peas, the food offered by one neighbour to another and meant, I think, to signal the down-to-earth, everyday Englishness of the situation. This is also the only instance where the author, Arnaud Cathrine, gets his cultural references slightly wrong. Otherwise, the novel is pitch perfect; the absurdity of these British people speaking in French soon fades away, though perhaps it contributes to the unsettling atmosphere.
Richard Taylor, as the title indicates, is largely absent from the narrative, which opens with the voice of his wife, Susan, who recounts how she and Richard found their flat, had a baby and settled down to a peaceable existence until a new neighbour, Jennifer Wilson, moved in and disturbed their quiet, passionless nights with loud and prolonged bouts of masturbation. Then, one night, Richard does not come home and at around the same time, the neighbour quietens down, though the two events seem to be unrelated.
From this point on, each chapter belongs to another female relative, friend, colleague or passing acquaintance of Richard’s. The only unmediated version comes in the form of two letters sent by him to his mother and younger sister. The character of the missing man emerges little by little through the prism of the various portraits and impressions; stifled by his conventional upbringing, he has sleepwalked into marriage and fatherhood and cannot or will not come to terms with his growing sense of futility or, it seems, think of anything other than himself. Those around him tend to excuse, forgive and seek to mend; the only person who reminds him of his responsibilities is the transvestite Vanessa, who runs the Soho bar he frequents and is in some ways the moral heart of the book. Richard’s disappearing act unleashes a set of consequences he is utterly incapable of dealing with, and all that is left after his fugue is a spreading sense of waste.
One of the characters caught up in Richard’s drama is the English playwright Sarah Kane, and here we run into another curiosity; Kane is introduced as a friend of William, who was in love with Richard, and she has a chapter in which she meditates on how love affects her friend, herself, her work and her world, and thinks about what music should be played at her funeral. She is not explicitly planning anything, but death is certainly in the air. What makes this very uneasy reading is the knowledge that Sarah Kane did in fact commit suicide in 1999. Why Cathrine has made her a part of his fictional world is not clear; she is a strong presence and her monologue is convincing, but La Disparition de Richard Taylor would work equally well without her, or rather, with a fictional character in her place. If Cathrine is only using Kane as a shorthand to evoke the violent, troubled world of love and pain she represented in her plays, he should have had more confidence in his own ability to create and manipulate that world.
Each of the monologues he creates is nicely differentiated; the colloquial, often brutal way the characters speak – to each other and to themselves – is shocking but it doesn’t feel unnecessary. The register is a world away from beautiful, traditional literary French; if Cathrine was trying to translate his British influences into his own language, he has succeeded. French critics have suggested that La Disparition de Richard Taylor is an attempt to explore the idea of a modern male identity crisis, narrated and defined as it is by women, but gender does not seem to be the driving force; each of the narrators is clearly defined rather than stereotypical and the tragedy of the story goes beyond male and female.
There are a couple of minor villains; Richard’s mother is clearly a difficult figure, though the bitterness of her son’s letter to her is excessive, and his wife, Susan, is derided by his colleague and, we learn, by Richard himself, as a “nice girl” but no more, shallow and essentially unworthy of him. However, her two monologues reveal someone capable of great courage struggling to understand why her world has collapsed; her pain drives her to an awful and desperate act, which we discover obliquely, through the eyes of the dispassionate and enigmatic neighbour Jennifer Wilson. Another curiosity: Wilson is based on a character created by A. L. Kennedy in her novel So I Am Glad (1995), published in French in 2004 as Le Contentement de Jennifer Wilson. Cathrine has borrowed the form of this title for each of his chapters: L’infortune de Susan Taylor, La décision de Rebecca Swift, La complainte de Jean Taylor, etc. The aftermath of a husband’s disappearance was also explored in Marie Darrieussecq’s Naissance des fantômes (1998), another layer of the palimpsest that makes up this problematic, intriguing work. While Darrieussecq charts the internal journey of a woman whose husband went out to buy a baguette and never came back, Arnaud Cathrine examines the train of events and emotions set off by a man’s willed absence from his own life.
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Lucy Dallas is the editor of the TLS website and In Brief pages.
