Rupert Thomson - Never Anyone But You

I finished Rupert Thomson's latest novel Never Anyone But You back in autumn and made a vow to write about it.  It's February already though and with no words penned, it requires a photograph of an androgynous clown to fire up the memory of Claude Cahun, one of the two subjects of that novel.  A woman sitting across from me on the top deck of the bus flipped the pages of her book and there was the image, not Cahun, but a vivid reminder.  

Why should I need a reminder though?  Why should Thomson be so easy to forget?  After all, a reviewer in The New Statesman once remarked that "when someone writes as well as Thomson does, it makes you wonder why other people bother".  Although that's a silly statement, it does give you a sense of just how highly regarded Thomson's prose is.  And yet, after devouring his first three novels back in the early 1990s, I didn't pick him up again until nearly twenty years later.  I think it has something to do with wanting to take your time with his books, savouring rather than devouring.  The act of reading his prose is an unhurried one, all-consuming, decadent, wanting to stretch out the sensation for as long as possible.  And on finishing, it seems gluttonous to immediately pick up the next novel.  Indeed, there are still two books of his that I have yet to read. 

Claude Cahun (1927) "I am in training, don't kiss me"

Never Anyone But You is a wonderful reimagining of the life and love-affair of Suzanne Halberde and Lucie Schwob: two teenagers who fell in love, changed their names to Marcel Moore and Claude Cahun, and then embarked upon a life of Surrealist art and gender-fluidity.  The novel takes in Nantes, and then on to a Paris in thrall to the Modernists, and finally to Jersey – which for most of the novel is occupied by the Nazis – where our two protagonists live out their days.  It is a story that is full of intelligence and quiet daring, fired through with the incredible prose of the writer.    

What is about that prose that I love?  In short it is both simple and exquisite, a rare and deceptive combination.  In the following passage, the narrator Marcel (still called Suzanne) takes a cycle trip out of Nantes with her soon to be lover Claude (still called Lucie).  

Spring came again. We cycled south, over the bridges and out of the city. Fog had rolled in from the coast, and a stealthy silence enveloped us. The creak of Lucie's back wheel, the crunch of our tires in the dust and grit. My breathing. Sometimes a house loomed out of the murk - the sharp angle of a roof, the low, mournful barking of a dog. We passed a row of poplars - elegant grey shapes, barely suggested. The landscape was as subtle and elusive as a Japanese watercolor.

There is nothing overly stylised here, nothing spectacular.  Thomson, when called upon, can light up the sky with an incredible metaphor, but he tends to use them sparingly; their impact, when they do occur, is therefore heightened.  Atmosphere is what he privileges, a bringing to the fore of the senses, sound and vision working together harmoniously.  Although there's nothing intricate, you still get an incredibly detailed sense of the scene and the situation.  And I choose this passage because of the reference to Japanese watercolours.  That is what Thomson's prose reminds me of.  Like I say, simple yet exquisite. Think of some of Katsushika Hokusai's pictures, particularly his landscapes.  Yes, Japan is rather different from Brittany, but I immediately thought of Boy Viewing Mount Fuji when I read those words.

Boy Viewing Mount Fuji - Katsushika Hokusai (1839)

A later passage again conjures up this softness of palette, using it to devastating effect as Marcel encounters the ghost of her dead brother Jean on the lawn outside of her Jersey cottage.  The image of Jean, who committed suicide on his return from The Great War, can't help but summon up memories of Wilfred Owen's strange, sad spectres.  

One morning in December 1943, I opened the front door to let Kid out and saw Jean, my brother, standing on the lawn. He was looking this way and that, as if highly entertained by his surroundings. As if the garden – or the world – was somehow ludicrous. He was in uniform, but his feet were bare. His heels were blistered, mauve against the snow. His mouth leaked smoke, like a gun that had just been fired. I remembered how every letter he had written from the trenches had begun with the words I’m fine.

The bare feet against the snow, the mouth smoking like a gun, the quiet stoicism of Jean's salutation, all combined to give me one of those moments that occur all too infrequently when you read.  I recall laying the book down on the table next to my cooling coffee, gazing out the café window onto the Charing Cross Road, and revelling in the passage.  Sentences and images so vivid, that you not only remember them, but you remember exactly where you read them and how they made you feel.  

Marcel Moore - Much more than a muse

There's also a deftness to how Thomson delves underneath the skin of his characters.  He needs to almost try them on, exploring and sensing how they react to situations that can only be imaginary.  He may be wide of the mark with these imaginings, but that does not matter.  When he has Claude become infatuated with a local Jersey boy, there's a learned and classical erudition to the inevitable jealousy.  Claude, clearly goading Marcel, compares the local boy to Hadrian's young gay lover Antinous, and the sexually unconventional allusion is brought to the fore to illustrate a flirtation with the conventional:   

The statue he reminded her of was that of Antinous. Did I know it? I shook my head.  Antinous was a Greek youth who had been the lover of Emperor Hadrian, she told me. He had wide shoulders and a narrow waist. Long thighs. After his death, a cult had been established in his name.

Antinous, the Emperor's broad shouldered favourite

Did Claude have these heterosexual tendencies?  Did Marcel ever come across the ghost of her brother standing in the snow?  Perhaps not, but it's that fugitive ring of truth that is so wonderful here, one that a conventional biography can never really get close to.  And return to that passage and look at how the usual composure of the prose disintegrates into short, passive aggressive sentences.  The eloquence is gone, the description cursory, almost as if Marcel can't be bothered to conjure up the beautiful Greek youth.   

That getting under the skin of different characters is a real commonplace in the startling range of subjects that Thomson chooses.  Modernism was the subject of my Master's degree, but I'd previously skirted around the art and reputation of Claude Cahun.  Naturally, after reading Never Anyone But You,  I wanted to investigate further.  And yes, the art and the Parisian parties, with their dazzling guest-lists and manifestos, as Modernism sets fire to the past – in short all the reasons why I love reading something like Hemingway's A Moveable Feast – are well done.  If I do have a minor criticism it might be found here with a hint of didacticism jarring the dream-like narrative as Claude and Marcel try out André Breton's theory of experimental walking:  

But 'unintentional' was a word we tried not to use. It was a word people hid behind. I didn't mean to. It was an accident. There was no such thing. Every accident contained an element of the deliberate. This was the principle that lay behind André Breton's concept of déambulation: you had to accept – or even own – that which you came across by chance. Was it also Breton who had insisted that one should always leave a window open for the visitations of the unconscious and the unexpected.

A rare misstep here in this overview of flaneuring?  Only if we measure it against the brilliance of the whole.

Rupert Thomson - England's finest living writer of prose?

Perhaps it is Moore and Cahun's move to Jersey and their struggles against the Nazi occupation that stand out as the book's most thrilling narrative component.  The quiet, subversive propaganda – posting inflammatory leaflets around the island, even slipping them into the pockets of unwitting Nazi soldiers – exceeds the bravery of what many of their Modernist contemporaries were up to – yes, Pablo Picasso.  All of this means that the book isn't just an artistic triumph, but a superb piece of story-telling.     

Indeed, Thomson is clearly a writer who loves the challenge of getting inside the mind-set of fascinating women, digging away at what makes them tick.  Cahun and Moore certainly courted controversy and make for intriguing subjects.  But an earlier novel, Death Of A Murderer, ventures well beyond the confines of artistic controversy and hooks itself up to the question of evil, burrowing into the mind of one half of the Moors Murderers, Myra Hindley.  An attempt to find a way into the psyche of Hindley – although she is never explicitly named – through PC Billy Tyler who is assigned the grim duty of guarding the child-killer's body in the morgue, is another Thomson masterpiece.  Along with the earlier books such as The Five Gates of Hell and Dreams of Leaving – both have a terrifically twisted Lynchian feel to them – they are distinct, inventive and unusual.  They envelope you in whatever particular world Thomson is writing about and they – an aspect of why we read that is easy to forget as we age – take you right to the heart of that world.  

It's no surprise that Rupert Thomson's prose is the first prose that I consciously fell in love with.  Rereading the opening pages to The Five Gates of Hell, I am able to pinpoint the paragraph that first struck me, the moment that I first realised just how much beauty and power could be found in words.  

Then, in the distance, a mirror-flash of silver and the jets came tearing through the membrane of the sky.  The air turned to sound there was nothing left to breathe, and in his ears the stammer of machine guns as the bullets scuffed the dust around their feet, raised rows of ghostly plants that few one after another in the dry ground, hung in the air, then crumbled, and their hands were pulled apart, and they scattered, screaming, limbs of water, breath like saws attacking wood. 

American Gothic anglicised

Never Anyone But You closes, as many great novels do, with death.  It is a startling and singular book that haunts and informs.  And in my opinion, and I suspect a few others, there is no finer writer of English prose alive today than Thomson.  Two books left.  I'll wait, but not for long.     

Postscript: At a recent Q&A with Rupert Thomson, I got the chance to ask him about details in the novel that were based on what actually happened.  Claude Cahun did develop a complicated crush on a man in Jersey, and, indeed, compared him to Hadrian's broad shouldered favourite Antinous.