Deborah Levy has been short-listed for the Man Booker prize twice for the novels, Swimming Home and Hot Milk and she has proved herself to be a perceptive fiction writer with a refreshing approach to story-telling. Sadly her new novel, itself long-listed for this year's Booker, is not up to scratch.
The author, you sense, is exasperated with the conventional approach and wants to break into new ground with each of her novels. She wishes to shock and surprise, to jolt us out of our usual narrative expectations, and this works in Swimming Home (2012) and Hot Milk (2016).
If you are talking unconventional then, the South African-born novelist has certainly gone for it in The Man Who Saw Everything. The year is 1989, and her protagonist Saul Adler is photographed negotiating London's legendary Abbey Road zebra crossing by his girlfriend Jennifer Moreau. This is a recurring and very tiresome motif in the book, you better get used to it. Typically, a car knocks Saul down as he hesitates at the crossing. Crossing the zebra in the shadowy, faint footsteps of the Beatles is not good for Saul, he keeps getting hit by a fellow called Wolfgang.
After a strangely mild enough encounter with Wolfgang - he has just knocked him down, for god's sake - Saul, relatively unharmed, accompanies Jennifer to the flat she shares with two other girls. Exasperated with his lack of interest in her photographic projects, Jennifer tells Saul that she is breaking up with him. They make love for the last time.
Not long afterwards, Saul goes to East Berlin on some kind of vague history research project - way too vague actually, there is too much flimsiness in this novel. He is met by Walter, his translator, with whom he begins a furtive physical relationship. He also has a sexual encounter at the family dacha with Walter’s sister Luna, whose boyfriend is Rainer.
This is East Berlin before the fall of the Wall; the secret police, known as Stasi are still very much in force and the elusive Rainer appears to be a police agent. Early in the East Berlin segment, Saul observes that Walter is following him home one night. So it goes, to tell any more is not so much to spoil as to waste your time.
The final section of this 200-page novel features the young, er, historian in a hospital bed back in London. Has he had a hit again on Abbey Road? You bet, and he is experiencing hallucinatory visits from basically everybody we have met so far. To compound the disorienting feeling, Levy begins to juggle with time periods, the last refuge of the novelist desperate for something innovative.
For what it is worth, your reviewer failed to latch on with any kind of empathy for the characters, who are badly contrived and listlessly manipulated. There is far too much superficial and trite detail in an overly-laboured story that attempts to grab itself some gravitas with the Berlin setting. Towards the end there is an entirely gratuitous reference to Brexit, thankfully just one.
This novel has been long-listed for the Booker Prize, and such is the perverse way of such awards, that she could win it. At which point I will be found munching on my hat.
Approach with serious caution.
