A woman, discarded by a lover she stalks, is at once dead and “wearing the semblance of her own body.”
The crescent street in which he lives, from which she watches him, “curves like a giant vampire’s jaw, each house a long and yellow tooth.” It sucks her blood and “drains her of semblant atoms.” The first person narrator knows she is fantasising her death and invisibility. By telling the story she manages her grief. Reiteration, with variation, enables her to remain present for us, to continue narrating, to continue living while dead. Scientific sentences, sometimes paradoxical, are revisited to sustain her, passages often concluding with a pinpoint of death “weighing innumerable tons of heavy nothingness.” In this story, a full stop might be fatal. Medical terms support her, the vampire’s jaw recurs and recurs, and her thoughts return again and again to the unidentified “terms” on which the terminated relationship was based. Terms that she tells us she broke.
She’s a contemporary Job, not entirely innocent, with no court of appeal, grieving in a vacuum of loss, running out words, and then she’s gone.
British late modernism is at its best in Brooke-Rose. This is a story for those who – as measures of value – put puzzlement and the unfamiliar, active reading and empowerment before relatability, recognition and representation. Though it lacks none of the latter.
First published in Go When You See the Green Man Walking, Michael Joseph, 1970, republished by Verbivoracious Press, 2014
A Personal Anthology 