Marie, the narrator of Chloe Aridjis’s second novel Asunder, is an attendant at the National Gallery in London. “They call us guards,” she explains at the start of the book; “warders, invigilators, room keepers, gallery assistants.” She came to the job nine years ago, partly by accident, partly following in the footsteps of her great-grandfather, who held the same position a century ago. It’s not wholly what she wants to do with her life, but like the other characters in this fine, ghostly novel, she lacks the impetus to change.
Marie’s attention is piqued when she one day overhears a tour-group leader at the National Gallery explaining to her charges about craquelure, the term for the network of surface cracks on an antique painting, whose patterns reveal a kind of secret history of the work in question, indicating stresses or even where the canvas has been touched by an imprudent visitor, something Marie’s job is to prevent. The lightest of touches can have a deleterious effect; sometimes, the extent of the damage is impossible to tell until the canvas wears further – until, in a very literal sense, the dust settles.
Like the other characters in this fine, ghostly novel, Marie lacks the impetus to change
That dust has settled over Marie, and Asunder’s other characters. In turn we are introduced to Marie’s flatmate, her ex-boyfriend, and a poet friend, Daniel, who likes to engage in correspondence with other poets worldwide (and with whom Marie has a highly ambiguous relationship, neither able to fully commit to or withdraw from the other). Like Marie, these characters seem afflicted by the same melancholy stasis: they’re stuck, they lack commitment. They are, however, highly attuned to influence: when Jane and Lucian get together, the former takes on the gothy make-up of the latter, starting to look like his “female doppelgänger”. And Daniel only maintains his correspondence with the other poets on the proviso that they should never meet in real life.
Themes of influence, physical contact or distance, and different forms of harm appear and reappear. Daniel tells the story of the crippling migraine he developed in his youth; when medicine couldn’t find their cause, nor cure him, he sought the help of a hypnotist. The headaches vanished – but instead he developed a limp, also physiologically mysterious. Through the book there are inexplicable afflictions, invisible lines of influence, different types of harm visible and invisible. Dust accrues.
As in her first novel, the splendidly ambiguous Book of Clouds, Aridjis tells her story in set-pieces and miniatures. This is a slim novel, just shy of 200 pages long, and it takes a while to put all its pieces in place. Aridjis has admirably tight control over her themes throughout – fittingly, for a book about visual arts, its mise en scene feels meticulous – and this control permits the book to be discursive without ever feeling meandering (even if there are occasional slightly clunky linkages of the “thinking about Daniel’s letters made me recall a letter I’d once written” variety). In fact, one of my favourite chapters of the book is a meditation on Velázquez and the Rokeby Venus, art restoration, and the suffragettes. (Marie’s great-grandfather Ted witnessed suffragette Mary Robinson’s attack on the Velázquez in 1914: he charged towards her, but fell — a collapse as mysterious as Daniel’s headaches nearly 100 years later — and was unable to prevent Richardson setting about the canvas with a cleaver. In an instant, Richardson’s story is bound up with the painting’s story, never to be forgotten.) It may not advance the plot, but this section is fundamental to this novel’s themes, and a highly enjoyable essay to boot. Aridjis is so good at this, you’re almost sorry when the next chapter starts to advance the story again.
The book’s long, late central set-piece takes us to Paris, where the book’s threads start to twine together. Here, Marie and Daniel fail to consummate their awkward dalliance, Daniel is alarmed to meet one of the poets he’s corresponded with, and, on a visit to the Louvre, Marie is barely able to stop herself intervening when a visitor seems about to prod a priceless canvas. In this case, the visitor’s finger does comes to a halt – ”centimillidecimetres” from the surface of the canvas – and Marie needn’t intervene. Disaster is averted. But as this wise and haunting book reminds us, you don’t have to actually come into physical contact to have a profound or even harmful effect on someone or something else.
“Depends how you measure distance…”
Shortly afterwards, in the novel’s central setpiece, Marie visits a château that has fallen into disrepair. There, she has a terrifying encounter with Marc Cointe, the chatelain, an alcoholic with an “intriguing” facial scar, who has become destitute, burned all his possessions, and now lives in a chimney of the building. Something makes her pursue this soot-covered, derelict former nobleman through the rooms and stairwells of his property; cornered, he rounds on her like a frightened animal, and scratches her: the scar, now, is down Marie’s face too.
When she later learns that the chatelain has died, the news proves to be the incentive she needs to finally leave her job at the National Gallery. She has learned from the example of Cointe, a man who became stuck and went mad from it. The chatelain is dead but his scar lives on, faded but still visible on Marie’s face, a legacy of damage, passed from one sufferer to another. C