Review of Russell Hoban's "The Bat Tattoo"

Conversations with a museum: The magpie methods of Russell Hoban

by M. John Harrison

(Times Literary Supplement review of “The Bat Tattoo”, 18^th October 2002)

A man and a woman meet on the steps of the Victoria & Albert museum. He is looking to get a bat tattoo, she already has one. His Christian name is Roswell. She is crying. His father was a failed inventor; while she was once married to a man who had “everything but the knack of succeeding”. A few minutes later they meet again, inside the museum among the Chinese ceramics. She is in his way, he is in hers. She doesn’t like him. He doesn’t like her. It is a snappy encounter; but the bats are beginning to multiply, and the convergence of their lives via this pinch of coincidence will already be recognisable to Russell Hoban readers.

Hoban has always sought the something that gets squeezed out of existence daily in the closing gap between everything that is real and everything that isn’t quite. He looks for it in language – “To me it seems that everything that happens is language, everything that goes on is saying something” (The Moment under The Moment, 1996) – but for a moment in every book of his, the risk seems to be that he will find it not so much in language as in a voice. It is a voice full of character, but there is no character behind it. For a moment, the narrative is lost, or suspended, or not yet begun. All you hear is the voice, which tells you, more or less drily, more or less poetically, about places and things and feelings. The places are made uncertain, by a delivery which layers them over one another like too many pictures seen in a gallery on a wet Wednesday; the nature and reliability of the things is undermined, as if everything is being received as a memory; the feelings are somehow scattered before they have even been brought together. As the reader you begin an immediate search for whatever intellectual tool, metaphysical description of the world or presiding deity will unify all this. You are in a state of anxiety from the word go. Hoban might help you or he might not. He might exercise his wit a little while he is deciding which it is to be.

Roswell Clark’s father, we learn, was a dreamer, a drinker, a disappointment, with a luridly ironic postmortem career as a crash-test dummy. Roswell’s mother, strong, bareboned religious, as unimpressed by her husband’s death as by his life, warns Roswell at an early age: “Sonny, Zion is where it was a whole lot better than it is now and you never get back there.” Roswell lives in the shadow of this warning. His project is retrospective. From the start he is trying to make up for his father’s failure, already half-aware of it pursuing him in the way – as Hoban has it – the “horrible hopping creature in white” pursues the little boy in M.R. James’s story “O Whistle and I’ll Come to You” [it’s actually “Casting the Runes” – ed]. He becomes an inventor too. He makes and markets a children’s game called Crash Test, a constantly recurring accident after which “the loose bits ... were easy to fit back on”. Crash Test brings him into contact with a sexually obsessed industrialist and launches him on a second career as a carver of “adult” toys. He is as puzzled by this sudden success as by his original failure. He talks about what he does in terms of its techniques; he talks about himself in terms of perpetual convalescence. It is this man, working without a definition of himself, on a life he doesn’t really recognise as his own, who meets Sarah Varley, a forty-three-year-old antiques dealer, on the steps of the V&A. Whether he knows it or not she reminds him of his mother.

Hoban’s fiction is such a magpie’s nest of shiny borrowed objects that narrative must disentangle itself from one kind of stuff by the act of weaving itself into another. In The Bat Tattoo, the narrative emphasis is distinctively Hobanesque, too. Events that would be floodlit in anyone else’s book pass by and are hardly remarked on. Hoban keeps Sarah and Roswell apart for seventy or so pages after their first meeting. We know that when they next meet they will both have the bat tattoo. We know what that means. We know they are going to fall for one another. By now we are like puppies or small children, wriggling, agog, letting out small yelps; but the moment passes with the briefest acknowledgment from them, and even less from Hoban. This is a message. Narrative values aren’t the point – or, rather, the narrative has its values but the narrating voice isn’t so interested in those. Sometimes it dwells on an event with a kind of amused or tolerant surprise, as if to say, “Well, yes, look I find this as pivotal as you do. But moving right along...” Emphasis is syncopated, and out of that syncopation, or despite it, a narrative must somehow assemble itself.

As an organism the novel has some odd stuff to work with. There is a dream-interview with Jesus. There is a smart plastic, Mnemoplast, which – much like Roswell himself – slowly returns to its original shape following deformation. Roswell, it turns out, has killed his wife in a car smash after an evening of fatuous middle-class bickering over supper in Highgate – parallels with J.G. Ballard’s Crash multiply in barefaced fashion, suspended in the most unBallardian medium of Fulham and Chelsea. Hoban is all over West London with an eye like a chicken’s. “Beautiful young models and other sleek and chic people now sport tattoos”, we learn. Also exactly how to get to Dimes Place from Hammersmith Tube station. Also that the parish church of St John, Walham Green, bears a plaque which reads: “Originally erected to the glory of God and in memory of members and past members of the 17^th Fulham and Chelsea Battalion Church Lads’ Brigade who gave their lives in the war.” The author considers this judiciously for a paragraph or two, then doubts there was a Church Lads’ Brigade in the Second World War; the plaque, therefore, must refer to Church Lads of the First World War. We aren’t sure until later if any of these items are relevant or if they are just a kind of pottering – benign, knowledgeable, always on the lookout for something to peck up.

Deciding early that crashes are what Roswell Clark knows, we become anxious on Sarah’s behalf; but she is too robust to be a victim. In fact, she often seems as dull as he does dour. “Still, for good or ill, life goes on”, she muses. “There’s nothing to be done about the past; today is all there is to work with.” We begin to sympathise with her ex-husband, another man who built models. Meanwhile, Roswell’s mysterious patron, Adelbert Delarue, builds a Museum of Art in Hoxton Square and offers an inaugural prize. In a way, The Bat Tattoo is about patronage, and thus about being – or not being – fathered. Clark’s pivotal act – the reconstruction of Christ as a crash-test dummy (ie, his father) – is little more than a reification of the first line of the Lord’s Prayer.

You are not entirely sure what to make of this. But Sarah, invited to the first viewing of the masterpiece, is wearing a pair of peach silk knickers with lace inserts, so there is clearly something else in the air, and it is clearly the same old thing. After they have taken her critique of his personality to bed – and remembering how Roswell’s mum was so concerned to improve his father – we see that this is a book about being (or not being) mothered, too. Sarah asks herself why she is always attracted to unfinished men. Working to finish his Christ, Roswell is trying to finish himself. Of course, it is the wrong self.

One of the propositions of The Bat Tattoo is that we use one another as signposts to the self worth working on. That idea leads back to Hoban’s own pursuit; and to the book in which, for most readers, it began. The inexpressible is, if not Hoban’s big white whale, at least his big green turtle. It is the secret of which Neaera – the Anita Brookner of children’s writers – dreams in Turtle Diary, only to wake understanding absolutely: “Those who know it have forgotten every part of it. Those who don’t know it remember it completely.” But the secret of what, she asks herself puzzledly.

Those who know or don’t know what? Really she knows full well. The secret is not to write fantasies entitled “Gillian Vole’s Jumble Sale”, for instance; nor is it to goad a shark for the purposes of photography from inside a metal cage: if you do that, as Naeara says, you “have not really seen him or touched him”, because the shark “is to man what he is to naked man alone – swimming”. We all know that keeping a turtle in an aquarium won’t reveal the secret: but will freeing it, either? Maybe not. It certainly won’t free us. In Hoban’s tenderest book the inexpressible is something to do with being alive as opposed to being merely conscious.

“We are doomed ever to feel shameful about our detachment from nature”, as Will Self puts it in his excellent introduction to a new paperback edition of Riddley Walker, released by Bloomsbury alongside The Bat Tattoo: “Consciousness depends on dualism.” In Turtle Diary, Hoban saw it like this: the green turtles can navigate. They “know how to find something”. They bank and turn, against the current, swim 1,400 miles, “through all that golden-green water over the dark, over the chill of the deeps and the jaws of the dark”. Can you do anything worse to a creature than prevent it from finding what it can find? Turtles are alive, and famous for their journeys, while merely conscious human beings trudge around in the hamster wheel of a sore, self-referential discourse. Riddley Walker is something of a turtle himself, as his forename would imply. His journeys across the grain of a postnuclear Kent enable the inexpressible to emerge through topography; while his reader struggles towards it through broken language. If Turtle Diary summed up the feelings of one generation, Riddley Walker helped shaped the perspectives of the next. The shattered grammars, for instance, the bits and pieces of dream, the fragments of story which force the reader into a constant reinvention of the narrative act, reminded me forcefully of Tim Etchell’s work with the extraordinary Forced Entertainment theatre company.

Hoban’s more recent works – Angelica’s Grotto, Amaryllis Night & Day and now The Bat Tattoo – don’t have the linguistic intensity of Riddley Walker, the tight metaphysical focus of Pilgermann (described by one critic as “a private conversation with the universe”), the manic digitised drive of The Medusa Frequency. They have instead an unapologetic simplicity when dealing with the things of ordinary life – London streets, quiet interiors, men and women at the cranky pivot between getting on together and being in love. These books are love stories, full of the stops and starts and conversations by which lovers represent their individuality to one another even if that risks the dilution of love. Although Roswell Clark is forty-seven years old, there is no avoiding the fact that his author is a much older man. Wisdom is the old furniture of a life, the intellectual and emotional clutter lost, forgotten, rediscovered, brought to a shine by love and humour. Wisdom, Hoban thinks, is an assembled thing, worked up in a magpie way out of everything we ever noticed. Every noticing moment is made of every previous moment, of everything we have ever seen, a continually shifting experiential DNA with no rules of recombination except the preferences of the individual heart. It is a short step from this idea to the feeling that, increasingly, Hoban’s purpose is to turn over his own collection of moments. This can be fun. Sometimes it can be less fun. We are aware that they are his, not ours (although, of course, if he is right, they might soon be; they’ll become part of our own palimpsest). At this we jib a little. If the author can be self-involved, so can we; and if we are, he will end up talking to himself.

But things move on, and suddenly he is describing Hoxton Square by minimalist throwaway, “The ground was black with artists”; or he has taken you to Covent Garden market, which is – as you know for a fact – all “eyes hard with acquisitiveness”; or he is weaving J.G. Ballard’s text into his own with such outright cheeky deftness – to draw from it almost opposite conclusions – that you laugh intemperately on the Piccadilly Line. Everything grounds and takes flight at the same time. You remember that as long as you trusted him, Russell Hoban never gave you anything in forty years but quiet, unalloyed delight.

One of his own delights is art. The Bat Tattoo begins with it and ends with it. In between, there are visits to museums and galleries and European cathedrals, more than a few of them; also long and engrossing art chat and some clear expertise where Caravaggio or woodcarving are concerned. “Chardin died in 1779”, Sarah informs us, “Monet in 1926. Certainly Monet’s is the more modern approach but I am a Chardin sort of person”. Later, bumping into Roswell in front of “The Campo Vaccino with a Gypsy Woman Reading a Palm” at the Royal Academy, she tells him: “Humans can outlast all kinds of things.” Then almost immediately, “I’ll move on. I find it difficult to adjust my viewing space to anyone else’s.” Hoban is equally blunt with the reader. He has no patience with the conceptual in art, reserving much of his contempt for Tracey Emin’s iconic “My Bed”. Curiously enough he has much in common with his bête noire. Emin’s art, Melanie McGrath said in Tate Magazine recently, acts as “the key to an unopened cupboard in some remote corner of your heart, a cupboard you once filled then locked ... Once the cupboard is open you can’t close it again. The memories and objects and images it contains have already spilled out and are lying in a confused and half-familiar tangle.” The Bat Tattoo is full of such moments in the lives of its characters – indeed, it may be said to be composed almost entirely of those kinds of moments. The contents of the cupboard differ, but the cupboard is the same for all of us, and the secret, the inexpressible, or part of it at least, lies inside. Like Emin’s, Hoban’s is work of the heart. Hard work it is, too.

(c) M. John Harrison / Times Literary Supplement 2002

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The TLS notes: “M. John Harrison’s new novel, Light, is published this year.”