Five less ordinary lives

Sunday 16 September 2012

Sebastian Faulks's latest novel is at first glance a collection of five short stories – two bordering on novella-length – with little connecting them.

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a possible life by Sebastian Faulks Hutchinson, £18.99 Reviewed by Malcolm Forbes

Each tale concerns a different character in a different era recounted through a different narrative voice. Geoffrey in 1938 opens the proceedings and Anya in 1971 closes them; in between we visit the 19th century, care of Billy in 1859 and Jeanne in 1822, but also fast forward to Elena in 2029. For all its unevenness, we are taken on a richly compelling journey through time and across continents and deep into the human soul to be informed that our wildly disparate lives can in fact overlap.

Geoffrey's story, the strongest here, returns us to familiar French-flavoured Faulks terrain. Our protagonist's promising teaching career is interrupted by the outbreak of war, and it isn't long before he is enlisted by an "irregular outfit" that is "covertly competitive" with the British Secret Service. Geoffrey is sent to France where he liaises with resistance groups and falls for firebrand Giselle. But when he is betrayed, the SS dispatch him to Poland to a uniquely brutal camp. Later, we are back in France and back in time with Jeanne, a poor and ignorant housekeeper who is brought closer to God by a conniving monk, and who learns to endure privation and accept her lot: "it was a life and she knew no other." Similar hardship is pleated into the book's other historical strand, with Billy packed off to a Victorian workhouse aged seven and after his release going from rags to relative riches but also breaking hearts in the process. The two more modern tales satisfy with their broadly divergent subject matter. Anya follows the upward career trajectory of an American singer-songwriter, whose voice reduces grown men to tears and whose very being intoxicates narrator and fellow musician Jack enough to want to abandon "all the philosophy and the Zen and the counter-culture" and settle down. Elena offers us an ingenious though bleak glimpse of a future still reeling from the Great Slump, with Faulks's Italian teenager growing up to wrestle with her love for Bruno, her adopted brother, and to make scientific breakthroughs in the field of human consciousness.The novel's broken structure is a new approach for Faulks. In his last novel, A Week In December, he chopped and changed protagonist and perspective to again cover a fixed time-span. But A Possible Life is arguably more ambitious.The link between each story is slight, at times tenuous, and often any neat dovetailing is only apparent towards the end. Bruno writes a story called Another Life. Anya's most heartfelt song is called Another Life. However, the clear-cut red thread is life itself. Every story is a potted history of a character trying to make sense of the global and inner chaos that afflict them, and buried within each are personal philosophies on life. A bewildered Billy confesses, "The more I live the less I seem to understand." Geoffrey's world-weary plea to "Let someone else live my life for me" chimes with Elena's theory that we are merely matter which, in the end, "falls apart and is infinitely reused".With the ambition comes daring assuredness and honed skill. Charlotte Gray took us to the door of a concentration camp. Here Faulks drags us right in and blinds us with one pitiless set-piece after another. If, however, A Possible Life feels like less than the sum of its parts, it is because ultimately, despite Faulks's best efforts, it does read like a short story collection: just as some weaker short stories appear as padding for the better ones, here some of those lives are less gripping than others. But Faulks still deserves credit for his virtuosic vocal range and ability to capture the heartache and vitality, not to mention mystery, intrinsic to human existence. Yes, A Possible Life is disjointed but then the bumpiest rides are often the most exhilarating.

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