The Hopkins Conundrum

Simon Edge

Lightening Books, £8.99

Review by Nick Major

IT IS unusual to read a novel that takes an old-fashioned approach to tragic comedy. Nowadays writers tend to twist the comic and the tragic around each other. But in his debut novel Simon Edge separates the two styles and gives them their own narratives.

If this were a good book the reader would be thrown back and forth between laughter and sober reflection. Unfortunately, Edge’s writing is banal and humourless, and there is more tragedy in his prose style than in the false sadness of his subplots.

Tim Cleverly is a divorced cynic who inherits a rural pub in North Wales. He dreams of being a successful publican but he only has two regular customers, and one of them is a dog. One day a passing walker tells him about the Jesuit seminary down the road where the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins trained for the priesthood.

It is also where the poet wrote his long poem The Wreck of the Deutschland, about five nuns who were killed when crossing the North Sea to England after fleeing the anti-Catholic fervour of Bismark’s Germany.

The walker’s visit reminds Tim of a tedious holiday with his ex-wife when they went roaming in the south of France "in pursuit of an idiot quest for the Holy Grail, involving maps, a set-square and a postcard of an old painting. She had just read a book – the book the whole world seemed to have fallen for that summer – and she was on a mission."

The book, written by Barry Brook, is called The Poussin Conundrum. Edge’s side swipe at Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code is the start of a failed attempt to pit literature against genre fiction.

Edge attempts to mock, in Tim’s words, "pulp thriller trash" and its advocates. But a writer is always taking a risk when they try to rise above another; Edge’s tepid writing is not up to the task. The comedy is often cynical or cliched; there are too many boring jokes about the supposed lack of vowels in the Welsh language, for instance.

At the level of the fine detail, there is hardly a fresh or sprightly sentence, and his wooden use of free indirect style is unconvincing in its attempt to follow his character’s thoughts.

This doesn’t stop a few of them having some intriguing thoughts, however. When Tim finds out that Manley Hopkins was a member of a "secret society" and wrote obscure poetry, he decides to create a false mystery about Hopkins’ poem and convince Barry Brook to write a novel about it. The ensuing hordes of tourists will, Tim hopes, bring in the cash.

This could have been mildly amusing if Edge had followed it through. However, when Chloe, a real Manley Hopkins enthusiast, turns up and the pair fall in love, it is clear Tim will have to abandon his plans. The novel may begin by making fun of "conspiratorial drivel" but the book itself soon turns into romantic drivel.

While this ostensible comedy is going on, we are drip-fed the sober and cloistered life of Manley Hopkins, as well as the ill-fortune of the five nuns on board the sinking ship. Of these two narratives, the second is superfluous and not worth discussing. As for Manley Hopkins, Edge concentrates on the preoccupations that led to the composition of The Wreck of The Deutschland, when the poet developed sprung rhythm.

Edge has clearly done research on metrical systems, if research counts for anything in a novel. To trace the development of a poet’s mind whilst they are devising their poetic metre is a tough task. Edge picked one of the trickiest minds to follow and he must be given credit for his attempt. But Hopkins was not "a revolutionary poet with a new system of metrics". His system re-discovered the alliterative verse sometimes found in Old English and Medieval English and brought it to the modern world. We do, however, get a good sense of the frustrations Hopkins went through, writing out of his time and facing rejection from publishers.

The literary world is a fickle creature. Like other spheres of life, it is driven by base motives as well as higher ideals. But when purveyors of art inflect their work with false gravitas, the whole artistic endeavour seems futile. This is one of the more squeamish of Edge’s mistakes. When Tim finally recites The Windhover, he falls in love with the world: "Is this what it means to have poetry in your soul?" he asks. That’s one conundrum that’s easy to solve: no.