On the trail of obsession...
Any novel which features
the UL tearoom has definitely got my vote. There’s something so wonderful about
that place. The UL, full of academics and, in termtimes, students in various
degrees of stress, offers really only one place to drink a cup of tea and eat
the packed lunch before rushing back to a reading room. The atmosphere is
somewhere between a strangely Communist canteen and a National Trust café.
Don’t ask me why that mixture, but it feels distinctly communal and
worthy at the same time.
Ah, I’ve been sidetracked.
To get to the point, Patricia Dunker’s first novel Hallucinating
Foucault begins in the UL tearoom. The
initial encounter between the PhD student and future girlfriend takes place
there, or rather outside it smoking. This is a meeting full of clichés: PhD
student has only just noticed “The Germanist”, as she is called throughout, but
she has been watching the PhD student for weeks.
I don’t know why, but I’m
going to have to admit something at this point which was completely my fault
and which sullied my reading of the first sections of the novel. About 10 pages
in my brain decided that the main character was a woman.
There was only something
like one pronoun in the first few pages and I missed it. However the PhD
student is a man and yes the relationship with the Germanist is a clichéd as
first predicted from the chat-up line he uses. I don’t understand my
disappointment at the main character being a man. Possibly it was due to my
anticipation of the novel linked with the one-dimensional characters and plot
at this point in the story. At any rate, I found the central relationship from
the start quite implausible.
However, given the force
of homosexuality in the novel, it is pretty key that the male PhD student
protagonist prove attractive to the fictional writer Paul Michel. So I was
wrong in my interpretation at the start, and it clearly couldn’t have been any
other way. I did wonder though upon reaching the end, no spoilers I promise,
whether the author had intended to make it ambiguous for a little while at the
beginning…
To return to a review in a
sense: I found this a strange novel that reads like a thriller and not the Bildungsroman
(coming-of-age novel) that it is. Madness also features heavily, and the
text is littered with Dunker’s clearly excellent knowledge of Foucault. My
knowledge of French 20th-century culture is so bad that I actually
had to Google Paul Michel to assure myself that he was fictional. I think that
proves how brilliantly he is portrayed.
The novel tackles
questions of relations between texts (intertextuality being such a clumsy way
of saying this!) and the writer-reader dynamic head on, taking these questions
to their ultimate, extreme conclusion.
Given the progress down to
the south of France later on, I was distinctly reminded of another
coming-of-age story full of questions of mental health I read recently set on
the Mediterranean - Tender is the Night. I’m sure Dunker is aware of the clichee of that part of the world
being somewhere people retreat to and heal themselves.
So some advice on reading
this: do not expect anything verging on realism, even though the text itself
seems generally realistic. Do not expect all plot twists to be believable.
Enjoy the clever philosophical questions and the questioning of sanity and
obsession.
Moon Palace