Ulverton

"Historical novel" doesn't quite seem quite adequate to Adam Thorpe's Ulverton (1993). That is, it is a historical novel, but one that also takes its attitude to the past from folklore (as Thorpe himself notes) and archaeology. The novel takes place in a small (and fictional) village, apparently located near the White Horse.  The "archaeological" effect derives from its structure--several "layers" of loosely connected stories, dated between 1650 and 1988--and, indeed, its recurring allusions to excavations and material culture.  While multigenerational novels of this type often turn into what I call "parallel-plot" fictions, with successive generations living out the same stories  or uncovering essential connections between past and present, Ulverton represents local historical memory as fraught with lapses, misinterpretations, and fragmentations. Thus, within a generation, two characters collapse into one; the villagers ascribe a single event to a number of different historical figures and times; events remain unexplained or undiscovered.  There is no plot as such, and the intergenerational links between stories are usually echoes instead of parallels or daisy-chain connections. Nor does Thorpe wrap up any of his storylines in neat bows. While, at first glance, the novel ends by returning to the beginning, this "return" is dysfunctional: the excavated body's identity remains unknown and the link between the developer and the seventeenth-century murderer is cast as fiction--by a character named Adam Thorpe!--instead of historical fact. Instead of solving the mystery (to which the reader already knows the answer, anyway), the body simply generates a new series of probably unanswerable questions.

Thorpe's use of language and multiple genres further distances the reader from the past.  We have a veritable welter of literary forms here: epistolary correspondence (one-sided), folktale, dialogue (also one-sided), sermons, documentary film scripts, memoirs, diaries, trial transcripts...  While all of these genres rely on first-person voice, their very multiplicity highlights the extent to which each voice has been mediated through "contemporary" literary conventions--as well as through accidents of history.  In "Dissection.  1775," an epistolary tale set in ironic proximity to the  amatory letters of "Leeward. 1743," an illiterate woman writes to a son awaiting execution in Newgate.  In all but the final letter, the local tailor transcribes her words and, as the correspondence goes on, adds his increasingly hostile (and sexually boastful) voice to the mix.  As the tailor is not exactly a master of written English, the missives rely heavily on phonetic spelling: "I ont bare it you mus reply the wagon doo tak this plees replye francis my som" (101).  But in the final letter, written by the local curate, both the linguistic register and the tone shift abruptly.  In other words, we seem to have the woman's voice, but that voice has been crafted through the intercession of, quite literally, other hands.  Similarly, "Stitches.  1887," a totally unpunctuated stream-of-consciousness narrative in rather uncompromising dialect, appears to be the most immediate tale in the novel--and yet, it is almost murderously difficult to read.  One of the diaries appears to have been "edited" by an unspecified archivist; another lapses into fragments.  It's not that we can't access the past in this novel, but that Thorpe insists that our access is tenuous at best.

In Ulverton, the only true continuity lies in the countryside itself.  Weather, rooks, the return of old buildings to nature...all of these things persist despite the fickle nature of human memory.  Fittingly, the final tale, "Here. 1988," imagines a developer's failed attempt to turn Ulverton into a hot property by, in effect, commodifying both the past and the village's natural surroundings.  In this tale, nobody really has a critical historical awareness: the developer sees the village in terms of its potential financial returns, while the locals tend to think of the past in nostalgic or strictly conservationist terms.  Ultimately, the development fails, but for no evident "good" reason; it's as though the landscape itself resists being transformed.  Human beings are transient, but Ulverton remains. 

Comments

[Bing]

Bought this last week after reading this post a while ago... Really enjoying it. Thanks :)