Sunday Morning! “Berg” by Ann Quin

“A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father…”

So begins Ann Quin’s bizarre, heady, weirdly hilarious 1964 novel Berg. Aside from being a perfect opening sentence, it’s one of those lines that encapsulates the whole novel. I recently stumbled into Quin from Claire-Louise Bennett’s warm appreciation of the writer in her own strange and beguiling novel Checkout 19, which I came to, in turn, from a recommendation in Artforum. Such is the way many of us read books I think: like a never-ending treasure hunt to find something new and exotic that will affect us in unforeseen ways. One thing leads to another. Unfortunately, we cannot read eternally or explore neverendingly, since lifespans are limited. But, while we’re still here, let us be curious!

In her discussion of Quin, Bennett singles out the novelist’s ability to capture the uncanny texture of working class life, in which a certain in-your-face harshness alternates with numbing tedium. Quin grew up on the lower rungs of the working-class in Brighton, England, a country where class is seen as more of a concrete fact than in a country like America, where it’s treated as a brief layover. I might not have even noticed this aspect of her work, as a prodigal American, but I did respond to the liminal zone shabbiness of her setting, a seaside resort town not unlike Brighton, where the meager and unfabulous go to wade in the water and drink at night until the sea stops moving for them. It’s a bit like David Lynch goes to the beach.

Here, in a drab lodging house, Greb- really a young hair tonic salesman named Alistair Berg- sets up shop and makes plans to kill his neighbor, an boozy older chauvinist traveling with his mistress, who is apparently too drunk and self-absorbed to recognize our hero as the son he abandoned years before. Quin was raised herself by a single mother after her father abandoned the family. She completed this first novel while working as a secretary, and also while recovering from a nervous breakdown.

The story starts out so clearly and then… Berg seems to go through a crisis of his own. Does he really want to kill this stranger? Or does he want to seduce the man’s mistress? Is he really trying to escape the stifling mother whose letters punctuate the story? Is he trying to remake himself as a new person capable of murder? Is he even capable of acting at all? Caught in a psychological stasis, the three of them- father, son, and mistress- enter into a sort of weird domestic situation. The booze flows and the prose seems to soak it up. The style is hallucinatory and brilliant, and part of what I came looking for…

Window blurred by out of season spray. Above the sea, overlooking the town, a body rolls upon a creaking bed: fish without fins, flat-headed, white-scaled, bound by a corridor room—dimensions rarely touched by the sun—Alistair Berg, hair-restorer, curled web toes, strung between heart and clock, nibbles in the half light, and laughter from the dance hall opposite….

Later:

A yellow creeping sort of light spread across the station as Berg passed the waiting room, and looked in, saw the huddled shapes on the benches, several stretched out on a table like slabs of meat. No one moved: polyhedron somehow, Pompeii risen.

It’s short and dense and written in this sort of poetically allusive style. I was reminded of J.G. Ballard, particularly the short stories. Quin has been described as the great forgotten “experimental” novelist of post-war England, but I tend to associate “experimentalism” more with fractured story structure and non-linear form- the labyrinthine collages of someone like Kathy Acker, say. This is more like surrealism.

Ann Quin photographed by Oswald Jones

It all feels grittily real, until things change… The incidents go from amusing to playfully absurd and then disturbing: Berg tries to strangle his father and drags his body in a rolled up carpet to throw in the ocean, before realizing he’s unwittingly disposed of the man’s ventriloquist dummy. He then decides to dress as a woman, in order to move about more freely, but then is the target of his drunk father’s affections and nearly raped. Somewhat miraculously, he enters into a relationship with the mistress and finally enters into domestic respectability, finding it unlocks entirely new avenues of feeling for him. Too much isolation is not good for anyone, the novel seems to say.

Or does it? Perhaps the nice, stifling bourgeois life he’s been trying to escape throughout the novel is simply inescapable. There’s something like purgatory to these little seaside towns; alcohol and the ever-present ocean, compared to a sleeping dragon, seems the only way out. Even if we block out thoughts of Quin’s own untimely end, Berg remains a dark and haunting novel that defies any easy understanding. It sticks with you and has been reissued- in fact, Quin is having a bit of a moment, finally- because of the many writers, like Claire-Louise Bennett, who read Quin’s four books and never forgot them. I’m glad the trail led here for me too.

And so, what are YOU reading, writing, watching, pondering, playing, creating, or scheming about this weekend?