Elegy for Gurney

Sarah Howe

In Zodiac Light by Robert Edric
Doubleday, 368 pp, £16.99, July 2008, ISBN 978 0 385 61258 6

Robert Edric specialises in historical backwaters. His novels, 19 to date, unfold in isolated fishing villages, colonial outposts or Alpine spa towns. What these places have in common is that they seem removed from larger political conflicts, though they replay them in claustrophobic miniature. Edric’s imagination has always been drawn to the peripheral, to characters who are set apart, or seeking a geography to match their sense of spiritual exile. For the same reason, his historical fictions tend to cluster at the fag end of things, giving the impression of a camera left running long after the event proper has finished. War’s inglorious aftermath preoccupies several of the recent books, the years 1919 and 1946 in particular. In Desolate Heaven (1997), Peacetime (2002) and The Kingdom of Ashes (2007) are populated with men and women bewildered and resentful at having been inadvertently left alive. A twist on the traditional tale of the soldier’s return, they follow the homecoming of men for whom home no longer exists.

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Vol. 30 No. 23 · 4 December 2008 » Sarah Howe » Elegy for Gurney (print version)
Pages 31-32 | 2215 words

Letters

From Kate Kennedy

Sarah Howe, reviewing Robert Edric’s novel about Ivor Gurney, In Zodiac Light, points out that Edric ‘sometimes gives in too readily to the demands of fiction’ (LRB, 4 December 2008). Two-thirds of Gurney’s work remains unpublished, and little has been written about the last 15 years of his life, which he spent in asylums. The danger of commingling fact and fiction without being clear as to which is which, particularly in the case of a writer whose biographical details and work are largely not in the public domain, undoes much of the work of academics attempting to dismantle the myths surrounding Gurney.

By borrowing from Gurney’s poem ‘In Flaxley Wood’ for his title, Edric closely associates his novel with Gurney. Yet he counters the association with a disclaimer: ‘This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.’ As Howe points out, there are obvious parallels with Pat Barker’s Regeneration, which is based on Owen and Sassoon’s stay at Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh. But not only does Barker not change the fundamental facts of the poets’ stories, she also adds a note listing her sources. Edric claims to have written a work of fiction, but his book is steeped in fact – and some of these ‘facts’ are simply wrong, while others have been altered to suit his purpose. More damaging is Edric’s representation of Gurney as having completely lost his musical powers in the asylum. What Edric fancifully imagines as ‘trailing lines of words and notes’ were regularly played in the asylum by Vaughan Williams and other musicians.

Kate Kennedy
Clare Hall, Cambridge

From Victoria Owens

Is it really Kate Kennedy’s wish to see novelists barred from writing about enigmatic figures like Ivor Gurney unless and until the scholars have ‘dismantled the myths’ (Letters, 26 February)? Who would make themselves responsible for deciding when academic study had shed sufficient light on the sacred subject for fiction to be allowed its turn? Would it be a job for the Arts and Humanities Research Council, perhaps? Or might the editorial board of the LRB care to take on the task?

Victoria Owens
Bristol