Here is an author who bravely asks the question: what if a novel had no conflict?
I’m not being entirely facetious; Jonathan Buckley’s 13th novel genuinely experiments with narrative expectations. The protagonist Teresa is an aloof English lawyer who goes to Greece every time she loses a parent. (“Will two visits suffice?” asks Petros, a poet-turned-mechanic; “No more parents left,” she concedes.)
Her first trip nine years ago brought coastline wanderings and bedroom gymnastics with Niko, a hot diver. Now she’s back for a second Hellenic round of acquaintances’ anecdotes and her occasional use of a “half-dozen readily available phrases of Greek”. She thinks nothing of her extraordinary luck that locals conduct deep philosophical conversations with her in English, nor of the irony that her monolingualism forces them to accommodate her after she specifically sought escape from anglophone tourists.
Indeed Teresa rarely faces any serious internal discord, though we do get the odd hint. There are memories of her parents’ failed relationship and her own, musings on memory and choice and even a subplot involving the violent death of someone’s nephew. It’s certainly a decision to make murder the subplot in a novel with no plot plot.
This is entirely deliberate on Buckley’s part; in the final chapter, a friend reads Teresa’s account of the visit and suggests it could do with more “narrative torque”. I enjoyed this last playful gallop, and wondered momentarily if I’d been a grumpy agon-demanding Aristotle whom the Greek setting itself was sending up.
[ Naoise Dolan on The Paris Express by Emma Donoghue: Journeying into the pastOpens in new window ]
But to get to this scene, you must first trudge through the longest 158 pages of your life. A novel need not deploy conventional sources of tension. The observations of the town, the stories others tell Teresa, even her own subtle irritation at being expected to grieve gushingly as a woman should: these are all, in principle, legitimate alternative choices of focus to the traditional plot beats that a Hollywood executive might demand.
The problem is it’s bloodless and culturally superficial: the Greek characters are props, the town a mere backdrop. I admire Buckley’s intention of alerting the reader to the textures of life that conventional plotting overlooks. But if you’re going to point us in an alternative direction, the new thing had better be worth seeing.
