tl;dr

Published 54 years ago Berg feels as lively and fresh as any literary novel I’ll read this year.  You’re doing yourself a disservice if you don’t pick-up this extraordinary novel.

opening remarks

The Backlisted podcast (you may remember it from the 28 other times I’ve mentioned it) recently recorded a discussion about Berg by Ann Quin.  The clear and passionate message from that conversation was that everyone should read this book.  Who am I to argue.

knee-jerk observations

Believe the hype, the first line of Berg is a barn-stormer.

This excerpt should be read out aloud, just to feel the colliding words, the collage of image and sensation, trip off the lips.  I’m sure this won’t be the only passage that lends itself to a microphone and a hushed auditorium:

This is as fucked up and shocking as anything I’ve ever read.

From time to time Berg’s mother intrudes into the narrative, a Greek chorus of one, questioning her son’s motives.  Just like the reader, she’s confused as to what Berg is trying to achieve given he’s had an opportunity to kill his father a couple of times:

Animals don’t fare well in this novel.  First a cat and now a budgerigar owner by Berg’s father.

Berg’s father also happens to own a ventriloquist’s dummy; one he built with his own hands.  In a scene that’s a little bit mad, the doll goes the way of the bird and the cat:

There’s a hallucinatory quality to this scene that I’m naming “The Battle for the Ventriloquist Dummy”.

Berg may have killed his father as he always planned.  We can’t be sure because Berg is unwilling to roll-back the eiderdown and verify that the corpse – is there a corpse? – is his father’s.  While he considers how best to dispose of the body – who may or may not be his father – he convinces himself that what he’s done isn’t murder but the beginning of a new life of which the corpse – assuming there’s a corpse – is the afterbirth:

The character of Judith is fascinating, she’s both the manipulative femme fatale, using sex as a weapon and the sensitive girl frightened to be without a man.  As Berg puts it: “Once the majestic, self-effacing mistress, almost self-sufficient, the assured emancipation, and now a snivelling creature treading on his tail”.

I love how the novel moves from noir to crazy shit involving grown men scrabbling for coins, to bedroom farce as an apparently alive (and drunk) father tries to molest his son who for reasons is dressed up as a woman.  It’s brilliant.

I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from Berg – even after listening to the Backlisted podcast – but a ventriloquist dummy playing a prominent role in the plot was absolutely top of my list.  I just knew this was going to be another in a long line of noir-beachside-ventriloquist dummy-patricide novels.  And that was before I saw this mind-fuck of a cover:

There’s a deep and symbolic metaphysics here that I don’t full appreciate.  Not that it matters. It’s simply beautiful:

The Gist Of It

The novel is named Berg.  It’s told entirely from Berg’s perspective.  We are regularly privy to his thoughts.  And yet at no point does Berg, (or Quin) explain why he wants to murder his father.  Nathaniel Berg would not be the first man to leave a wife and son high and dry, and there’s no indication that he was abusive, maybe a grifter, perhaps selfish, but not violent or dangerous.  In fact Edith, Berg’s mother, still loves him, still holds a flame for her Nathaniel.  So why kill him?  What crime did Berg’s father commit, other than absence, that deserves the highest sanction?  The closest I can come to an answer is that Berg, who struggles to find some purpose or meaning in his life, (he’s a hair tonic salesman but not a very good one) sees this act of patricide as a form of rebirth, as a way of freeing himself from the emotional baggage left by his father when he exited Berg’s life.

This lack of clarity around motivation and intent is a strength of the novel.  It shows Berg to be confused, unsettled, bewildered as on the one hand he plans his father’s murder and, on the other, he’s drawn into his father’s life, ultimately having an affair with Nathaniel’s girlfriend, the buxom Judith (much is made of her cleavage).  Through it all, we get this strong impression that Berg is alone, that neither the people around him or, frankly the reader, will ever be able to sympathise or comprehend him.

Berg is an astonishing novel.  Quin’s prose, sometimes precise and sharp, other times lyrical and strange, is a delight to read.  I did that rare thing of reading passages aloud just to hear the collision of words, and the images they create.  Thank you Backlisted podcast and Jennifer Hodgson for introducing me to the delights of Ann Quin.  I look forward to reading: The Unmapped Country: Stories & Fragments.