Suitable for a few

Some Here Among Us
Peter Walker
Bloomsbury
2014, pp 275
Rs. 399

Some Here Among Us is Peter Walker’s third novel, which only some here and there among us would connect with. The novel is in the modern genre, with a detached tone that looks at life as a superficial unfolding of events and characters. The plot explores a new world in which there are global incidents happening in parallel. But the narrative or plot is meandering, and the incidents are random. Most of them seem unhinged and disconnected. The author’s examination not only exposes the looseness in their links, but also their subtle connections.

Hence, while history is part of the narrative, it does not intrude, nor does it interfere too obviously with individuals. Instead, it seeps into lives like fragments of conversation, and then spreads to impact and influence them unobtrusively, without characters being too aware of it. The throwbacks to history are handled with some deftness. In the beginning there are five friends — Race, Candy, Chadwick, FitzGerald and Morgan, who is supposed to be outstanding as compared to the others. The venue is Wellington, New Zealand, in 1967. The Vietnam War forms the framework of the situation, and the students are ready to walk out into the streets to protest against the legitimacy of the war. Bob Dylan and Beatles are name-dropped into the situation, while there are anti-war protests in the backdrop. Yet, against this politically interwoven background, there is a deeper and more complex web of thoughts, feelings, aspirations and insecurities.

Four decades later, Race’s son Toby and his relationship with his girlfriend JoJo is set against meteors in the sky. The entire narrative is put up against the post-9/11 clash and the invasion of Iraq. All the lives are plotted through the novel in four discrete parts, with each character following his own path in a particular year and location. One of them walks into Washington on September 11, 2001, the other is in New Zealand, 1969. Yet another character moves into Beirut in 2004 in the larger shadow of the war in Iraq and finally moves to New Zealand in 2010.

The stories are thus not followed in a neat manner, but through different phases of life — late teenage, in the final years of school, and later middle age. Morgan, who is looked upon by the others as an “insightful and wise man”, is their touchstone as well as rebel. However, it becomes clear after a while that his most extraordinary feature seems to be that he dies early, an “escape” that the others are not able to grasp. There seems to be not too much depth to most of them, even though the characters share the existential issues that mark most people’s lives.

The novel is not completely a chronological, linear exploration of events. It comprises a number of random incidents that are clubbed together without strong connections. A few friends, relatives and well-wishers walk through the book. There are small mini-histories of love, loss, relationship and interaction that characterise our duration in the world. Instead of exploring the connectivity of events, the characters seem lost in the maze of personal incidents that make each one different and isolated. Each person interacts with the surface as well as deeper relationships that characterise relationships.

The criss-cross against time and space does not allow for development or unfolding of events, thoughts and characters. The superficiality of life and its brittleness are laid out like a tableaux. The events and their progression into middle age seem to have laid out just one event to mark them different from the others — that they are middle aged, and time has progressed to develop their situations, not their characters.

Most of the descriptions do not draw the reader into the narrative, or the experience. The novel feels like a journal, or a documentary, rather than a novel. The reader lives through the experiences — as most of the characters do — in suspended animation, with the situations and times blending and slipping away from neat slots of understanding.
Instead, there is a certain stream-of-consciousness feel to the prose when it is blended with the unfolding narrative. It reflects the simple, quick, repetitive and incoherent flow of thoughts and perspectives. For instance, “Morgan began to tell a long story about Flaubert in Egypt... how Flaubert, visiting a Turkish bath in Cairo or somewhere and lying there in the dim hot dripping echoing room, felt this incredible melancholy, and how he, Morgan, always felt the same melancholy just at the point of getting into a hot bath — ‘lowering in’, he said. Adam then said that he too felt that same melancholy, and Race was about to say that he — although he was not sure what the end of the sentence would be but he was sure he had something to say but Candy interrupted and said that it was complete balls...”

Thus, Some Here Among Us does not have the standard pegs of plot, character or ambience. It follows an alternative journey. Hence, only some here and there among us will explore it — or even want to!