Memories and identities of Hugh Arkwright in pieces of light

Having mentioned this awkward term 'postmodern', I could be tempted to rely on other related terms and write about Hugh's shifting fragmented self, disrupted chronology and discontinuities of all sorts. Only I won't. I have too clear a memory of Adam Thorpe saying in his lecture that a novel is never about destruction but about creation. Yes, reality gets twisted, people tend to forget things, but what remains is what makes one what he is, his memories, little pieces of light in the 'sclusively dark forest of life. Thus, like Ulverton , Pieces of Light is a novel about memory, this time not collective but mostly individual. It is also a research into personal continuity, not a single identity but several selves striving to weld themselves into that shape that we call uniqueness.

Hugh Arkwright speaks different voices in different periods of his life. The fascinating first part highlights his early years in Africa. The opening sentence of the novel The incident with the gorilla remained with my mother for the rest of her life, as certain tiny wounds do on the face [Thorpe 1999: 3] hooks the reader immediately. However, one hopes in vain that it will soon be explained what kind of incident it was and why the impact on his mother was so dramatic. You have to read the novel through and come to the last part to learn that from another narrator. Hugh is five and he is the only white child in the whole of West and Central Africa [Thorpe 1999: 12]. He speaks different languages: pidgin English to the natives and 'good' English to his parents. Which is more natural to him? My answer is both. He reads English books, he knows that his family are English, looks up the word in his father's dictionary but finds something called Presentment of Englishry and feels chilled . The child can never understand the parallel which the author makes: once the English were an inferior nation. When the meaning is explained to him by his father, he thinks, Normans invaded, like leopards, like tsetse flies, like snakes [Thorpe 1999: 13]. His native tongue is English but he thinks like an African. He knows that his mother is upset by something when her face had a cloud on it ; he talks about the beautiful-bird-smaller-than-its-tail ; he calls England the land full of letters and telegrams ; his father was mended by his mother when he was ill with yellow jack; he gives owners to the cries and calls he hears at night. Yet he feels different from the majority of people there: I was a maggot, an albino, 17

an outcast [Thorpe 1999: 13]. Different but not set apart, for he has his own collection of fetishes, and the pages cut out from the Bible stand alongside feathers, teeth and bones. He knows about the Christian God but his universe is full of other gods and spirits and the prayer seemed to be a very weak thing, against the night [Thorpe 1999: 14]. The imaginative boy creates his own good and evil spirits out of the lives of people long-dead. The white one is Herbert E. Standing, a good young man who had come to Africa equipped with cricket bats and a dream to spread the game among the native populace. The dark one is Sir Steggie developed from a frightening picture Hugh found in the attic. That was the picture's caption and the painting was J. S. Hargreaves' property. He asks a lot of questions about the man and gets only the most basic facts. And again the reader gets some answers only at the end of the novel. Actually, these spirits will accompany Hugh throughout his life.

Hugh's dreamland is the crater lake where he once travelled with his parents and Quiri, their servant. He will marry a fertile wife, have children and die an old and wise man. The greatest fear of a native is to die childless and become an evil spirit as a result. That fear sets in in Hugh's soul and becomes associated with England. The fear turns out to be prophetic. Hugh loses his paradise forever at the age of seven when he is brought to England to be educated and where he is to die childless. With this dramatic change in Hugh's life, the author introduces the idea of sacrifice.

Hugh's questions about the time after he is seven are always evaded as the decision to take him to England has already been taken but the boy hasn't been informed about it yet. That lights up a flash of insight: I was going to die on my seventh birthday – be sacrificed in some way [Thorpe 1999: 28]. This is where the author juxtaposes the two civilizations: European (Christian) and African (pagan). Hugh looks into the very notion of sacrifice and sees the truth: it is the most loved person that must be given to the gods, for nothing else will do [Thorpe 1999: 31]. He tries to calm himself down saying that they are Christians and human sacrifice is impossible, or is it? There run through his mind the words of the prayer said each Sunday: And he gave His only-begotten son, more beloved of the Father... [Ibid.]

Hugh starts comparing his mother to Virgin Mary and feels powerless. Hugh's fears are surely groundless, he doesn't have to die at the age of seven. However, the notion of sacrifice recurs in each part of the book, from African practices of human sacrifice to Hugh's uncle's attempts at resurrecting ancient rituals in the form of an imitation play (at one moment of his life High is gripped by fear lest it should have been more than imitation and connects it with the mysterious disappearance of his mother) and the sacrifice of millions in the two world wars. Besides that, there are numerous personal sacrifices connected with different characters and, though Hugh was not killed at the age of seven, he was – in a sense – sacrificed to the 'civilized' world and felt betrayed by his mother.

Those years were Hugh's golden age and their spirit is enshrined for future restoration in this memoir written by forty-year-old Hugh sounding like the echo of William Wordsworth's words opening the novel.

The second part of the novel (the same memoir still) makes the reader feel Hugh's physical discomfort and emotional unease through descriptive sensory imagery:

visual: when the sun went in so did all the colours; even the stevedores weren't black; I was searching for forest, but saw only fields and some small, puffy trees; the dull, dirty water, full of bottles and paper and tins ;

olfactory: the worst stink I have ever known (the lavatory on the train);

tactile: I found I was gripping my mother's hand; she held me so tight that I dreaded crossing the road because it hurt my hand so much; I clung to my mother as one clings to another in a flood ;

auditory: omnibuses growled and rumbled ; a chugging taxi;

gustatory: I kept swallowing but the taste stayed in my mouth ;

synesthetic: I closed my eyes against the whistles and hisses .

Instead of the smells of river and forest and rain, there was a sickly sweet scent of beeswax and mothballs and old car- pet, and that same sourness from the street that came in through the window and lay on your tongue and tickled the back of your nose [Thorpe 1999: 59–66].

By creating the sensory picture of Hugh's little world, the author develops deep empathy between the reader and the character, and England becomes so unbearable that we really long for a magic trick and almost believe that it could have happened if Adam Thorpe had chosen another genre:

The gulls screeched above us, eager to offer me a lift home on their huge wings, mile after mile after hundredth mile [Thorpe 1999: 61].

Hugh is an English boy, after all, and he is to live in England, with an English family and English friends [Ibid.]. However, Hugh seems to be totally lost and, though he is not yet separated from his mother, predicts his future desperate loneliness:

I felt like a piece broken off something, but I wasn't sure what. I wasn't sure whether the piece was just me and my mother, or just me [Thorpe 1999: 68].

For me, that was the place where the spell was broken. Up to that moment I had been identifying myself with the child 'suspending disbelief' [Gebbie 2020]. I started questioning the reliability of the narrator. The person who is writing this story can't be a child. I asked myself what I remembered about my seven-year-old self and gave a sad answer that I remembered next to nothing. I tried harder and did better: the smell of the first day at school, my red sandals and brown dress. What else? How did I feel? Excited? Happy? Awkward? I might give an answer here and now, only it wouldn't be a memory but a reconstruction. So, what we are reading is not what Hugh felt at the age of seven but what forty-year-old Hugh thinks he felt at the age of seven. What the reader gets finally is a double distortion of reality. What I mean is that everyone's vision is a sort of distortion and a child's perception is even more subjective than that of an educated adult, and then this educated adult reconstructs the child's subjective reality turning it into a story. Moreover, what we are reading is fiction and we know that it was written by Adam Thorpe and not Hugh Ark- wright. It's not even a double encoding. I'm afraid it is beginning to look like a Russian doll... What remains is not a memory but a memory of a memory.

Hugh indulges in nostalgia, laments his golden age and rekindles his memory image of a remote and tired mother. The memoir stops when Hugh learns that his mother has disappeared. Reader, don't cherish even the faintest hope! The mystery will remain a mystery! In several years his father returns to England a broken man bringing no news of his mother.

The separation of Hugh from his mother is shown as a gradual process as this disappearing act was repeated every time she left for Africa after her visit. The outer manifestations of Hugh's grief became less violent with each time and finally she faded away forever. Yet Hugh never believed in her death. This severance from his mother was a trauma from which he was not meant to recover. Hugh's case was seriously aggravated by his discovery at the age of 70 that he was an adopted child and his birth father was the very person with whom his imagined evil spirit had originated. That new blow shattered the basics of Hugh's personality and brought him to the brink of insanity. This double loss of Africa and his mother accounts for Hugh's oddness, estrangement and sets him on a never-ending quest for his own identity. Thus, the crucial importance of a mother-son relationship is emphasized once again and its repercussions are felt long after the physical, tangible contact is broken off.

There is no escaping it now, no going back to Africa. He is in the village of Ulverton, England, and his life is narrowing, despite the newness of things [Thorpe 1999: 73] .

When the reader hears Hugh's voice again, it is hard to recognize. It is his diary. He is 70, and he is a theatre celebrity who is famous for his own school of actor training. He deals in Shakespeare, a taste for whom he developed as a child when he acted out his plays in a sacred secluded place in the wood near his uncle's house; a sensitive, imaginative boy fighting his way out of loneliness and despair. Now Hugh sounds self-important and seems to make light of his childhood trauma:

Reading my childhood memoir like watching a man and his son fishing on the opposite back. <...> it's all happened to someone else before recorded time [Thorpe 1999: 143].

He is back in Ulverton to dispose of his uncle's property, house and land, and memories are inevitably brought back. What he feels about his mother now is different from the memoir:

The memoir makes her oddly remote: when I think of her these days she's almost stiflingly close, as if my head is buried in her skirts. <...> I think when I was forty I still felt betrayed by her leaving us so abruptly [Thorpe 1999: 148].

The terms of the will are tricky as Hugh shouldn't have the house, only the responsibility of handing it over to the Good Cause. He wants to set up a Historical Performance Research Centre, a sort of affiliate of his drama school. So, the good cause is Shakespeare and it's completely against his uncle's desire, like sitting on his face [Thorpe 1999: 147]. The reader learns that he loathes his uncle. At this moment we can only guess why. The current task is to get rid of all the house stuff and Hugh is not going to start burrowing: If there's a chest of doubloons up there then let Oxfam have it, or whoever [Thorpe 1999: 148] .

He is determined to deal with all that as quickly as possible as a villa in Italy is waiting for him where he is going to write a book on his theory of performing art. He believes that he has managed to revive the Shakespearian method of acting and is striving to wade towards him through thick time [Thorpe 1999: 140] .

So here we are. This sentence is constantly repeated by Hugh and the careful reader knows that it was what his mother said when she brought Hugh to England. Up to a certain moment that is the only connection between these two Hughs. The story told in the memoir seems like another life, another person [Thorpe 1999: 153].

Am I, as a reader, interested in this new Hugh? Yes, I am, but only for two reasons: he is another manifestation of that person who elicited my sympathy and I want to know more about his research into Shakespeare. Otherwise he appears to be a typical modern person hid- 22

ing himself behind a social mask. We learn practically nothing about his performing skill, though he exercises it several times to exert almost supernatural influence on people. Is it enough for the reader to know that all that sensitivity to the primaeval so characteristic of Hugh as a boy and teenager resulted in his ability to resurrect and develop old acting techniques? Not quite, the reader wants to know something personal about him, the reader wants all mysteries to be cleared up, and she reads on.

So here we are, and the house is believed to be troubled. That is how it stands in the collective mind of the villagers. The image must have been prompted by the oddness of its inhabitants – Hugh's uncle and his second wife. (The size of this paper makes me concentrate on Hugh and deliberately ignore many other issues introduced by Adam Thorpe through these characters.) Ulverton has its own mythology and one of the legends is related to the troubled house. The 'bogywoman' of the village is The Red Lady. The witnesses who saw the ghost thought that they had seen Mrs Arkwright, Hugh's uncle's first wife. However, she died 'properly' and was buried in the churchyard. It is Hugh's mother who disappeared in Africa – No official death and nothing to bury, even [Thorpe 1999: 156] – and it is her red coat Hugh remembers. That sudden connection between the legend's ghost and his mother becomes the starting point of Hugh's madness or nearmadness, for many doubts remain even after reading the final parts of the novel. Hugh wants to know more. His supposition is that she actually came to England and something happened to her there, in the village. He doesn't believe in ghosts and thinks that the red lady seen around the time of his illness and his mother's disappearance was actually his mother. Old beliefs are suddenly brought back and Hugh is struck with a sickening idea that his mother fell victim – I should say sacrificial victim – to his uncle's neolithic rituals. So here we are and back in the old story. What does Hugh have to go by? Nothing but his own memory coupled with the collective memory of the village. It is hardy enough,

Memory is a patchwork of unreliability, after all [Thorpe 1999: 173].

As a result, Hugh embarks on what he previously decided not to do – burrowing. That is how he finds a trunk full of his baby clothes and his mother's letters and the old leopard skin tanned by his father himself.

The diary ends as abruptly as the memoir with the words Horrible. Absolutely horrible [Thorpe 1999: 176].

This is what the reader gets next:

Dear Mother,

So here we are.

I've had a spot of bother but it's passing. The people here suggested that I write about what happened, since I can't talk about it.

<...>I used to keep a diary. Then I stopped it.

I think I'll start where I stopped it. This was about a year ago, now. During this year I've also stopped talking [Thorpe 1999: 179].

The reader understands that it must be some mental institution. The shock of finding out his origin must have proved too much for his psyche (though if it is your first reading, you can't know it at that moment): There are some things one really shouldn't know [Thorpe 1999: 183] .

We are astonished to find out that Hugh's uncle's second wife was Hugh's girlfriend. We catch some glimpses of Hugh's war experience, which is worth a separate article due to Adam Thorpe's unbelievable ability to imbue horror with poetry. Some gaps are finally filled but no mysteries are solved and whatever explanations there might be are all ours, not Hugh's, not the author's.

Ironically, instead of writing his book in a villa in Italy Hugh is writing letters to his mother. He feels closer to her in than when he was a boy. Life forms a circle and a man in his early 70s returns to the only true love of his and is bound (if only in his imagination) to his long-lost mother talking to her as if she were alive. Where are all his 24

life experience, his professional might and social status? All that is gone. Like a vulnerable and unbalanced teenager, he reacts to the folksong which hurts his feelings and blights the memory of his beloved, becomes painfully sensitive to the hints and sneers of two local oddities one of whom is soon found murdered. Why does what other people think and know about him matter so much to a person who changed the face of British theatre [Thorpe 1999: 312]? Isn't it better to ignore all that and move on? Is it wise to resurrect the past? Is it possible to build a true story out of collective and personal memories? Why is it necessary for us to know what happened exactly? Probably, the human mind as such is too fragile for that.

Hugh's experiences that fill in the gap between the diary and the 'present' are described in a manner reminiscent of magic realism. The dreamlike quality of the narrative, Hugh's fears, tears, anger, bewilderment and hatred draw us in, our own mind being absorbed into his. We are one with him, the passion drill is practised on us, we no longer ask questions about his reactions, we take them for granted. That is why it's absolutely impossible to believe that Hugh is a murderer. However, we all know that the human brain is a tricky thing, it does 95% of its work 'secretly', it blocks unbearable memories. The reconstructed circumstances of the murder, its theatricality, its connection with what only Hugh could have known point to the narrator. And we are left in doubt.

Nothing is forgotten by our brain. Psychological traumas, acute pain and happiness are always kept in our emotional treasure chests, if unconsciously. Unsolved mysteries, harboured resentments, unanswered questions may be brought back to life if one's memory brushes against other people's memories or you let places and some previously neglected objects retrieve what you once made fall into oblivion. Then your new identity that you have developed so carefully drops and you shed your skin and remain naked. You cannot return to your former self completely because you don't know what you were as our memories are false constructs and there is no absolute truth. What remains is to start again and be on your guard because there is always lurking in your soul the dark spirit of a ferocious leopard.

Pieces of Light is a book trying to embrace too many things at once, which makes it immune to a single interpretation. Besides the themes of truth and knowledge and the role of memory in constructing both, there is also a clash and mingling of cultures and civilizations, British policies in Africa, missionary work, people traumatized by World War I, historical research, issues connected with World War II, art as a means of resurrecting some primal emotional powers, to name just a few. The final part of the novel even presents another narrator and we hear the voice of Hugh's mother. We are suddenly given another vision and want to know much more about this remarkable woman. Our thirst for her true story is never quenched. But as far as I know, Adam Thorpe doesn't see any point in writing a novel unless the reader works [Hagenauer]. I did work reading this novel (twice!) and I am afraid it will be never-ending work.

When I was finishing writing this paper I didn't know that there was a shock for me in store. Browsing the Internet for book news I came upon the familiar title. Only the author was not Adam Thorpe. It was written by Charles Fernyhough, a psychologist. Its full title is Pieces of Light: The New Science of Memory. Dear Adam, are you a visionary?