SWIMMING TO ITHACA
by Simon Mawer
Little, Brown, £16.99; 352pp

WHEN THOMAS Denham’s mother, Deirdre, dies, he finds himself affected in unexpected ways. “The historian in him had expected to find some significance of some kind. It surprised him to find none.”

Simon Mawer’s hero is a university lecturer, accustomed to finding ways of holding on to facts, of “absorbing them into his personal world”. Thomas goes through his mother’s papers, attempting to make sense of her life and to understand his own. Deirdre was the wife of an army officer, and Thomas’s sentimental journey takes him to colonial Cyprus, where his parents had been stationed. The narrative conjures up a 1950s world of carob trees, cocktails and rebellion as Deirdre is glimpsed bed-hopping with a range of officers and nationalists.

Swimming to Ithaca is, partially, a campus novel and Mawer uses the form to its fullest extent. Thomas’s lectures allow him to riff on the difficulties of living in time. As he flashes through his Powerpoint, he asks: “Did people in the past live in a narrative? Do we ourselves live out a narrative? I think the answer is no.” He directs these questions to the classroom at large, but his focus is on a mature student, a single mother named Kale. Thomas never seems interested in whether Kale might have any answers. Neither, it seems, is Mawer. This is a book about Thomas’s odyssey. He finds that Deirdre stands for a faithless Penelope. Thomas questions his own identity and parentage, and Kale floats around in a black mesh dress (her “special”) like a symbolic siren.

The novel is obviously allusive, but there are moments when the echoes seem more tired than thoughtful. The connections can be painfully obvious. Early on, Thomas asks Kale to put on a 1950s dress that belonged to his mother, and makes love to her while admiring her faintly webbed toes. Later, after a performance of Cats, Thomas muses on the lyrics of Memory. We hardly need Kale to point out that it’s all “a bit Freudian”.

Heavy signposting can be one of the risks of setting a novel in a teaching environment, but Peter Rushforth’s A Dead Language offers few clues. Issued after the author’s sudden death last year, this is the second of a series breaking a 25-year silence. Those familiar with his 2004 novel Pinkerton’s Sister will recognise the almost Ulyssean scope and texture. The characters, too, are familiar. Rushforth is working his way into the memory of Ben Pinkerton, the faithless US Army officer who abandoned Madam Butterfly. We meet Ben after his infamous act of abandonment, but the novel focuses on his adolescence in the late 19th century. An only son, Ben is not what his father had hoped for.

“He blushed easily. He had been a delicate and nervous small boy . . . He had a tendency to faint. His Papa’s reaction had been disgust.” Ben learns how to be manly. “He moved as if upon a stage, each action imposed by a director, each world learned from a script, taught so as to appear natural.”

This is a virtuoso stream-of-consciousness performance, peppered by allusions, and time-switches, as we accompany Ben to Otsego Lake Acad-emy School, through chemistry lessons, school plays and countless Latin declensions.

Rushforth offers an extraordinary transcription of adolescence and his characterisations of teachers and pupils are masterly. Even more powerful is the way that he uses the classroom as a stage to negotiate ideas of gender and authority. Both Pinkerton’s father and his teachers batter Ben with a terror of the feminine. The boys are drilled in Latin, constantly told that they may secretly long to “decline puella”. Like Mawer, Rushforth is thinking about ways in which masculinity might be defined. The result is exceptionally complex. Its brilliance lies in the way that it fails completely to add up.

What is missing are women. The reader is left to think backwards, and the novel is haunted by three absent voices: that of Ben’s sister, Alice; of Butterfly, the mother of his future son, and of Ben’s mother, who is mentioned but never speaks.

In leaving these stories unwritten, A Dead Language suggests something subtle about those things that we will never quite learn, and the differences that we will never quite grasp. Rushforth teaches us about the limits of our own imagination.

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