Tright here’s no getting round it: Dreaming of Useless Individuals is an especially unusual e-book. Born in 1941, Rosalind Belben was first revealed within the Seventies; this, her fourth novel, first got here out in 1979. Her eighth and most up-to-date, Our Horses in Egypt, gained the James Tait Black award in 2007.
Dreaming of Useless Individuals may greatest be described as an early instance of autofiction: its narrator, Lavinia, is the identical age as Belben was on the time of writing, and she or he remembers a comparable childhood in Dorset, together with a father who was a Royal Navy commander and who was killed when she was three. Belben has described the e-book as “a research of the human determine”, and given its parallels along with her personal life story and its uncooked and deeply private type any reader might be forgiven for assuming that the determine is her personal.
The e-book is split into six very completely different sections, together with a keep in Venice, a treatise on masturbation, a description of a beloved canine’s euthanasia and a vivid erotic daydream involving Robin Hood. It’s laborious, at first, to know how these elements relate to at least one one other, for this uncompromising e-book affords few apparent clues, however on second studying they shift and merge, and the payoff for this further psychological and imaginative effort is a truthful and vivid portrait of a extremely particularised human consciousness.
Within the first part, At Torcello, Lavinia remembers a visit to the Venetian island in winter. She is there to see a Byzantine mosaic of the Virgin Mary and child Jesus, a picture of motherhood that may echo by the e-book. Whereas she is on the island she meets an English household for whom she’s going to later babysit throughout an influence reduce, her relationship to kids and the concept of household coming slowly into focus.
Torcello and Venice itself are made unusual by the issues she notices, and by her perspective to them, each on the time and in recollection: a pregnant canine, a depressing rat, a canal’s water, “uninteresting of eye”. “In that bitter and barren place, a spinster, who didn’t want for the dry, un-rustling grass. I weep with mortification. But I used to be extraordinarily blissful.” Belben’s angular syntax, frequent ellipses and strange punctuation pressure the reader to decelerate, assume, and listen.
It turns into clear that Lavinia is filled with regrets. Having nursed her mom by a protracted remaining sickness, she has not had intercourse for 10 years and wonders if others now see her as “not among the many fuckers of this world”. She had assumed she would marry and have kids, however no person ever proposed; in at the moment’s world, after all, she wouldn’t think about herself “a shrivelled individual … an previous maid” at 36, however issues have been completely different within the Seventies, one thing which makes her lack of disgrace all of the extra outstanding: “I’ve woken sopping and swollen, with a satan to suppress between my legs.”
If this novel is as confessional because it appears, it’s really fearless: dying, ageing, anorgasmia, loneliness, despair and insanity are all right here, jostling for consideration, simply as they do for many people, for all we might search to tune them out. In the meantime, Lavinia learns to masturbate with an electrical toothbrush.
The Robin Hood part is a change of substances so abrupt it dangers whiplash. As a baby Lavinia recognized with the concept of a forest-dwelling outlaw (“the parable of the greenwood … a comfortable, full, restricted life”), and liked books about kids who stay outdoor: BB’s traditional Brendon Chase and Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons additionally kind a part of the fantasy. However this e-book is not any fairy story, as an alternative a sensuous, humorous account of a sexual encounter between Hood and the spouse of Sir Richard atte Lee, a determine from early medieval ballads. This can be a imaginative and prescient of sexuality as pure, pure and incorruptible, a significant part in what at the moment’s pop psychologists may name Lavinia’s “love map”.
Because the sections unfold, a succession of photographs and recollections relentlessly and obliquely illuminate each other within the method of an Adam Curtis film. We glimpse Lavinia’s relationship along with her beloved however difficult mom (“one thing stiff and unyielding, fierce and loving”) and study extra about her deep affinity for animals, significantly horses and canine, each topics of Belben’s personal later books; we perceive her perspective to dying, and to London; see the injury inflicted by her education, and witness her sustaining, at occasions ecstatic relationship with the pure world (her account of a visit to Scotland beats practically all of at the moment’s nature writing into a cocked hat). She imagines the daughter she might need had, and names her “Jessie”, however dwells uneasily on the very completely different childhood she would probably have in contrast along with her personal: “She would reckon a Forestry Fee plantation is a pleasant wooden to stroll in … she wouldn’t have a clue about apples, tips on how to choose them, tips on how to retailer them: or pears.”
You may really feel Lavinia/Belben considering and imagining her manner by one thing that she may in any other case have had the chance to know in follow: the inevitable distance between generations and the inexorable tempo of change. “I’m anxious that Jessie gained’t learn,” she writes [italics her own]. “It might be my best dread.”
The final pages of Dreaming of Useless Individuals dissolve into an impressionistic however rigorously structured stream of consciousness, dwelling on ageing and mortality, loneliness and internal power: extraordinary from any author, however significantly from one in solely her center 30s. This can be very stunning, completely convincing, and rivals something by Virginia Woolf. “There comes a time for making peace with oneself,” Belben writes, as Lavinia. “Life as I’ve identified it’s ending. I’m drying up … I’m saying: here’s a life, what do you make of it. And making an attempt to not thoughts that you simply flip apart.”
