It has been fifty years since John Berger published his first novel, A Painter
of Our Time, and even longer since his first literary contributions, for
Tribune. In half a century, Berger has branched out in many directions (art
critic; artisan; television star; realist; postmodernist; sociologist;
motor-cyclist), but he has rarely lurched politically. “I never dared be
radical when young / For fear it would make me conservative when old”, wrote
Robert Frost: no such apprehension for Berger. Some fifteen years after A
Painter in Our Time was withdrawn from circulation after pressure from
anti-Communist factions, Berger was giving his anti-colonialist Booker Prize
acceptance speech; another three decades on and the radical anger was still
palpable. “Fanaticism comes from any form of chosen blindness accompanying
the pursuit of a single dogma”, he wrote in an Observer article in July
2005, responding to the London bombings. “The G8’s dogma is that the making
of profit has to be mankind’s guiding principle.” “Yes, I’m still among
other things a Marxist”, he stated in a recent collection of essays, Hold
Everything Dear (2007).
The Marxist in Berger has always sat side by side with the aesthete. G.
(1972), for example, which won him the Booker, is both a powerful political
novel and a sensual feast in which Berger was able to write about desire
with great beauty and utilitarian precision. “Why does writing about sexual
experience reveal so strikingly what may be a general limitation of
literature in relation to aspects of all experience?”, he asks, before
inserting into the text a crude pornographic sketch to show that language
strips away the quality of “firstness” in the way other more immediate
petitions to the senses do not, binding an experience up in “an exterior
system of categories”. Berger does not like to be constrained by systems,
metaphorical or concrete. “The essential activity of the rich today is the
building of walls”, he wrote in a recent article for openDemocracy.net –
which might again remind us of Robert Frost: “Something there is that
doesn’t love a wall”.
Walls feature strongly in Berger’s latest novel, as do the twin drives of the
Marxist and the aesthete – not to mention the limits and accomplishments of
language in dealing with these. In From A to X, language is pretty much all
there is. The book comprises a series of letters from a woman, A’ida, who is
a pharmacist, to her lover, Xavier, who is serving two life sentences for
unspecified terrorist activities. A prologue, written by “John Berger”,
tells the story of the letters’ recovery at a recently decommissioned prison
outside the fictional town of Suse. Some of the letters, it appears, were
never sent, though “Berger” cannot tell us how any of them came into his
possession, “for fear of endanger[ing] other parties”. He has, however,
arranged for their transcription, and, with the letters undated, respects
the order in which they have been found. This seems to be largely, though
not wholly, chronological.
The form, then, is one of monologue: the text is from A’ida, though there are
indications of reciprocation, signs that she is not simply howling into the
abyss. “Your letter about donkeys made me laugh a lot”, she writes at one
point. Meanwhile, Xavier’s presence is felt in his scrawls on the backs of
the missives: quotations from poets and politicians, economic statistics,
aphorisms, and angry plot pointers (“for almost two months they have
withheld letters”). They bear little relation to the earnest and amorous
epistolary contents on the obverse, making us reflect that A’ida might after
all be howling into the abyss. Along with words, she sends more practical
and, perhaps, digestible symbols of her regard: plums, pistachios, radishes.
Berger gives us other points of reference, but not without deliberately
disorientating us. The text itself appears to be a translation. “May God
keep their shadows”, the Prologue’s “Berger” pleads to the Heavens, using a
proverb as yet uncoined in English. A’ida uses “profound” when she means
“deep” and speaks of actions that have been occurring “since one week”;
Xavier writes of a flame that “risks to provoke an explosion”. Thankfully
these devices are kept to a minimum. As for setting, there is a place called
Suse in Italy, but we seem, rather, to be in South America. There is a whiff
of the tropics in the air, and another of guerrilla warfare. A’ida draws on
a host of Latinate nicknames for her lover – “Mi Guapo”, “Mi Soplete”,
“Golondrino” – but also employs Arabic- or Turkish-sounding sobriquets, such
as “Habibi” and “Kanadim”. Her friends are called Manda or Nininha, but also
Gassan or Idelmis. One day she might visit Lamasgao; another the Tora Pass.
At one point, she writes “inshallah”.
This, it becomes clear, is Berger’s Land of the Oppressed, a kind of
Islamic-Hispanic hybrid of warm weather and righteous discontent. (We can
stop short of calling it universal: the orientation points remain curiously
light on, say, Chinese, or sub-Saharan symbols.) The goodies cower in
poverty and go about their daily business, sustained by love and friendship;
the enemy lingers menacingly, nebulously. It comprises capitalism,
certainly, with its “acronyms that gag language” (IMF, WTO, NAFTA), but
there is also a hint of a more direct totalitarianism at large. One man is
“hauled out of bed by a patrol” and shot by “the River Zab”. Missiles rain
down, and Apaches hover.
A’ida, meanwhile, keeps on writing. Her letters are febrile, sensual, by turns
philosophical, political and personal. At their best, they successfully
illustrate a transcendental love; at their worst, they (and the novel) read
like a cross-stitch of aphorisms. The letters have been written over many
years, though time, in the realm of love, is shown to inhabit a different
dimension. (Berger's Shakespearean epilogue reminds us that “love is not
time’s fool”.) “The word recently has altered since they took you”, A’ida
writes towards the start. “As soon as they gave you two life sentences, I
stopped believing in their time.” Some of her temporal dictums are vintage
Berger: “love adores repetitions because they defy time”. Similarly
provoking is A’ida’s insistence on creative reconstruction as a means of
escaping incarceration. “The past is the one thing we are not prisoners of”,
she reassures her man, before offering different readings of their previous
encounters (“Agree to this version?”).
What becomes apparent is that A’ida is as trapped as her lover: after all, a
wall is a two-sided affair. The best prison literature – from Dostoevsky to
Jean Genet to Tahar ben Jelloun – has drawn on the importance of the
imagination to create a happier reality, and this is exactly what A’ida
finds herself doing: “Every night I put you together – bone by delicate
bone”. “Thought and extension are parts of the same stuff”, she writes,
reassuring herself as much as him. Sometimes, through her letters, A’ida
sends Xavier “visitors” in the form of descriptions of other people.
Sometimes, she sends him sex: “picture me”, she commands, “Nobody can
prevent you”. That we are never given Xavier’s response makes the novel
nicely haunting – a sense augmented by the alienating effect of his
haphazard, proto-revolutionary jottings.
Berger deals well with the solipsism of desire. If, as Hegel argued, the self
is formed through desire then these letters are certainly building A’ida a
lot of character. But Xavier’s absence remains a tangible presence, an
affirmation of a political project that is bound up with their love. This is
love as plenitude: personal and political. A’ida, too, is involved in the
revolution stirring beneath the Land of the Oppressed. Her writings are full
of arcane references to “canasta” games – some sort of
code for political machinations. “The day doesn’t begin with your absence”,
she reassures Xavier. “It begins with the decision we took together to do
what we are doing.”
As a character, A’ida stands out for her coupling of optimism and experience.
That we know so little about her seems less important than our sense of her
sucking out life’s marrow. Her inner world projects power. When it rains,
for A’ida, “it was as if everything that existed in the world had become
rain”. On the one hand, she is a scientist, a rationalist – we might say a
politician. She enjoys the order of taxonomy at the chemist, the counting
out of prescriptions and dosages through which “the silence of the
unpredictable is kept at bay”. But there is also something wild about her.
“I’m from deep in the forest”, she reminds Xavier. Language, inevitably, is
not enough for her. She recalls gazing on her lover’s hands: “No words have
ever been as reassuring to me as your hands were at that moment”. Rather
than describe her own hands, which “seem obsolete because they haven’t
touched you for so long”, she sketches them. As in G., this direct appeal to
the senses bespeaks the limits of language. Beneath one of her hand
drawings, A’ida writes “you can put it wherever you like”.
From A to X shares with its protagonist a rawness which belies its author’s
years. It is a slight, striking and rather strange book, sensitive and
vulnerable to parody. Along with its overdependence on the aphorism, it is
let down by a susceptibility to rambling passages and the occasional
painfully prodding simile to remind us that we are in some sort of War
Situation (“Miriam was as devastated as a bombarded town”). The monologic
nature of its structure causes Berger to throw in the occasional plot filler
that doesn’t quite ring true (“You say the drawings of hands I do for you
are scotched to the wall . . .”), though the general lack of narrative does
little harm to the novel’s meditative qualities.
More problematic is the flimsiness of its politics. From A to X is essentially
a love story, and Berger deals with this aspect of it well. But its
oppressed seem so saintly that it is hard to take them on. Of course, we
side with them – but only as the underdog. Yes, they are victims; but what
are they trying to achieve politically? Will their omelettes require broken
eggs? Xavier’s jottings alert us to a genuinely alarming capitalist
dystopia. But Berger’s Land of the Oppressed remains a frustratingly simple
world of Good and Evil – a system reminiscent of George W. Bush at his least
nuanced.
Last month, From A to X made it onto the Man Booker longlist. It would be
interesting to visit an alternative reality in which Berger left his name
off the book’s cover (as he did in 1999 with King). From A to X does stand
on its own merits; but it is surely too slender to earn its author another
major award. Berger writes tenderly; his novel doubtless deserves liberal
reference in the next Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. But it also deserved
something more: a fleshier rendering of its binary opposites. Berger might
this time have heeded the apprehensions of Robert Frost: “Before I built a
wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out, / And to whom I
was like to give offence”.
John Berger
FROM A TO X
A story in letters
197pp. Verso. £12.99.
978 1 84467 288 2
Toby Lichtig is an editor at the TLS.
