Fiction Review
The Necessary Angel
by C. K. Stead,
London, UK: Allen & Unwin,2018
220 pp. £15.99
I happened to be present at the International Katherine Mansfield Society’s annual conference in 2014 at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, where C. K. Stead was a keynote speaker. It was a very special three-day event and included a trip to nearby Fontainebleau-Avon, where there was a very moving ceremony at Mansfield’s graveside in the presence of the New Zealand Ambassador. The trip to Avon also included a visit to Le Prieuré, the former home of Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man, where we were able to go inside and see the staircase where Mansfield suffered her final, fatal, haemorrhage. The conference dinner was held at Le Procope, one of Paris’s oldest and most iconic restaurants, where we ate in gilded splendour, breathing in the air of French literary greats such as Rousseau, Diderot, and Verlaine, for whom the restaurant had been a regular haunt.
The night of the dinner also coincided with the annual French midsummer night music festival, when every Parisian street becomes suffused with Bacchanalian madness, and what seems like the entire population takes to the streets to live, breathe and perform the live music that goes on all night long. Just walking to the restaurant was a challenge in itself and leaving at about 11pm to return to our hotels was a complex business. The crowds of people in the streets were immense, and the throb of drums and loud music filled the air. Some of the delegates at our dinner ate on the balcony of the beautiful private room provided for us by Le Procope and must have felt dizzy by the auditory assault on their senses. It was a truly unforgettable night.
Aspects of both the night of the dinner and the trip to Fontainebleau-Avon are recreated in this stunning novel by C. K. Stead, his thirteenth, revealing that the foremost voice in New Zealand literature today has lost none of its power, for this is as good as anything he has written.
Set during a brief period in 2014, the protagonist in The Necessary Angel is New Zealander Max Jackson, a forty-something professor of English Literature at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, in the heart of Paris. Married but estranged from his French wife Louise, also an English professor, Max has become infatuated with his younger colleague Sylvie, with whom he conducts a short-lived affair. At the same time, he finds himself ensnared in the complex web that is the life of disturbed English student Helen, whose ‘necessary angel’ is the daily dose of lithium that keeps her vaguely stable, though still at some remove from reality. An adherent of Gurdjieff’s teachings, she develops an associated interest in Katherine Mansfield, who is buried just a short train-ride away from Paris in the cemetery at Avon, and just a few metres away from Gurdjieff’s own grave. Thus, Mansfield herself enters the plot, as Helen uses the dead New Zealand author as a pretext to win over Max. It is only when a Cezanne painting is stolen from his wife’s apartment that all the relationship balls Max has been juggling come crashing down around him, forcing him to re-examine his past actions and future direction.
Stead clearly knows Paris well, because the Parisian life he constructs is steeped in verisimilitude. If you want a novel that offers a real sense of daily life in the City of Light, from café culture to French politics, then look no further than this authentic recreation. Here, for example, is what Sylvie encounters as she and Max leave Le Procope on midsummer’s night: ‘the head-banging racket of it all, the beating her ears were taking – different songs, different voices and languages, klaxons, firecrackers – the seasonal euphoria, the urban cacophony’ (4). As the novel progresses, beautiful and talented Sylvie becomes Max’s ‘inexplicable midsummer obsession […] his “necessary angel”’ (48-9).
There’s another wonderful scene that anyone who has visited Le Prieuré will appreciate, when Helen takes Max to Avon:
At the Fontainebleau-Avon station a minibus was waiting to gather those enrolled for the Gurdjieff tour. They drove no great distance to the building that had housed the Institute, three storeys and quite grand, in beautiful grounds, now a block of apartments. Gurdjieff’s home, a big wooden house, was next door. This whole complex was where the great man’s devotees had come to live under his instruction, to learn ‘wakefulness’ rather than the ‘sleep’ which was, he argued, the norm for most human lives. They were to become ‘conscious’, to rid themselves of wasteful and negative emotions, to eschew regret, to shed ‘personality’, and to make their life’s work the creation of a ‘soul’. You were not born with a soul, but you could create one. That was the ‘work’.
The tour commentary was partly a lesson. They had to imagine it all happening within these walls – the importance placed on very early rising, on chores and menial duties, on preparing meals, drawing water from the well, milking the cow, feeding the hens and finding their eggs, bee-keeping, and especially growing things; and then, in the evening, listening to a talk by the Master which might be on any one of his favourite themes – the law of three, the law of seven, the four bodies of man, even ‘Beelzebub’; and then would come the thrilling Sufi dancing, and the music.
They were shown the stairs where the writer Mansfield, one of the Master’s better-known devotees, had had the tubercular haemorrhage that killed her. (65-6)
For Helen, this visit to Fontainebleau-Avon affords her the opportunity to develop her relationship with Max, with whom she becomes so completely obsessed that she makes it her life’s goal to retrieve Max’s ‘youthful soul’ (67). Ultimately, this obsession leads her character towards a path of destruction and the book into the realms of crime fiction, where the surprising dénouement affects both her and Max in unexpected ways. In the end, in her twisted and disturbed logic, it is Gurdjieff and Mansfield who ‘tell her what she must do’ (203), though her final, hazardous endgame is left in the hands of fate (220).
One of the most pleasurable aspects of the novel is the profusion of literary references on literature, poetry and criticism, in Stead’s customary (since he is well-known for disliking literary obfuscation), and brilliantly clear-sighted approach:
And the end for Flaubert had been an achieved clarity, intelligibility, elegance. Against this, Roland Barthes had favoured the obscurity of the New Wave novels of Claude Simon and Alain Robbe-Grillet, which he preferred because he saw clarity as the writer imposing himself or herself upon you, giving you no room to move. In the obscure and the oblique lay finally the ‘death of the author’ and the emancipation of the reader. By uncertainty about what the thing you were reading meant, you were freed to make new meanings, new interpretations, and so become yourself the author of the work. (92)
Here, one of the more complex literary theories of the twentieth century becomes child’s play in Stead’s sure hands, and he’s not above making us laugh at the literary greats either:
And then his mind switched abruptly […] to Barthes himself, mother-obsessed in his private life, the super Post-modernist critic, hell-bent on cleaning up the French – indeed the world – literary scene, who had died (supreme irony) after being run down by a laundry van. (95).
There is no finer author writing in New Zealand today. Enjoy this Parisian campus-mystery novel, and admire the artistry of a writer at the very top of his game.
