<\/p>\n
The Necessary Angel <\/strong>I happened to be present at the International Katherine Mansfield Society\u2019s 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\u2019s graveside in the presence of the New Zealand Ambassador. The trip to Avon also included a visit to Le Prieur\u00e9, the former home of Gurdjieff\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Set during a brief period in 2014, the protagonist in The Necessary Angel <\/em>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 \u2018necessary angel\u2019 is the daily dose of lithium that keeps her vaguely stable, though still at some remove from reality. An adherent of Gurdjieff\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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 caf\u00e9 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\u2019s night: \u2018the head-banging racket of it all, the beating her ears were taking \u2013 different songs, different voices and languages, klaxons, firecrackers \u2013 the seasonal euphoria, the urban cacophony\u2019 (4). As the novel progresses, beautiful and talented Sylvie becomes Max\u2019s \u2018inexplicable midsummer obsession [\u2026] his \u201cnecessary angel\u201d\u2019 (48-9).<\/p>\n There\u2019s another wonderful scene that anyone who has visited Le Prieur\u00e9 will appreciate, when Helen takes Max to Avon:<\/p>\n 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\u2019s home, a big wooden house, was next door. This whole complex was where the great man\u2019s devotees had come to live under his instruction, to learn \u2018wakefulness\u2019 rather than the \u2018sleep\u2019 which was, he argued, the norm for most human lives. They were to become \u2018conscious\u2019, to rid themselves of wasteful and negative emotions, to eschew regret, to shed \u2018personality\u2019, and to make their life\u2019s work the creation of a \u2018soul\u2019. You were not born with a soul, but you could create one. That was the \u2018work\u2019.<\/p>\n The tour commentary was partly a lesson. They had to imagine it all happening within these walls \u2013 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 \u2013 the law of three, the law of seven, the four bodies of man, even \u2018Beelzebub\u2019; and then would come the thrilling Sufi dancing, and the music.<\/p>\n They were shown the stairs where the writer Mansfield, one of the Master\u2019s better-known devotees, had had the tubercular haemorrhage that killed her. (65-6)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n 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\u2019s goal to retrieve Max\u2019s \u2018youthful soul\u2019 (67). Ultimately, this obsession leads her character towards a path of destruction and the book into the realms of crime fiction, where the surprising d\u00e9nouement affects both her and Max in unexpected ways. In the end, in her twisted and disturbed logic, it is Gurdjieff and Mansfield who \u2018tell her what she must do\u2019 (203), though her final, hazardous endgame is left in the hands of fate (220). <\/p>\n One of the most pleasurable aspects of the novel is the profusion of literary references on literature, poetry and criticism, in Stead\u2019s customary (since he is well-known for disliking literary obfuscation), and brilliantly clear-sighted approach:<\/p>\n 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 \u2018death of the author\u2019 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)<\/p>\n Here, one of the more complex literary theories of the twentieth century becomes child\u2019s play in Stead\u2019s sure hands, and he\u2019s not above making us laugh at the literary greats either:<\/p>\n And then his mind switched abruptly [\u2026] to Barthes himself, mother-obsessed in his private life, the super Post-modernist critic, hell-bent on cleaning up the French \u2013 indeed the world \u2013 literary scene, who had died (supreme irony) after being run down by a laundry van. (95). <\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" <\/strong> <\/strong>
\n<\/em>by C. K. Stead,
\nLondon, UK: Allen & Unwin,2018
\n220 pp. \u00a315.99<\/p>\n
\nThe Necessary Angel <\/em>
\nI happened to be present at the International Katherine Mansfield Society\u2019s 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\u2019s graveside in the presence of the New Zealand Ambassador. The trip to Avon also included a visit to Le Prieur\u00e9, the former home of Gurdjieff\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3162,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3112,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76\/revisions\/3112"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue23\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}