The Blue Book by AL Kennedy – review

AL Kennedy takes readers into a strange netherworld of travelling psychics

Illustration by Clifford Harper/agraphia.co.uk

Never judge a book by its cover, we are told near the beginning of AL Kennedy's new novel. The Blue Book is itself a very fine object and looks like a lovely old volume on palmistry. This is apt, as it takes us into the murky world of fortune-telling and stage magic, of mind-reading and manipulation and the desperation it feeds on. Our narrator is Beth, serious, highly sensitive and crisply witty, a tough but vulnerable woman we first meet as she waits in a queue to board a huge luxury liner. All set for a transatlantic crossing with her decent but boring boyfriend Derek, she finds herself hassled by an irritatingly chatty man doing magic tricks, and, as the queue shuffles forward, begins to dread the approaching voyage.

It is in fact a rough crossing in more senses than one. The weather's terrible, the ship pitches and heaves. Derek takes to his bed and vomits for days. Increasingly disturbing encounters with the man from the queue are interspersed with more reassuring ones with a pleasant and protective elderly couple, one of whom is suffering from a terminal illness. Beth is a woman tired of herself and her own thoughts, "my noise . . . the rubbish just spooling away in here beneath the hair, the skin, the bones, just mazing around and around in the brain". Gradually, through her stream of consciousness, we learn of her past as the partner, both professionally and emotionally, of a fake medium, Arthur Lockwood.

It's usual to perceive those who knowingly deceive the bereaved and fragile as despicable, but Kennedy doesn't do heroes and villains. Arthur is not depicted as a bad person, nor is he unscrupulous. In his own way he is a very moral man who uses his acute people-reading skills to bring closure to the grieving, to help them through the inescapable truth – "the void in every dawn, the scream in the eyes, the howl . . . the humiliation of too great a pain" – into acceptance. He offsets the fact that he has made a fortune out of fraud by contributing lavishly to charities and good works the world over. Ostensibly Beth left him because of growing unease about their shared occupation, but Kennedy is a playful writer and from the outset drops hints that we are being carefully manipulated. Beth conceals as much as she reveals, feeding us slow drips of information that channel disturbing undertones of sin and tragedy. "Any word can work a spell," she declares, being after all a skilled magician in her own right. As she probes the tangled psyches of those who deceive for a living, she admits her own corruption, acknowledging how much she had adored "what he gave me – the power to be in other people's stories". This is not unlike the power of the writer, something the book sporadically addresses through interspersed passages spoken to a mysterious "you", leaving the reader to work out who that may be. This is not too taxing a challenge.

Kennedy's observations are razor-sharp and often very funny, and I always enjoy and admire her books yet somehow fail to bond with her characters. I'm not sure why this is, because it's not as if she doesn't dig deeply into their souls. Possibly it's a distancing effect of the relentless analysis, the way that in spite of the restless levity the serious side in each one is heightened and we don't get to see very much of them simply flopping around in the daily humdrum of life. We are swamped by their intensity, and the void never seems far away. Beth and Arthur seem incapable of coexisting unless they're on a high of emotional drama. The character of Derek, on the other hand, is scarcely developed, but we know that Beth has settled "for decent and reliable and normal", "safer and stupider and less". "More" seems to necessitate mind games ad infinitum, and there was a time near the end when I felt like giving them all a slap and saying: for God's sake, stop messing each other about.

Kennedy herself is a riddler and likes to engage the reader in games. In this case, something crucial is withheld until the very last minute. But this kind of tricksiness is not where her strengths lie. Kennedy's real talent is in following her muse into the depths and reporting back from there with absolute honesty. Always a bold writer, she observes the world with a refreshingly skewed intelligence, and her well-known darkness, sometimes verging on morbidity, is always leavened with wit and humour. She also writes beautifully, sometimes producing the kind of sentences that stop you in your tracks and make you linger and savour.

In The Blue Book, she has conjured up a strange netherworld of seedy hotels and rainy towns, the weird nomadic existence of the travelling psychic, whose daily fare is the brokenheartedness of humanity and the inevitability of loss. The combined weight of all those tragedies has made happiness impossible for Arthur and Beth, and both are indeed truly haunted, though not by ghosts.

Carol Birch's Jamrach's Menagerie is published by Canongate. AL Kennedy will be appearing at the Edinburgh International Book festival on 21 August.

Related Content

User Comments