I have a nonagenarian friend who worked for a mere sixty years or so behind the scenes in theatre. She seems to have, or to have had, connections with just about everyone in the arts you can think of, so conversations with her tend to be arrestingly surreal. Luke Jennings’s name came up the other day because he’s married to a close friend of her daughter. My friend claims to have been there when he got the initial call about adapting his novel Codename Villanelle for TV and the rest, to coin a cliché – is history.
Now, I didn’t actually like Killing Eve because I thought it made light of death so I stopped watching it after the first three episodes. This conversation, however, triggered my curiosity about what else Jennings might have written. His early novels seem to be mostly out of print but I easily sourced a secondhand copy of Atlantic (1995) and read it.
It’s 1951. Cato Parkes, aged 16, from whose point of view this third person narrative is written, is crossing the Atlantic on a luxury liner with his widowed father, Reginald. Cato has a serious heart condition and the purpose of the journey is for him to undergo major, last ditch, surgery which is not available in Britain. The operation is dangerous. There is a fifty per cent chance that he won’t survive. Naturally he’s frightened and dreams a lot about his mother who died three years earlier in an appalling road accident.
On board are a whole raft of colourful characters including a beautiful but oddly wistful actress, several liars and con men of various sorts and a group of stewards who run a sleezy below-decks drag queen club in their time off. All the men, including Reginald, are obsessed with the war and the part they played (or didn’t play) in it which is probably a pretty accurate observation of how things would have been in 1951. only six years after the cessation of hostilities. Even the ship they’re on still bears discernible signs of its temporary career as a requisitioned troop ship. Never a dull moment for Cato, who meets a king cobra, nearly drowns and does quite a lot of drinking and smoking as well as spending time with various unlikely people from whom he learns a lot. Most of them, of course, recognise that he’s ill. Eventually he reaches New York with some experience under his belt (literally) and with the calm maturity to face what lies ahead.
It’s effectively a coming of age story with a whiff of both JD Salinger and Patrick Hamilton. Moreover Jennings is a fine writer who comes up with evocative phrases such as “the smoking room’s oaken and refectorial gloom” or “the piano’s minor key wanderings”. He is also an unabashed user (occasionally) of quite unusual vocabulary. Can you, for example, define “ruvid” or “debouched”?
In short, I quite enjoyed it.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng
