Whatever else it may be, Ben Marcus's new novel is certainly one of the more determined attempts at coupling high and low literary ambition I've seen lately. Marcus, whose earlier books were austere excursions into what you might call anti-narrative, and who famously dished on Jonathan Franzen in an article defending experimentalism against its supposed detractors, seems to have decided to have it both ways this time: Wittgensteinian curtailments of meaning, alongside cackling villains and suspenseful escapes.
Language, the debasement, banality and ultimate toxicity thereof, is his subject. It's a staple topic of avant garde literature, from the Prenzlauer Berg writers of the former East Germany to the Language poets of the American academy. All proceed, more or less, on the basis that verbal communication has been fatally corrupted by political or literary abuse and can be rescued only by a total dismantling and reassembly. Results vary (I've yet to read a Language poem that didn't make me want to dissolve it in acid), but Marcus's own, especially in The Age of Wire and String, have been haunting and inventive.
The Flame Alphabet differs from that book in approaching the theme less through the prism of language itself than through the twists and turns of an elaborate plot. It's a sci-fi disaster thriller, basically, driven by the conceit that language has become toxic in a more than purely metaphorical sense. Words have begun literally poisoning people, their ravaging effects sweeping across America like a deadly plague.
At first it's just the language of children, specifically Jewish children, that seems to be poisonous. But as time passes it becomes clear that all verbal communication spoken, written, mimed, signed is potentially lethal to adults (children remain immune). Meanwhile a fictitious sect of "Forest Jews", who worship in huts built over deep holes with transmission cables coming up out of the earth, are believed at least by the book's sinister villain, LeBov to hold the key to the antidote.
It's a deeply weird setup, though as it develops, Marcus's serious reasons for each of these improbable elements is revealed, and a measure of the book's success is that it enforces not just a suspension of disbelief, but for a while total surrender of the faculty of reason.
The brilliant opening section plunges the reader straight into the crisis, with the already sick narrator and his wife (both "Forest Jews") preparing to flee from their teenage daughter and the neighbourhood children whose voices are putting their lives in danger. The gear they pack evokes the crazed urgency of the situation: "I stashed field glasses, sound abatement fabrics, and enough rolled foam to conceal two adults. On top of these I crammed a raw stash of anti-comprehension pills Tucked into the outside pouch a personal noise dosimeter, hacked to measure children's speech. I wanted to be able to hear them coming."
For a while, as Sam (the narrator) describes his realisation that their daughter's words have been making them ill, Marcus works the notion as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the pain all parents feel as their little angels turn into cruel teenagers. The drama of parental obsolescence is sharply articulated, as is the condition of terrorised parental love, and these pages are the most humanly engaging in the book. But as the story progresses, and Sam's flight across a post-apocalyptic America culminates at a research facility where he goes to work on an antidote to the language toxin, so Marcus steadily widens the scope of the allegory to encompass information overload, the idiocy of public discourse and the ubiquity of deathly prose. A nice scene in which Sam gingerly tests the toxicity of texts left in his office will resonate with creative writing teachers or anyone who has to read lousy sentences for a living: "Perhaps my predecessor enjoyed sending obviously fatal scripts to the testing ground. He would watch from his glassed-in perch as the English language quietly picked off test subjects one by one"
And then there is the very curious Jewish theme, which unfolds in a somewhat obscure manner, but with enough biblical and historical hints dropped to steer the reader toward the basic matrix of meanings at issue. On the one hand there's some sort of secret weapon idea, relating to Judaic traditions of secret teachings, sacred alphabets and the divine power of the Word. On the other there's the idea of Jewish vulnerability the ancient scapegoating motif launched, here, with the initial suspicion that Jews are to blame for the plague. The two aspects converge in a strange parody of the blood libel of ritual child murder, whereby a voice from the "Jew hole" (impossibly awful phrase!) steers the scientists towards their life-saving grail: a serum that can be drawn only from terrified children. It's all mildly intriguing, but as the oddities proliferate underground rabbis, fluid-filled "Moses Mouth" listening devices so they begin to seem increasingly gratuitous.
About halfway through, the book's esoteric and populist aims begin to pull hard in opposite directions and the enterprise starts to fray. There's a thriller plot to fulfil, but its non-realistic terms don't lend themselves to the strict inner logic that makes thrillers thrilling. How concerned can you feel about a character when it turns out all he has to do to save himself is jump down a "Jew hole" and find a scared kid? Elaborate props and movie-style dialogue pump up the sense of crisis "What are you, on the team now? Part of the inner circle? Do you think you can really be a LeBov?" and the sundered family plot, beloved of blockbusters, is milked for teary emotionality. It rises to a satisfying conclusion, but nothing quite comes up to the promise of the first half, which is genuinely exhilarating.
James Lasdun's It's Beginning to Hurt is published by Vintage.
