There\u2019s no getting around it: Dreaming of Dead People is an extremely strange book. Born in 1941, Rosalind Belben was first published in the 1970s; this, her fourth novel, first came out in 1979. Her eighth and most recent, Our Horses in Egypt, won the James Tait Black award in 2007.<\/p>\n
Dreaming of Dead People might best be described as an early example of autofiction: its narrator, Lavinia, is\u00a0the same age as Belben was at the time\u00a0of writing, and she recalls a\u00a0similar childhood in Dorset, including a father who was a Royal Navy commander and who was killed when she was three. Belben has described the book as \u201ca study of the human figure\u201d, and given its parallels with her own life story and its raw and deeply personal style any reader could be forgiven for assuming that the figure is\u00a0her own.<\/p>\n
The book is divided into six very different sections, including a stay in\u00a0Venice, a treatise on masturbation, a\u00a0description of a beloved dog\u2019s euthanasia and a vivid erotic daydream involving Robin Hood. It is hard, at first, to understand how these parts relate to one another, for this uncompromising book offers few obvious clues, but on second reading they shift and merge, and the payoff for this extra mental and imaginative effort is a truthful and vivid portrait of a highly particularised human consciousness.<\/p>\n
In the first section, At Torcello, Lavinia recalls a trip to the Venetian island in winter. She is there to see a\u00a0Byzantine mosaic of the Virgin Mary\u00a0and baby Jesus, an image of motherhood that will echo through the book. While she is on the island she meets an English family for whom she will later babysit during a power cut, her relationship to children and the idea of family coming slowly into focus.<\/p>\n
Torcello and Venice itself are made strange by the things she notices, and by her attitude to them, both at the time and in recollection: a pregnant dog, a miserable rat, a canal\u2019s water, \u201cdull of eye\u201d. \u201cIn that sour and barren place, a spinster, who did not wish for the dry, un-rustling grass. I weep with mortification. Yet I was extremely happy.\u201d Belben\u2019s angular syntax, frequent ellipses and unusual punctuation force the reader to slow down, think, and pay attention.<\/p>\n
If this novel is as confessional as it seems, it is truly fearless: death, ageing, anorgasmia, loneliness, despair and madness are all here<\/p>\n
It becomes clear that Lavinia is full of regrets. Having nursed her mother through a long final illness, she has not\u00a0had sex for 10 years and wonders if\u00a0others now see her as \u201cnot among the\u00a0fuckers of this world\u201d. She had assumed she would marry and have children, but nobody ever proposed; in today\u2019s world, of course, she would not consider herself \u201ca shrivelled person \u2026 an old maid\u201d at 36, but things were different in the 1970s, something which makes her lack of shame all the\u00a0more remarkable: \u201cI have woken sopping and swollen, with a devil to\u00a0suppress between my legs.\u201d<\/p>\n
If this novel is as confessional as it seems, it is truly fearless: death, ageing, anorgasmia, loneliness, despair and madness are all here, jostling for attention, just as they do for many of us, for all we may seek to tune them out. Meanwhile, Lavinia learns to masturbate with an electric toothbrush.<\/p>\n
The Robin Hood section is a change of gear so abrupt it risks whiplash. As a\u00a0child Lavinia identified with the idea of a forest-dwelling outlaw (\u201cthe myth of the greenwood \u2026 a cosy, complete, limited life\u201d), and loved books about children who live outdoors: BB\u2019s classic Brendon Chase and Arthur Ransome\u2019s Swallows and Amazons<\/a> also form part of the fantasy. But this\u00a0book is no fairy story, instead a\u00a0sensuous, funny account of a sexual encounter between Hood and the wife of Sir Richard atte Lee, a figure from early medieval ballads. This is a vision of sexuality as pure, natural and incorruptible, a vital component in what today\u2019s pop psychologists might call Lavinia\u2019s \u201clove map\u201d.<\/p>\n As the sections unfold, a succession of images and recollections relentlessly and obliquely illuminate one another in the manner of an Adam Curtis film<\/a>. We glimpse Lavinia\u2019s relationship with her beloved but complicated mother (\u201csomething stiff and unyielding, fierce and loving\u201d) and learn more about her deep affinity for animals, particularly horses and dogs, both subjects of Belben\u2019s own later books; we understand her attitude to death, and to London; see the damage inflicted by\u00a0her schooling, and witness her sustaining, at times ecstatic relationship with the natural world (her account of a trip to Scotland beats nearly all of today\u2019s nature writing into\u00a0a cocked hat). She imagines the daughter she might have had, and names her \u201cJessie\u201d, but dwells uneasily on the very different childhood she would doubtless have compared with her own: \u201cShe would reckon a Forestry Commission plantation is a nice wood to walk in \u2026 she wouldn\u2019t have a clue about apples, how to pick them, how to store them: or pears.\u201d<\/p>\n You can feel Lavinia\/Belben thinking and imagining her way through something that she might otherwise have had the opportunity to understand in practice: the inevitable distance between generations and the inexorable pace of change. \u201cI am worried that Jessie won\u2019t read,\u201d she writes [italics her own]. \u201cIt would be my greatest dread.\u201d<\/p>\n The last pages of Dreaming of\u00a0Dead People dissolve into\u00a0an impressionistic but carefully structured stream of consciousness, dwelling on ageing and\u00a0mortality, loneliness and inner strength: extraordinary from any\u00a0writer, but particularly from one in only\u00a0her middle 30s. It is extremely beautiful, utterly convincing, and rivals anything by Virginia Woolf<\/a>. \u201cThere comes a time for making peace with oneself,\u201d Belben writes, as Lavinia. \u201cLife as I have known it is ending. I am drying up \u2026 I am saying: here is a life, what do you make of it. And trying not to mind that you turn aside.\u201d<\/p>\n