Joanna Kavenna: Inglorious

Rosa Lane is a London journalist in her mid-thirties, with a good career, a successful boyfriend, and a comfortable life; but her mother died a while ago, and since then she has been struggling with a sense of meaninglessness. From the very beginning we see just how difficult her work is becoming for her, and this first chapter of Inglorious made me fall in love with Kavenna’s peculiar brand of wit:  

By May she was writing in fragments. It was unfortunate, as her job was to write and explain, to produce quantities of lucid prose. Instead, she stared at her computer, the bare notes of a story in her hand. Embarrassed, she wrote, ‘The Modernist Novel’. After another hour she wrote ‘Rosa Lane reports’. Then it was lunchtime and she wrote ‘If Lunch Be the Lunch of Love, Lunch On’. Then later she wrote ‘Shuffle Off’ and ‘Mortal Coil’ on two lines. Then she accidentally pressed Send, and emailed her few phrases to the editor, who ignored them. Her focus seemed to be slipping. Where once she had read the paper every day, noticing the preoccupations of society and her colleagues, now she flicked through a few pages and tossed the thing away. She was left with odd words - ‘BLAME’, ‘WORSENS’, ‘REPRIEVE’, ‘SILENCE’ - and some images of a screaming mother, a model clad in satin, a bomb victim. None of it made any sense. Now she wrote: ‘I want. We want.’ And then she wrote: ‘What is it?’

 Along with her writing, Rosa’s mind is disintegrating, too - one day she realises she can’t do it anymore and simply walks away from her job. Her friends are baffled, her father worries, but support and understanding are in small supply; instead everybody seems to see her decision as a defection and a betrayal of shared values. Her boyfriend and their mutual friend Grace are particularly angry, and it soon turns out these two have their own agenda. In no time at all, Rosa is alone with dwindling funds, no place to stay except spare rooms in the homes of acquaintances, no plans for the future, and precious little dignity.

As Rosa’s crisis deepens, there are fewer ‘funny moments’: the humour becomes more feverish and the ironies more violent (strange word choice, I know, and yet quite appropriate in the context of the novel’s climax). But what could have been a bleak study of depression and alienation in other hands becomes something serious and yet light of touch in Kavenna’s. The idea of walking away from it all and starting your life from scratch seems to hold a peculiar fascination to many in this day and age, but Inglorious shows what the fantasy might entail in reality; in Rosa’s case, starting from scratch equals falling down to the bottom ladder and effectively committing social suicide. Once you let go, it seems near impossible to climb back again. At the same time, Rosa is held back by something more than her circumstances or a paralysing depression. She may be mourning, shell-shocked, and shabbily treated by her friends and fiancé alike, but she’s not a sympathetic character, and her sense of entitlement seems to grow in proportion with her sense of her own failure. What she really wants is a job that is neither boring, nor unpleasant, nor hard work, but leaves her unlimited time to ponder on questions of life and death. What she really wants are friends who are only too happy to help her back on her feet, but when she finds such people, she doesn’t want them after all. The same restless impatience keeps her from pursuing the aforementioned questions even when opportunities abound; she wants answers, but she recoils from the possibility of unpleasant answers, and makes mountains out of rather worldly molehills instead - her ex’s tardiness is selling their old furniture becomes an obsession that eclipses even the Meaning of Life. She has nothing to do, but without the safety net of working hours time seems to be slipping through her fingers. She keeps drafting ambitious to-do lists - which include reading the complete works of Plato, Kierkegaard, and others - although she can’t even manage the more mundane tasks. (Which makes me wonder, has anybody in the history of mankind ever written a doable to-do list?)

A book of this kind is likely to polarise readers. If you don’t get along with stories that meander aimlessly in search of a plot, you probably won’t like this book; if you’re allergic to whiny, navel-gazing protagonists, you probably won’t like this book. You could make a case for Kavenna’s philosophising being self-indulgent, but you could equally well make a case for her being ironic about this kind of self-indulgent philosophising. You could make a case for the extravagant use of language being pretentious. You could - and I would - also make a case for the whole concoction - self-indulgence, extravagant language, navel-gazing, irony and all - being all the richer because of its occasional irritating moments. The ending felt a little too pat to my taste, but I half suspect the very patness was yet another touch of irony.

I know a lot of readers will say that this book was written by a particular sort of person - Kavenna is a successful journalist herself, and this is her first novel - for a particular sort of young, middle-class audience who like nothing better than to read about characters of their own sort analysing their own sort and dissecting problems of their own sort. I don’t agree with this assessment, however. Inglorious is such a peculiar, ironic, unique work that, if approached with an open mind, it should have something to offer for anyone who sometimes has difficulties making sense of this world. ‘I don’t see how I can sit at my desk,’ wonders Rosa (and one is inclined to agree), ’presenting reality to people, tailoring it for view, commenting glibly on daily events, when I have no idea what is going on.’

Final Verdict: I loved it. You might… or you might not.

Faber & Faber  2007  paperback  272 pp.  ISBN: 0571232604