Study for Obedience
by Sarah Bernstein
Every ten years, Granta publishes an anthology featuring the Best of Young British Novelists. The very first edition, back in 1983 picked, among others, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, Rose Tremain and Julian Barnes, that of 1993, Alan Hollinghurst, Jeanette Winterson, Hanif Kureishi and AL Kennedy. I therefore read with particular interest Study for Obedience, my first encounter with Sarah Bernstein, considering that she is one of the authors who have made the cut for the 2023 edition published earlier this week.
The (unnamed) female narrator
of this slim novel is the youngest of several siblings. She has – from early childhood and throughout
her life – made it her mission to serve their every desire. As a result, when her newly-divorced businessman
brother asks her to give up everything and move to the “northern country” where
he lives so as to be his companion and housekeeper, she readily accepts, seeing
this as an opportunity for further self-abnegation. She also makes an attempt to integrate into
the village community where he lives and to ingratiate herself with the locals. This, however, proves challenging. She finds
their language difficult to learn and understand and, despite her best efforts,
the villagers consider her an outsider. Worse still, soon after her arrival,
the village is plagued by several tragic events – deaths of farm animals, a
potato blight – which seem to point to some supernatural or, at the very least,
unnatural powers triggered by the narrator.
Her penchant for distributing doll-like figures as a “peace offering”
does not help, being taken by the villagers as evidence of witchery. Soon after, her brother’s health also starts to
fail. Is the narrator “guilty”? Or is
this some sort of metaphysical turning of tables?
Bernstein’s anointment as a leading “young British novelist” prepared me for a novel that would be original and different. Study for Obedience certainly is that, although I’m not sure I understood its point. Bernstein plays around with the rule book. Traditional writing advice tells you to ground the narrative into a defined temporal and geographical setting, ideally described early on. This novel does the opposite. It is tantalisingly – and sometimes frustratingly – vague on details. It is clearly set in the present day (as evidenced by the references to Twitter, meetings on Microsoft Teams, multinational lawfirms, cancel culture), yet the writing style sounds archaic, often employing the sort of rhetoric one would find, for instance, in old religious tracts. It is suggested that the narrator speaks English as a first language and that although she is good at languages, she cannot master the language of the “northern country” where her brother lives. We don’t know what this is, but vague references to ancient pogroms and persecutions against the narrator’s people (she is of Jewish extraction) would point to (possibly) a country in central continental Europe. All this creates a feeling of detachment and alienation, reflecting the feelings of the narrator who feels scapegoated by the villagers, in a chilling repeat of past histories. Her brother, in an apparent betrayal of his roots, seems to have assimilated into the community which once persecuted his people. The narrator simply cannot bring herself to do that even if she tries. She remains ever “different”.
The sense of dread is intensified by details of the narrative which seem to take a page out of the folk horror genre: the villagers indulge in a strange ritual at their church; the narrator is branded as a sort of witch – a harbinger of a string of unnatural occurrences.
My interpretation of this
strange work is that it is a metaphorical fable about the recurrence of past
sins and wrongs, as if the land is steeped in the blood of the narrator’s
forebears. But meanings, alas, remain
elusive.
No comments:
Post a Comment