It’s a good, solid, atheistic message, delivered in language of great poetry, clarity and beauty.You can only admire Crace for tackling such a tricky subject. Crace paints them with immense compassion, but perhaps they’re a little too good, a little too victimised, to be of startling interest.The novel’s message is a convincing one: we manufacture our own heroes out of our own needs. Jesus, or “The Gally” as Musa calls him, is an unknown being made radiant and numinously powerful by the others’ projections. He’s been left behind for dead by his caravan, which has travelled on without him. His wife Miri, whom he bullies and beats, has been abandoned too. Full of hope , she digs a grave for her husband and aches for widowhood. Lots of miserable marital sex has made her pregnant, unlike Marta, another desperate pilgrim arrived for 40 days of penance and prayer, who’s barren and desperate to conceive.
A certain comedy sets in as Musa unexpectedly recovers, accidentally aided by Jesus, whom the ambitious merchant now recognises as saviour and longs to set up in business, and the two women make friends. We have to take on trust what Crace’s omniscient narrator tells us about his spiritual drive, his love of prayer, his confused humanity. He emerges as definitely different, very much other.Perversely, I found the merchant Musa a more sympathetic character, perhaps because he’s so familiar and recognisable, a true Thatcherite entrepreneur, a master of tricks, bribes and deceit. Jesus, for example, is like one of those male mountaineers determined to scale Everest at all costs: he’s the classic loner, driven to prove himself by a god (Crace prefers lower-case for the creator) who’s high above, all spirit. We don’t discover what Jesus is like as a person by watching him interact with the other denizens of his chosen desert, because he needs to keep away from human beings in order to test his powers of survival.
Its air was thin; its earth was pale; its weeds were frayed; its moods were fractious and despairing.”The protagonists pit themselves against it in various characteristic ways. The scrub was economical, as well, like some old men, and boundless in its barrenness and poverty. The land is like a person: “The scrub required its passengers to take care of themselves or go without. If you make one of the tortured souls Jesus Christ, preparing for his future ministry by withdrawing for 40 days into the wilderness to pray and fast, then you can expect some extra heavenly revelations, as his companions squabble over the meaning of holiness and salvation.
The strongest impression left by this novel is that of its setting, scrub and scree unequalled in bleakness and inhospitality. But the conceptual material is insufficient for anything longer than a macabre short story. Given that the narrator spends so much time in the library researching his monomania, it is impoverishing that the story is so indifferent to the theories of Chomsky, Fodor, Dennett et al. This is where the interesting ideas of language glow – things about which The Dumb House, a mean, cold book, has nothing to say..
Take a few troubled characters, each driven by private demons, put them down in the loneliest and roughest desert landscape you can imagine,
deprive them of comforts and security, then sit back and watch them scrabble to survive It sounds like the plot outline of a disaster movie. This weird keening has such an unsettling effect on the narrator that he enacts an ugly surgical revenge.Burnside, a poet, arrests the mind with a few splendid images. “Mother is the only person who is completely real for me,” he admits, but that’s one more person than is real for the reader.Burnside’s narrator is merely a device by which the author works through his own obsession with language, and its dangerous illusion of cosmic order. The narrator’s mother, terminally ill, demands that her son cover the bedroom mirror: “I found an old shawl, and used it to cover the mirror, binding it with the twine, unable to shake the idea that we were still there, frozen on the surface of the glass, in a last glance.” But having lovingly sewn together his monster, Burnside is unable to conjure a vital spark from the heavens.
Unfortunately for the twins, they begin singing to each other: a form of communication, it seems, self-invented and entirely private. He impregnates a young homeless woman, who dies after giving birth messily to twins at his home. These twins, his children, he names A and B and locks in a cage in the cellar. He plays them instrumental music but does not speak to them, and has no direct contact except at feeding time.
