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Historical fission
Lawrence Norfolk’s elusive Boar
BY PETER KEOUGH

Until the recent return of J.R.R. Tolkien, Lawrence Norfolk was perhaps the hottest thing in British fiction. He specialized in encyclopædic historic meta-fiction, juicy parcels of paranoia, overheated prose, esoteric research, and self-subverting solipsism in the mode of Umberto Eco and Thomas Pynchon. In Lemprière’s Dictionary and The Pope’s Rhinoceros, he indulged in this genre with, if not quite mastery, then exhilarating gusto, ingenuity, and exhaustive detail.

It’s all fun and games, though, until it becomes Serious Literature, and in his third novel, In the Shape of a Boar, Norfolk takes on the whole shebang — the truth of history, art, the meaning of it all or lack thereof. Not that these did not figure in his previous work, but he did have a sense of humor about it. None of that survives in the Boar, only a sense of eyestrain and the dust of old volumes and ideas.

As with all history, Norfolk begins with a myth, the Boar Hunt of Kalydon, an event occurring circa 1250 BC, a generation before the fall of Troy, and featuring a who’s who of classical heroes, including Jason of the Argonauts fame, the twins Castor and Pollux, Odysseus’s father, Laertes, and the chaste, centaur-castrating huntress Atalanta, the sole female. Some 60 in all have been enlisted by King Meleager to hunt down the beast sent by the wrathful goddess Artemis to ravage the countryside. Call them the Fellowship of the Boar. In the midst of the disastrous hunt a vague triangle emerges comprising Meleager, Atalanta, and the young " Night Hunter, " Meilanion. These three alone will survive to confront the boar in its cave.

Flash-forward some three millennia to the eve of World War II in the Romanian town of Bukovina, where another vague triangle — moody poet Sol Memel, his scholar friend Jakob Feuerstein, and aspiring actress Ruth Lackner — collapses before the wrath of the Third Reich. Memel flees to Greece and is taken prisoner and tortured by the Nazis before escaping to join partisans — led by their own Atalanta — to hunt down the local boar, a vicious SS officer.

Sol survives to write a poem, " Die Keilerjagd " ( " The Boar Hunt " ), that relates his experience to the Kalydon myth; it becomes an unlikely bestseller and classroom staple. But doubts as to whether the experience is his own are prompted by an annotated edition put out, perhaps, by the long-lost Jakob. These doubts are not assuaged, in Sol’s mind at any rate, when years later Ruth, now a hot director, decides she wants to adapt the poem to the screen.

Sol evokes another Holocaust poet, Paul Celan, who was also dogged by charges of plagiarism and who committed suicide in 1970. Then there’s Jerzy Kosinski, and Binjamin Wilkomirski, whose Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Child was exposed as a fraud. In this era of Holocaust doubters, the question of historical authenticity is no dithering matter, but in Boar, Norfolk turns the issue into the driest of academic exercises.

What can we know of the past, he asks. Certainly records of pre-Homeric events are almost as hard to come by as those of Enron today, and the story of the Boar Hunt comes to us in contradictory versions from different sources. Norfolk worked hard at tracking these down (two years, he claims) and, dammit, so will the reader. True, Norfolk has never made it easy for the reader — Rhinoceros, for example, opens with several pages of description from the point of view of a herring. But in the past he has at least made it entertaining. Here he annotates the opening third of the novel — the part relating the boar hunt — with references to classical authors from Aelianas to Zenobias, 180 footnotes in all, some taking up nearly a whole page. A bold stylistic gesture, perhaps, but those hoping for rewards along the lines of Nabokov’s Pale Fire will be disappointed.

As for the tale itself, it is as arid as the countryside Norfolk describes with relentless detail, peppered with pronouncements that sound like T.S. Eliot on a bender, such as " A tendrilled creature creates itself over the terrain’s rough fibre; its inky body will mark their meeting. " Or " The true fates of the heroes are to become their own apocrypha. " Or " The footprints churn the ground to an illegible palimpsest where all three are reduced to the evidence for their existences. . . .  " No wonder the rest of the novel, describing with increasing ambiguity Sol’s past and fate and the truth of what happened in his own cave, seems anti-climactic and irrelevant. By rendering the boar shapeless and the hunt as an exercise in tedious, tail-chasing futility, Norfolk takes the reader on a wild-goose chase.

Issue Date: January 17-22, 2002
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