Fiction/Eileen Battersby: Sex and food could be described as our two basic needs: food is interesting, sex is marginally more so - or less so, depending on your point of view.
Jim Crace, one of Britain's more imaginative writers, has already explored the darker and more sinister aspects of food in The Devil's Larder (2001); now he tackles sex in Six - or does he?
Six promises something, a clue, a secret, the tiniest hint perhaps as to why sex is at the same time power and helplessness, comfort and terror. But this slim novel offers the slimmest of narratives. It is the world according to the sexual experiences of an actor named Felix Dern, who is remarkable, at least as far as his creator is concerned, for two reasons. Firstly, he has a large birthmark on his face. Secondly, every woman he sleeps with bears his child.
This second fact is not as overwhelming as may initially appear, as, at the time we meet this most boring of characters, there have only been five children, with a sixth just beginning its pregnancy journey within the body of Felix's second wife, Mouetta. She is doomed to live in the shadow of her cousin, Freda, the sexual partner the actor most desired yet could not keep.
Six is no doubt intended to be a clever conceit, a graceful collection of shrewd observations. These are the games we play, this is the price we pay. In Felix's case, the price is children - a bit insulting, that. Sex is about hidden needs and is usually more about oneself than it is about the object of one's particular desire. The sad reality that Felix the actor is about as dull a man as has ever bestrode a sidewalk, never mind a stage, is just one of the many shortcomings of a study of indulgence that is itself a work of monumental self-indulgence. Crace exercises his always graceful, supple prose in a series of empty posturings that deliver nothing.
Felix never develops. Late to experience sex, he then adheres to a life pattern of nothing much. Aside from the dramatic Freda, a woman whose seductions apparently rely on the fear she inspires, his sexual partners are collectively as dull as he is. Is Crace merely confirming that daily life is a mindless ordeal and that unless tragedy strikes nothing much really happens? The prevailing sensation when reading this novel is of being a spectator while Crace the smug puppet-master simply plays games.
Neither the games nor the tricks are all that ingenious. The setting is deliberately vague, clearly a city, the City of Kisses, possibly a European city. Judging by the references to floods, it could be Budapest, although there are no clues. It is a wet, watery place, a bit like most of the non-characters. Heavy in the air, however, is the lingering sense of a time in which people did at least take action as opposed to merely act. Freda carries a photo of an unnamed Czech who might have had revolution in his blood as well as in his features.
But is the reader seriously expected to feel sympathy for a character because his few sexual encounters always result in children? Had Crace, or indeed anyone else, written a novel about a woman in a similar situation, readers might have shrugged their shoulders and asked why. No woman writer would have got away as easily with exploring the thoughts and memories of one female character's sequence of aimless non-relationships, and the children produced.
Felix, we are told, is timid. His tentativeness does not help him become a character; there is only so much one characteristic can do when there is no personality. Safe to say, in the absence of much else, his early encounter with Freda offers the only life in the work. Not that this is saying much.
He was someone new and unrehearsed, the over-cheerful, over- careful supplicant, who wanted desperately to keep this woman at his side. His voice had softened, matching hers. He tried and didn't quite manage to sound as uncompromisingly logical. He could feel his body change just from being close to her, within her odour range.
The cold cleverness of The Devil's Larder resulted in performance fiction that at least repelled. This book simply irritates. It is not that Crace needs a story: in several of his best novels, such as Arcadia, another city book, published in 1992, there is no story as such. Being Dead (1999), an outstandingly complex exploratory tract in which a couple are brutally and mindlessly murdered, defies the solving of the crime as the actual story concerns the recreation of the couple through the process of their physical disintegration.
Metaphysics is not beyond Crace's range. He is a clever, provocative writer and, as Signals of Distress (1994) and Quarantine (1997), ably demonstrated, he is not without a sense of humour. But the sheer stylishness that began to manifest itself with The Devil's Larder and now appears at its most oppressive in the empty confection of Six leaves the reader wondering at Crace's rising, and risky, levels of irony.
The closing lines of Six appear to say all and nothing, much as the book itself:
Still the streaks and pricks of light are eloquent. They tell of people going home. They tell of love and love- making, of children, marriages and lives. You think, But this could happen anywhere. It does.
Such an arch finale suits the rest of a narrative that glides on the surface of a surface, that take blandness into and beyond nothingness. Not even the half-hearted subversion can render this idle designer thesis relevant. Why write it? More importantly, why bother reading an empty conceit from a writer who can do, and has done, so very much better.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Six By Jim Crace Viking, 220pp. £16.99