Nicholas Lezard's choiceFictionReviewThis dystopic masterpiece is both fascinating and beautiful – and it completely does your head inFifteen years ago, I strongly recommended this author's first book, The Age of Wire and String, not despite but because it was composed of sentences such as this: "Intercourse with resuscitated wife for particular number of days, superstitious act designed to insure safe operation of household machinery. Electricity mourns the absence of the energy form (wife) within the household's walls by stalling its flow to the outlets." Or definitions of imaginary words, such as "blain": "Cloth chewed to frequent raggedness by a boy. Lethal to birds. When blanketed over the house, the sky will be swept of objects." This was a new and exciting talent, a writer doing things to and with language that no one else had thought of before. It wasn't surrealism: Steven Poole detected a testament to personal loss, and I think he was on the money. The very form of the language suggested evasion, or superstitious ritual intended to avert misfortune.
So there is something almost inevitable about The Flame Alphabet, which could be said to be the object of which The Age of Wire and String was the embryo. Before it Marcus wrote a second novel, Notable American Women, an exercise in the elimination of character (I can put it no better without going on at much greater length), which as far as I have been able to discover has not even been published in this country.
Were that not evidence of the kind of cautious philistinism that every so often afflicts publishers, you could argue that that book's non-appearance here was a deliberate move, or non-move, on Marcus's part: he affects to have deep troubles with words, picking them up and looking at them as if they were alien, treacherous artefacts.
In The Flame Alphabet, language has become literally poisonous: the carrier, it is suggested, of a primal allergen. It starts with children: their voices, their statements, make their parents sicken horribly, distressingly, and ultimately fatally. (One of the creepiest symptoms is the way people's faces become smaller.) Marcus has, then, taken the avant garde preoccupations of his earlier work and deftly transferred them obliquely to the form of the dystopic sci-fi novel.
Only it's not quite that simple. There are other strands at work, one being Jewishness. The Jews in this book listen to sermons delivered from an underground network: beneath huts erected in woods or other secret places, singly, or in pairs, they hear a rabbi deliver an intentionally incomprehensible sermon through a "Jew hole". "Since the entire alphabet comprises God's name, [Rabbi] Burke asserted, since it is written in every arrangement of letters, then all words reference God, do they not? … Therefore the language itself was, by definition, off-limits. Every single word of it. We were best to be done with it. Our time with it is nearly through."
What I found fascinating about this book, after its remarkable premise, which both invites and strongly resists allegorical interpretation, and the cold beauty of its prose, was my own reaction to it. I can put it no better than to say that this book got to me, and I started worrying whether Marcus had in fact achieved something darkly magical: the creation in readers of the very reaction he describes his characters having to language. In short, this book made me sick with anxiety, more so than I would have believed possible. I grew almost to fear it. I tried to comfort myself by thinking of Beckett's line from Malone Dies – "There is no use indicting words, they are no shoddier than what they peddle" – but, nota bene, the narrator is called Samuel. Later I speculated, with a kind of hopeless retreat into biographical literalism, whether fatherhood has not been kind to Marcus. (The narrator's daughter, Esther, whose name is surely ironically chosen when you consider the original Esther's place in Jewish tradition, has a particularly vile tongue anyway.) It was no good: this is a novel that does your head in, and your consolation is the number of quotes from reviewers who acknowledge that it had similar effects on them. In other words: it's a masterpiece.
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