A woman is running for her life. “She slams her raised hands into two sets of fire doors ... stumbles ... keeps running.” The breathless opening of poet Lavinia Greenlaw’s third novel appears to promise a fast-paced thriller. The reader imagines a predator, a stalker perhaps, in pursuit. But this illusion is typical of the author’s legerdemain, in a novel that deals less with dramatic events than with the mind’s vagaries. Greenlaw charts tiny shifts and stirrings, semi-conscious responses and recoils. Iris, a museum conservator, is bolting from a fleeting conversation with a stranger who had reminded her of “something by the way he unbuttoned his coat”.
But what? Iris doesn’t know and the novel has much to say about not knowing, about loss of bearings. Here, the “something” that sparks between two middle-aged lovers-to-be is a moment of uncanny recognition. Both Iris and Raif are deeply embroiled in problematic relationships and mundane cares. Each appears to some degree traumatised. Iris is in the process of separating from her sick husband, David, and managing two unhappy daughters. In the breakdown of her marriage she has to register the truth of the message from David: “Your anger sucked the joy out of their childhood. They learnt to creep round you. We all did. You’re terrifying.” Ouch: that gets through her narcissistic carapace. Raif, widower and stalled academic, is sleepwalking into a future with Helen, who’s on the verge of moving in with him. He doesn’t really love her, and is still drifting in the wake of marriage to a woman it turns out he never really knew. How is the quicksilver moment of erotic arousal worth the damage it generates?
The theme of dangerous, mischievous Eros, who brings chaos to whomever he touches, is ancient: “He smites maids’ breasts with unknown heat, and bids the very gods leave heaven and dwell on earth in borrowed forms,” writes Seneca in Phaedra. Iris seems wise to bolt. But can she get away? And does she know where she is or what she’s doing?
I found the book at once riveting and frustrating. Greenlaw asks a great deal of her readers. Her manner is expository and she provides lashings of backstory. The narrative slows itself up at every turn, in favour of fable. An impersonal narrative voice commentates on the urban context: “The city with its millions is a place where we think we drift ... No one drifts ... Those who like to get caught up must be prepared to get lost. Perhaps they don’t cherish their own substance ...”
There must be hundreds of gnomic reflections on “us” and the way “we” feel. Who is providing these sometimes maddening aperçus? Neither Iris nor Raif, surely, but a sibylline narrator who dangles characters like puppets, presenting the work as a form of wisdom literature. In the City of Love’s Sleep seems oddly suspended between the George Eliot omniscient realist tradition, freighted with moral and philosophical commentary, and something experimental and post-Freudian, a kind of dreamy contemplation. The city is a mind; the mind a kind of city, whose alleyways of subterfuge and cul-de-sacs of decision the narrator attempts to map.
Short chapters are devoted to Iris’s museum objects: bone ice skates, a bronze skeleton four inches tall, a cloud mirror. The mini-histories that describe these and their provenance provide lively interludes.
The most interesting character to me was Lou, Iris’s beautifully drawn older daughter. She is on the brink of adolescence, and her pain is a measure of the harm her parents, and especially her mother, have inflicted on the younger generation. Her anger is just: “Don’t talk about my father like that! ... Even when he had MS you were horrible. Making him do stuff and shouting at him all the time.” But Lou also has a temperate spirit, an understanding heart and better judgment than her mother. The relationship between the two daughters is affectingly sketched: they preside over a secret museum hoard of their own, echoing Greenlaw’s theme of the talismanic role of objects that ground us in our world.
If its self-conscious manner sometimes challenges one’s patience, In the City of Love’s Sleep is an ambitious and thought-provoking experiment in charting the fugitive moments that make a life.
• Stevie Davies’s Arrest Me, for I Have Run Away is published by Parthian. In the City of Love’s Sleep is published by Faber. To order a copy for £12.89 (RRP £14.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
