Kasia Boddy
THE ANGLE OF INCIDENCE by Alex Benzie (Viking)
Alex Benzie’s novel begins with a Freudian primal scene. Five-year-old Cameron stumbles upon his parents in the act of generation. Rather than sending her son away, his mother, Catherine, insists that he watch. She wants him to understand that it is not an act of violence.
When Cameron’s father is dying painfully of cancer in the next chapter, Catherine again brings her son to look. Her reasons emerge in this novel preoccupied with parental legacies and the way that looking (and the knowledge that comes from clear- sightedness) can redeem.
After her husband’s death, Catherine drifts into a relationship with a struggling artist whose attempts at working-class portraiture are dismissed as genre painting. This is the Glasgow of the 1960s, and all that will sell are Jackson Pollock rip-offs or variations on the Monarch of the Glen.
The novel has all the Glasgow clichs – sex, drink, religion, violence, and a desire to memorialise working-class life. Yet it is as if the dialect battles of James Kelman et al have never happened. Using both standard English and dialect un- selfconsciously, Benzie builds symbolism and tension into a prose of minutely observed detail. Great care is taken in describing the impact of a first plate of lasagne on Glasgow tastebuds or the exact way coal is put on the fire. It is also a sympathetic prose, devoid of irony and cynicism.
This novel explores many of the same themes as Benzie’s first, The Year’s Midnight – the nature of justice and inheritance, the value of work, and the ways in which technology can be harnessed. The crucial equation is that of knowledge and power. But in this novel, the focus is narrower and more intimate than in The Year’s Midnight. Its intensity focuses on Catherine.
While she comes across as a believable creation, the plot’s twists are not always plausible. The novel veers into dangerously melodramatic territory on several occasions. But although the ghost of Thomas Hardy hovers, Catherine is no Tess and Benzie no determinist intent on seeing her suffer. He is keen to show that there is more to realism than authenticity. The things seen in shadows and reflections can be truer than those noticed in direct light.