Neil Sonnekus SIGNS OF THE HEART by Christopher Hope (Picador)
There are usually two reactions to the name Christopher Hope. The first and most frequent, usually by those who worship television programming, is one of blank incomprehension. The other is slightly more difficult to pin down and therefore more interesting.
It is something that approaches politically correct condescension, which partially (perhaps even subconsciously) has to do with the fact that he left this country a quarter of a century ago and is therefore not really “one of us”. He didn’t fight the struggle “our” way. He didn’t “stay”.
In fact, he questioned the struggle and sent it up as much as he did the powers-that-were. How dare he? How dare he go out into the wider world and occasionally write about other subjects, even though it’s usually from the unashamed point of view of an expat South African? And lastly, how dare he actually see this country and the world from a point of view that is as fond as it is fatalistic?
Apart from his fine, comical fiction he also started writing a kind of subjective reportage about places like Russia; it was as informative and insightful as it was entertaining. Then, having grown tired of England, he accidentally ended up in the Languedoc region of southern France and liked it so much that he stayed. Now he has written about that place as well, and comparisons with Peter Mayle’s bestselling A Year in Provence will be inevitable, but unfounded.
If Mayle sees the region through a homey, soft-focus lens, then Signs of the Heart is very much informed by an eye that can spot the small and mean as easily as it can recognise an ugly provincial restaurant being more profoundly spiritual than any church.
Hope is not one to start with what is called an arresting opening, even if his writing has become both leaner and paradoxically richer over the years. It takes a while to set up and get into a gallery of characters who, if they weren’t real, one would dismiss as fantastically fictitious. Like the woman from New Zealand who thinks she is God and who is “infused with the joy that makes martyrs so difficult to deal with”.
But the book goes way beyond merely describing a contradictory collection of people and landscape that is soaked with the blood of the Cathars, for whom it was “tough being a heretic. First the authorities burn you alive, then [a few centuries later] they name the menu gastronomique after you.”
It’s about spending enough time with all kinds of types, often deadly dull ones, to find some illuminating moments in a world “where sense and sobriety rules and science is king; where God is officially dead and life is run from California”. Perhaps Signs of the Heart is good holiday reading, as one British critic put it, but for us it is also a bit of home from home. If not, it is our loss and our loss alone.