RACHEL CUSK
TLS
Charlotte Cory
THE LAUGHTER OF FOOLS
264pp. Faber. £14.99.
0571 16815
“If one is to be taken in by a man”, says a woman who has, in Charlotte
Cory’s second novel, “let him at least be a man worth the sum of
his deceptions.” The man in question is Pegglar, a bigamous breeder of
fowl and of foul play, author of anarchy and father of fabrication, the considerable
sum of whose deceptions only begins to accrue interest after his death, when
wives start coming out of the woodwork.
Cory is a writer whose depths are best manifested in comedy, and who is at her funniest when what she mocks is at its most bleak. Pegglar is a small-town poultryman so enamoured of christening prize-winning strains that he sets about fathering a flock of his own offspring. His progeny is the novel’s subject. We are shown the plight of those living in the half-light of shared childhoods in which the story of the self is replaced by myths of parental potency, and the nascent imagination rampages unchecked; in which the particularity of childhood is invaded by duplication and chaos. “Rare breeds, all, of his own mismatching. How Pegglar has fluttered and clucked!”
The more gruelling trials of parenthood, however, prove Pegglar better suited to breeding than brooding: “When the younger child had fallen in the canal Pegglar had shaken his head and spoken of the eggs he had lost in his days as a poultryman. The shells had been brittle, the hens often careless. You must expect to lose a few.”
Not surprisingly, such a philosophy of fatherhood fails to impress the child’s mother, but accountability was never part of Pegglar’s plan, and he chickens out.
In a story strewn with freak accident and mischance, we are shown only one of Pegglar’s brood, Rosa, who lives to tell her father’s tale after his death. Rosa’s spiralling, quixotic narrative is in turn related by Jeannie, a girl with no story, whose shadowy existence is the image of Pegglar’s flights of fancy crashing down to earth. Rosa has charged Jeannie with “writing it all down”, and it is on this process of bequeathing history that the book centres itself.
“I could be anybody”, says Rosa. As with her father, as many versions of her exist as there are people to create them; but while Pegglar was the sire of his own desires, Rosa is the reflection of those of others. Where Pegglar first created her as a page on which to write himself, so others continue to scrawl their stories in the blank space where her own should be. “Yet, for all that I managed to make Rosa talk about the past and recount things that happened before I was born”, says Jeannie, “I don’t not think she herself believed in a time before she was born.” For Rosa, history is coincidence; by telling her own story, she is in a sense discovering herself in reverse: her existence will come to seem intentional and chance be made to look like destiny. The problem with children, Cory seems to be saying, is that they can’t remember where they came from; they must be told a story, and they must believe it. Jeannie’s failure of imagination takes her to the heart of a starker truth: a form of madness, where fiction becomes reality and reality a place of fools.
The Laughter of Fools is an easy book to like and a difficult one to understand,
though the elegant surface of Cory’s narrative is rarely interrupted by
its complex underlying intentions. She is a resourceful stylist, and so funny
that her comic sense seems at times to wrestle with her tragic. “He died
in my house”, mourns one of Pegglar’s women to another after his
body has been removed. “In my bed … I still have his pipe.”
After Pegglar’s death, when Rosa and her mother are forced to move to
a smaller house without a garden, Pegglar’s dog, Alfie, decides to feign
his own death as a means of escape, in one of the many scenes which Charlotte
Cory breeds from a rare crossing of empathy, absurdity and the macabre: “As
the cart jolted off with the dog thrown on top of the pile of dirty sacking,
she had seen Alfie open an eye and look straight back at her … Then he
had sprung from the cart with a yelp of joy and had run as he used to run, back
to the long grass full of daisies.”