When Will Tye, a Cambridge student, falls from the roof of King’s College chapel in May 1994, his sister, Hetta, finds among his possessions a book called The Night Climbers of Cambridge, with a “black and white photo of a young man climbing a building”. At first I assumed that Vickers had invented the book, but it turns out to have been published in the 1930s under the pseudonym “Whipplesnaith”. According to Whipplesnaith, a night climber is an outlaw, a sportsman and a thrill-seeker. “Out of the darkness they come, in darkness they remain, and into darkness they go.”
Will’s failed stunt is the dramatic centre of Salley Vickers’ 10th novel, but the narrative mood is quiet, discursive and brooding. Will, always an anomaly, remains – like Jacob in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room – an enigma. Cousins takes the form of a threefold fictional memoir in which Vickers explores “family, that spider’s web of which we are all a part”, with its secrets, evasions and silences. Will’s reckless, troubled maleness is approached through female questioning and heart-searching.
What was the nature of the passionate bond between first cousins Will and Cecilia Tye, which seemed to precipitate his downfall? Who can say for sure? For family life, as represented in Cousins, is opaque and occluded. Choices and accidents in one generation may have subtle consequences in the next or the next-but-one. Vickers ponders undercurrents that swirl unaccountably down the ages. Patterns of behaviour surface and subside – and each generation, conscience-stricken, seeks out discrepant clues to explain them.
Three saddened narrators – Hetta, Will’s grandmother Betsy and his aunt Bell – take turns, searching out past events that might have foreshadowed Will’s passion for his cousin, his accident and its tragic sequel. The story takes in a 70-year sweep of family history, from the second world war to the present, with the narrators’ euphonious names testifying to the close ties; their loquacious styles and perceptions echo and vary, as they mull over the darkened lives of Will and Cecilia. Hetta, a bookish and emotional young woman, acts as “the conduit through which the collective family tears were let”. Her account opens in the immediate aftermath of Will’s fall, “when everything changed for my family”. Betsy, their spirited grandmother, locates the moment of change in her adoption of her husband’s child, Nat, whose fate mysteriously prefigures Will’s. Bell, Cecilia’s unmotherly mother and easily the most vivid of the narrators, plays “black sheep” to Will’s “black lamb”. She rejects the submerged, self-punishing guilt that runs through families and would, with an irony she acknowledges, have been a perfect mother for Will but has been a lousy one to Cecilia.
Doubling, mirroring and twinship are the major themes and structural devices. Two sets of first cousins fall in love. Two young men fall from King’s chapel. “It’s Nat all over again!” cries Hetta’s father. Like Toby in Pat Barker’s Toby’s Room and Ormus in Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Will was born with a dead twin: his passionate bonding with his cousin is taken to imply an unconscious attempt at recuperation of original loss. Betsy recalls Will as a baby crying in “a strangely unchildlike way ... He is lamenting his lost twin, poor little lamb”.
Perhaps too much is made of this and other thematic motifs. Fictional family memoir has to negotiate the problem that can turn real-life family historians into first-class bores: the further back you go, the more names, places, dates and deeds you accumulate. There are too many characters in Cousins. “Eddie, this is Beetle’s son, Will. Will, Eddie was Nat’s great friend.” But Nat is sometimes called Jack. And who was Beetle again? The story tends to interrupt itself with new items of information: “I need to explain here about Mrs Mahoane,” says Hetta. Oh, please don’t, I implored her.
Such excess, however, is a side effect of Vickers’ commitment to the realism required by fictional memoir. Trapped within their limited perspectives, the three narrators weave a fascinating exploration of the often equivocal and always cryptic nature of family love.
• Stevie Davies’s Equivocator is published by Parthian. Cousins is published by Viking. To order a copy for £13.93 (RRP £16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
.png?w=600)
