- Seen elsewhere on the internet and published with permission.
Title: We two from heaven
Author: James Whyle
Publisher: Jonathan Ball
ISBN: 9781776193844
With any justice in the world, James Whyle would be a household name. While I haven’t had the privilege of reading his short stories as of yet, his The book of war (2012) and Walk (2013) impressed me enormously.
Whyle is clearly an intellectual person and a supremely thoughtful writer, with an appreciation of the wry and understated. What sets him apart and what makes these two texts linger in the memory, is how the author plays with our understanding of time, space, the textures of human relationships, motivation and notions of violence, progress and survival – profound ideas about man’s grappling with his darker impulses. I am thinking of men here, specifically, because Whyle is interrogating various kinds of masculinity, maleness, how male bodies make their way in the world, and how men rationalise and understand their own behaviour – or fail to do so. This is combined with clever formal and technical flourishes and structuring.
In short, Whyle really, really gets the nub of writing stories and performing literary excavations where the form has something to say about, and cannot be divorced from, the content. Both The book of war and Walk offer deceptively simple titles only to undercut expectations of what fiction can do and should be doing, and how we are essentially still so bitterly far away from a society where we honour the better angels of our nature. You don’t read Whyle to feel good. You don’t read him to find hope. You don’t read him to find comfort. What you can and should read him for are the myriad ways in which he reminds us of our responsibility and duty to question what we think we know – and never to lose our sense of wonder about what the world is and could be. And, especially, to remember to play and play well.
There’s zero chance, then, of Whyle’s hugely affecting memoir, We two from heaven, embracing the conventional and not refusing a play on form, theme and narrative voice. The root of “memoir” comes from the Latin word memoria, meaning “memory”, passed through the Old French word mémoire, which also signifies memory or reminiscence. This ultimately refers to a written account of personal experiences from the author’s own life, focusing on specific times, feelings and lessons rather than an entire life history.
Our brains and memories might have clearly observable and quantifiable structures, but I don’t think two human beings have ever remembered the same event or events in exactly the same way. There are always differences and slight variations, no matter who, how, what or where. Whyle knows this full well; he isn’t attempting anything close to a linear, expected or neatly boxed memoir that is purely chronological and easily digested. Instead, in a “four-part fugue” analogous to music, we see father and son, real life and letter-writing, immediacy and distance, swaying together as in a dance. An intermingling of nature and culture, if you will.
Taking his father’s letters from the Western Front during the First World War – with a marked shift in perspective, tone, feeling and attempts to process and understand, as time passes – and juxtaposing these letters with moments from his own life, Whyle is almost more of a composer than a writer, you feel. Strands overlap. Reflections and overlaps illuminate or cast a shadow over truths and understandings, and over traumatic and other memories. Neither story is privileged over the other.
This contrapuntal narrative made me think of another fiction master, Michael Ondaatje, and how he engages with space, time, memory and subjectivity in his divisive yet brilliant Divisadero. We assume that time heals (all) wounds, but what if that isn’t the case at all? What if time widens the chasm, wounds us anew and draws us further and further away from understanding? What if time is the great wound, contrary to our beliefs? What if time, as sung a little differently by Mick Jagger, is never truly on our side?
In We two from heaven, a multitude of voice and reporting modes – some intimate and some more distanced or aloof or “objective” – bring our understanding of truth into question. Ironically, poignantly and elegantly, Whyle reveals how the past can feel so alive and urgent and the present so distant and opaque. Talking into the void. The counterpoint as investigative tool. Nostalgia as rewounding. Forgetting and oblivion within a membrane of one another. Closure as the biggest myth of all.
He writes about real events, real politics, real trauma and true feelings of guilt, shame and disillusionment; language becomes both rapier and broadsword, sometimes a tool to set a flame and sometimes one to cauterise. Whyle’s prose is typically raw, charged with meaning and dense with allusion and wordplay. These sentences build a staccato (sometimes legato) rhythm, stripped as they are of anything vaguely superfluous or approaching the sentimental. Whyle can be rather caustic, acerbic and occasionally bitter, but is never patronising.
We all know what the Bible says happened to Lot’s wife looking back, but Whyle doesn’t look back in anger or despair. Rather, he brings a sagacious, unshowy, cumulatively staggering force of insight and understanding to very charged and raw feelings. Humour and ridicule expertly undercut some very serious moments; likewise, light and breezy moments can turn deadly serious and revealing of interiority, just like that. There’s not a shred of cliché in what Whyle underlines, time and time again: the personal is political, and the political is personal.
Whyle’s might be a stripped-down and spare “language of confrontation”, but the tenderness and poignancy he is able to pry from these stories is nothing short of extraordinary. You wouldn’t compare Whyle with Ivan Vladislavic as a first port of call, but there is something of Vladislavic’s understated, elegant gut punch in Whyle’s work here.
What does it mean to read your father’s First World War letters, and to try to remember a man you truly didn’t know all that well? What does it mean to reflect on the utter absurdity and existential terror – the structural and emotional madness – of the apartheid state and conscription? What does it mean when the very vessel of the crazy and unjust brand you as mentally unwell and unfit to serve? We two from heaven underscores and continuously reiterates how we cannot speak of war without speaking of family, isolation, self-loathing and intergenerational trauma. In this sense, there’s a powerful conversation between We two from heaven and Dana Snyman’s memoir, Seun.
War is a tree with a million rings, trauma a river of feeling and force with no foreseeable end. We encounter talk about “surviving” your parents and about the body’s “nervous system”. I found Whyle’s formal aesthetic of history and memory as collage endlessly intriguing and very apt. James Whyle as a nature writer is the stuff of dreams. You wish Justin Fox and Whyle would document a bunch of sit-downs, where they speak about their travels, the sublime power of the natural world and how we find our place in the cosmos.
Reflecting on what this book is and does would be incomplete without an acknowledgement of what we might call the writing about the artist as a young, younger man and as a more mature, older man. Later sections especially have a lightness and levity that nevertheless harbour devastating truths about how boys are twisted into men and how men never fully recover from their adolescent wounds.
We two from heaven isn’t only about a father and son, and a son reckoning with an uncertain and unsettling legacy. It is also, absolutely, about the twin truths that both nourish and destroy us: firstly, that there is no growth, no progress, no true living and certainly no true being in and part of the world, without great suffering. Secondly, that our earthly suffering activates and feeds our creative imagination, sense of play and truly resilient instincts to imagine what lies beneath and beyond.
Heaven might be just out of reach, but Whyle makes an outstanding case for a rediscovery of the ordinary – to reawaken one Njabulo Ndebele.
See also:
Seen elsewhere: Intermezzo by Sally Rooney – a reader’s impression