From A to X

Book Review

John Berger

Before the TurboBookSnob can go any further, she must comment on the glaring set of typos at the beginning of this novel. On the first page, the narrator refers to “ Marlborough ” cigarettes, while mere pages later, the word is spelled “Marlboro.” As distracting as this apparent lack of editing is, the TurboBookSnob will attempt to ignore this and consider the novel's merit without this error.

In fact, John Berger occupies one of the more scandalous spots in the Man Booker Prize's history. When he won the award for his novel G in 1972, he wanted to refuse the honor, and instead of keeping the money, he reportedly donated all of it to the Black Panthers. Politics has always been in his nature.

His newest novel is tender and political at the same time. It has garnered the highest praise from one of his fellow Booker politicos, the brilliantly driven Arundhati Roy, who won the prize for The God of Small Things in 1997.  Roy writes about From A to X:

“John Berger has given us an exquisite thing. This is a book of controlled rage sculpted with tools of tenderness and a searing political vision. Everything he writes about is profound, precise and invoiced: Liberty and the lack of it, hope and the lack of it, power and the lack of it, love and the terrible yearning that takes its place when the loved one has been taken away.”

The other hint that From A to X has a political message comes from Berger's publisher – Verso Books claims to be “the largest English-language radical publisher in the world.”

The novel is written in the form of letters, written by A'ida, a woman living in a small village called Sucrat in an unnamed country savaged by war. She produces a one way correspondence with her lover, Xavier, throughout his lengthy stay in prison (two life sentences). The narrator, also called John Berger, together with a person named R “recuperates” these letters and presents them in the order in which they were stored in Xavier's cell, which may or may not be chronological. At times, Xavier uses the backs of these letters to record his thoughts, emotions, and political frustrations, and these jottings are included with the respective letters from A'ida. Together, they depict the savagery of war and the enduring beauty of a love separated, yet inextricably bound together.

A'ida's writing is complex, at times depicting everyday occurrences in her village and her interactions with her neighbours, an attempt to normalize everyday existence for her lover. At other times, she recounts anecdotes from her life with Xavier as if to emblazon their shared history upon his memory. Often, she plays the philosopher and writes with uncanny wisdom and simple elegance.

“There's such a difference between hope and expectation. At first I believed it was a question of duration, that hope was awaiting something further away. I was wrong. Expectation belongs to the body, whereas hope belongs to the soul. That's the difference. The two converse and excite or console each other but the dream of each one is different.”

Xavier's notes cover everything from his thoughts about America, to the availability of potable water in Third World countries, to the price of gold per ounce:

“1,000 million people do not have access to drinking water. In some areas of Brazil 1 litre of drinking water costs more to buy on the street than 1 litre of milk, in Venezuela more than 1 litre of petrol. At the same time it is planned that two pulp-paper mills, owned by Bothia and Ence, are going to use 86 million litres of water per day, taken from the Uruguay River .”

He also quotes people like Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez:

“After almost 200 years we can say that the USA was designed to fill the entire world with poverty—whilst giving it the name of Freedom. The United States empire is the greatest threat which exists in the world today…”

The combination of the lovers' two voices is powerful and familiar, and wholly relevant to modern times.

One of the stories A'ida relates originates from an encounter with a music teacher named Manda, and provides insight into the title of the novel, From A to X:

“In the beginning, she said, there were two names, no more, a name for women and a name for men. Quickly from each of the two shot out others which were variants, versions, of the first one. As time went by, the names given to people across the entire world, became more ingenious and more various, until most of them no longer recognised one another. Yet, unlike other words, people's names, however strange-sounding and unfamiliar, possess, whenever we hear or pronounce them, a common sound. It's not in the syllables, it's not A'ida. It's not Karim. It's not Shasno. It's not Ybarra. The sound is something that surrounds the names.

Manda shut her eyes and went on talking. The sound comes, I believe, from their velocity. Velocity is like a name, isn't she? All the world's names are rushing at the speed of light to converge on their point of origin, or else they are advancing at the speed of light to disintegrate into particles smaller than electromagnetic photons… I'm not sure which, but it doesn't matter. All that matters is that names are not like other words. That's why I'm learning the lute.

Ah! The music teacher!

 

From my name to your name.

 

From A'ida to Xavier.”

From A to X. Love advancing at the speed of light, smaller than electromagnetic photons, able to cross vast distances, real and imagined, from a ravaged village through the bars of a prison cell.

For all of its quiet beauty and its earnest moral compass, the novel requires a certain indulgence on the part of the reader. The concept is not a new one, and Berger utilizes every opportunity for his characters to display weighty insights. The lack of specificity is reminiscent of the annoying anonymity of Thomas Keneally's The Tyrant's Novel, a book that managed to be about Iraq and Saddam Hussein without naming either. The political bent of this novel exists more in the notes of Xavier than it does in descriptions of the country, the war, the oppression, or even the exact cause that A'ida and Xavier are fighting.

And yet this novel is successful and moving in ways that Keneally's novel is not, and this is because it possesses that certain special “something,” an unmistakable and mysterious quality the elevates From A to X to a sum much greater than its individual parts. It should secure a spot on the Man Booker Prize shortlist for 2008, and the TurboBookSnob believes that it stands a chance to win.