Book review: It's lighten up time

Published on Friday 20 June 2008 19:59

Illuminations: A Novel by Eva Hoffman Harvill Secker, 266pp, £16.99

EVA HOFFMAN HAS BEEN greatly acclaimed for her philosophical and historical non-fiction, not least Lost in Translation, her memoir of her childhood as a Polish immigrant growing up in America. Her new book, which synthesises many of her themes in fiction, ought by rights to be quite a heady brew. It's not. What went wrong?

One of the dangers of a philosophising novel is a preponderance of abstract nouns, something the novel in general loathes, and it does little to help Hoffman's tale. We first meet concert pianist Isabel Merton at the airport, at the start of a European tour. She has broken with her long-term partner, Peter, in an attempt to find what she wants, who she really is. But on the plane she meets an American diplomat, McElvoy, who later introduces her to the rebel Chechen activist, Anzor Islikhanov.

Things get a little tricky, plot-wise, after this moment. Isabel and Anzor fall in love and, rather preposterously, they continue to meet in just about every city on her itinerary. He only ever seems to want to have sex with her and lecture her endlessly about the situation in Chechnya, but occasionally he also complains about her friends who are too wealthy, liberal and American to understand the pain and suffering of his country. The attraction he has for Isabel is quite difficult to fathom.

While this love affair is taking place, Isabel is reading the published journals of her former mentor, Ernst Wolfe, which seems to delight in abstract nouns too ("Our histories do not bear thinking about. There were those who murdered and those who were murdered. Those who did worse than murder, those who were worse than murdered. The horror of it, the utter horror"). When Isabel witnesses the after-effects of a bomb blast in Rotterdam, we have a sense of what history is doing, how it is manipulating and manipulated.

But the seriousness of this message is submerged in writing that is difficult to get hold of. Attempting to echo the rhythms of music, Hoffman switches into a stream-of-consciousness form when describing characters in the audience watching Isabel play. This doesn't work because the characters in the audience all sound the same, irritatingly echoing each other ("ah yes… ah yes…").

Occasionally, we view Isabel or Anzor as if through a long lens ("see him there, in his not completely clean T-shirt and two days' stubble…"), which tends to sound artificial and clichd. But the worst fault is the inability of Hoffman to convince us about Isabel. We hear about her mother's lack of interest in her children, about her brother's death from drugs, and it barely touches us.

The reason for this lack of emotional involvement lies primarily in Hoffman's love of abstraction. Here is Isabel in Brussels, the day after giving a performance: "The ghost is still there when she wakes the next morning, pitching her into a state of irritable disaffection. What can culture mean? She wonders as she sets out on her morning walk, in a city where it is so ubiquitous. Culture which covers the world like an extra skin, static, pacific and fatly subsidised. We're fat with culture, she thinks…"

Philosophical reflections are perfectly welcome; only a fool would argue the cerebral has no place in a novel. But we need to know how Isabel is feeling, how the city makes her feel. Too often, Hoffman swerves away from this kind of interaction between Isabel and her surroundings. Even her love, or lust, for Anzor is couched in philosophical terms, distancing her from us at moments when we should be there with her, inside her head.

It's a basic lesson novelists have to learn: how to make us care about their characters. Hoffman, for all her intellectual gifts, has failed to learn it, judging by this effort. Her novel fascinated me – but for all the wrong reasons.

• Eva Hoffman is at the Edinburgh Book Festival on 14 August.