HERE IS WHERE WE MEET
by John Berger
Bloomsbury £14.99, 256 pages

In an essay published shortly after the “velvet” revolutions of 1989, John Berger suggested that it wasn’t only the joy of liberation that one could make out on the faces of the demonstrators in Prague, Leipzig and Warsaw. Their expressions also registered something older and deeper - a sense that the “living [were] remeeting the dead” and reacquainting themselves with a past from which they had been cut off by the hollow promise of a “radiant future”.

Here is Where We Meet is also concerned with the presence of the dead and the persistence of the apparently unremembered. Two-thirds of the way through the book, Berger leaves a lone sentence marooned on a page of white space: “The number of lives that enter our own is incalculable.” Berger has used such nouveau romanesque typographical devices to some effect before, and here we are clearly being invited to take this as a statement of the book’s premise or organising principle. Though ostensibly a work of fiction (”novel” is at once too narrow and too imprecise a term to be of much use here), its formal and thematic affinities with Berger’s essays are striking; indeed, in his hands, the distinction between the fictional and essayistic modes is a precarious one.

In the first chapter, Lisboa”, the narrator, who is also named “John”, sees his mother sitting on a bench on the banks of the Tagus. She has been dead for 15 years. John and his mother fall into a routine, meeting at various places around Lisbon and discussing his childhood, her first marriage (not to his father) and her attitude to her son’s work.

At one point he asks her, “Why did you never read any of my books?” Here, Berger is reprising an explicitly autobiographical text he wrote nearly 20 years ago. In “Mother”, he recalls how she failed to read most of his books, preferring to leave his being a writer “unqualified” by what he wrote. His mother thought writers were people who dealt in secrets, so perhaps not reading his books was a way of ensuring that they remained “more secret”.

Later in Here is Where We Meet, Berger retells another anecdote, about how his mother and his daughter colluded in a kind of unspoken understanding, as if “sense was only to be found in secrets”. This retelling is given a political and historical frame: “Last summer while Bush and his army and the petrol corporations and their advisers were ruining Iraq, I had a rendezvous in Geneve with my daughter, Katya.” For Berger, politics, aesthetics and metaphysics are of a piece - another reason why it’s hard to tell his fictions apart from his essays. But such crude sermonising sits uneasily here; it is as if Berger is violating his own strictures on the verbal precision required to render the “ambiguity” he has identified elsewhere as the writer’s proper quarry.

The jarring is compounded by the fact that for most of this book-essentially a collection of discrete sketches in various settings- Berger’s prose is a stealthy miracle of precision. His painterly eye for sensuous particularity has often been remarked on and it is on frequently thrilling display here: the “right” temperature for greengages is said to be the “temperature of a small boy’s fist”; the narrator listens to a dog’s tail “thumping” on the floor of a Lisbon tram; and a rock in the caves of the Ardeche is compared with the “tip of a pancreas”.

The semi-fictional essay-cum-memoir Berger is attempting here is primarily a European literary form - it’s the sort of thing that W.G. Sebald, for example, did so dramatically and unsettlingly in German. Berger’s achievement is to manage it in an English idiom sinuous enough to voice the “unfamiliar recognitions and hopes” that he read on the countenances of the protesters in Wenceslas Square.