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Guilty (Peter Owen Modern Classics)

by Anna Kavan

3.56 · rating details · 9 ratings · 3 reviews

British author Kavan (1901-1968) plays with the confusion of reality and unreality in this understated posthumous novel set in a nebulous time and place. When Mark, the somewhat unstable and unreliable narrator, is young, his war-hero father treasonously converts to pacifism and is forced to abandon him. Further isolated by a gradual separation and distancing from his mo...more

Paperback, 220 pages

Published May 1st 2007 by Peter Owen Ltd (first published February 4th 2007)

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Apr 22, 2011

Joselito rated it

Mark's father was a former soldier who had fought in two wars. He came home a minor hero but then publicly declared himself a pacifist. For this, he was ostracized and was forced to leave his family (Mark and his mother) to look for a new place for them to live in where his opinions against war can be received with tolerance.

While Mark's father was away, their frequent visitor was Mr Spector (no dot for the "Mr"), an old friend of his father. As this novel is in the first-...moreMark's father was a former soldier who had fought in two wars. He came home a minor hero but then publicly declared himself a pacifist. For this, he was ostracized and was forced to leave his family (Mark and his mother) to look for a new place for them to live in where his opinions against war can be received with tolerance.

While Mark's father was away, their frequent visitor was Mr Spector (no dot for the "Mr"), an old friend of his father. As this novel is in the first-person narrative, by Mark himself, starting at that time he was still a young boy, there could only be a hint that his mother and Mr Spector had become lovers while his father was away. Or had at least been in a very serious flirting stage. Mr Spector became Mark's surrogate faather with whom he had mixed feelings of love and hate, respect and fear. It was Mr Spector who made a school, which hated Mark's father's pacifist ideas, accept Mark as a student where he was coldly treated even by his fellow students.

Anna Kavan got an extra star from me for this name "Mr Spector." I realized that no English name could be more sinister-sounding than this as it brings to the ear similar horrific-sounding words like Inspector (trouble with the law), Spectre (haunting), Spectral (ghostly), Spectrum (confusing), Expectorate (rejection) and Spector (Phil, bad music).

Mark saw horror in everything but seemed to like it. He was intelligent, had a knack for writing and the arts, but hated chess. In the school where he was admitted into, after some vague arm-twisting done to the school officials by this enigmatic Mr Spector, there was a topiary chess-garden where trees were cut in the shape of chess pieces. A guy like me, or even just a normal boy, would be jumping up and down with a fantasy garden like this, considering it perhaps as the 9th wonder of the world. But not Mark. He called this garden malignant. His own description (and note how well he wrote to capture the gloom he saw in this innocent-looking place):

"No flowers grew here among the rows of tall evergreens, immensely old and cunningly clipped in the shapes of chessmen, by which I'd been so impressed when I first arrived. Even now, after years have passed, their weird aspect, hard and solid-looking as if carved out of malachite, is the thing I remember most clearly about the school. Only one man in the whole country was expert enough to give them their yearly trim, and his family had held the hereditary office since time immemorial. When the sun was high, these arborial curiosities could resemble a grotesque company of medieval giants, with their attendant dwarf-shadows. Or an army of green invaders from an alien planet sometimes seemed to be marching in ordered formation across the lawn, where only masters and prefects were allowed to tread. All their transformations, however, as my first glimpse had showed me, possessed the common quality of malice, which infected the air around them, as if, throughout the centuries of their long lives, they'd been accumulating contempt and bitterness for their human creators, which found expression in this emanation.
"x x x
"Outside there, I could see the chessmen, at their most mocking, crowd one behind the other to peer in derisively at me, as though all the centuries-old malice, which should have been distributed over the whole human race, had been concentrated on me alone."

Eventually he finished his studies and had to leave that school. But, on his fianl day there, he wasn't finished with the chess garden yet:

"I seemed to get the better of the chessmen, too, in the end. When I looked at them for the last time from Mr Spector's big car, they at first appeared utterly indifferent to my departure, standing stiff and unmoving in sombre rows. Then suddenly, on this bleak and blustery day, the wind set them confabulating; putting their black heads together, they gobbled and gabbled in growing excitement and finally started to dance up and down, as if in rage at being rooted there and unable to follow me, except with their clamorous mocking voices, whistling derisively after me as we drove away."

The book's blurbs use the word "Kafakaesque" (I thought it's "Kafkaesque," after all Franz's surname was "Kafka" and not "Kafaka," but maybe even the blurbs would like to have a mysterious, foreboding tone themselves). Indeed, this novel is so oppressive, nightmarish and so black that it was almost always midnight. And if both Franz Kafka and his predecessor Heinrich von Kleist had their own Castles, Mark here had his...Housing Bureau. And if you think this sounds ridiculous (and the basic plot too, if I'll give it to you here), then you haven't seen how Mark writes about the world HE lives in--

"We all of us construct our own worlds from what is within us, and this is the obvious reason why it's so vitally important to know what is there."

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Jun 14, 2009

Mercurymouth rated it

She reminds me of Hermann Hesse, the way she expresses the inner workings of thoughts and feelings.

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Mar 05, 2008

Mbanga Ka rated it

Ultimately disappointing

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About Anna Kavan

Anna Kavan was born "Helen Woods" in France on April 10, 1901 to wealthy expatriate British parents.

Her initial six works were published under the name of Helen Ferguson, her first married name. These early novels gave little indication of the experimental and disturbing nature of her later work. I Am Lazarus (1945), a collection of short stories which explored the inner min...more

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Guilty (Peter Owen Modern Classics)

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