A Heavy Feather by A. L. Barker

(The Hogarth Press, 1978)

 

Another dark,  disturbing and idiosyncratically brilliant book by this fascinating writer.  A Heavy Feather is self-defined on the half-title page thusly:  This is the story of Almayer Jenkin's progress through life.  "You start alone, you finish alone, " she says.  "It's fine to be alone, it's a revelation, truth at last."

The book does, indeed, as promised, follow Almayer Jenkin through her life, beginning when she is a young child and finishing in her old age.  Yet it does this in an unusual and interesting way: the novel is comprised of nine chapters, and each of them records a brief period in Almayer's life from different vantage points alternating between first and third person.  In the sections narrated by Almayer (about half)  she is very much at the center of the book, but in many of the other sections, different characters -- her father, her friends, her husband, her son -- take center stage and Almayer's presence in the book is refracted and tangential.

Almayer is an interesting and original character from any and all angles.  Her mother left her and her father when she was a baby, and her father, a loving but dangerously incompetent parent, barely supports the two of them with his struggling plumbing business.  He dies when Almayer is a teenager, and she is sent to live with a family of benevolent strangers whose life she fairly ruins with her naivete and instinctual honesty.    She then sets out on an independent life, first becoming involved with a pair of mismatched homosexual lovers (as usual, Baker's world matter-of-factly includes characters of many different and under-represented sexual persuasions) and later marries a kind and decent (but somewhat clueless) husband.  She ends her life as a successful yet solitary business owner in London.

As with all books by Barker, what makes this one especially interesting is the acuity of the author's perception and expression.  The book skips haphazardly (it seems) through time and space but each time it lands Baker's skills allow her to quickly evoke a complete and authentic world inhabited by interesting and well-developed characters.  And so, despite its  fractured and episodic nature, the novel feels rich and whole, and Baker's prose is as bracing, funny, and elegantly assured as always.