How many literary genres and how many specialized backgrounds can one novel encompass? The latest from Gerard Woodward, a British writer frequently shortlisted for prestigious literary awards, has aspects of war, espionage, coming-of-age, comedy, mystery, saga, gay romance, and courtroom drama. It provides a wealth of background detail on subjects as diverse as art, farming, aviation, sex, and the work of camouflage experts in World War II. The title Vanishing refers both to the protagonist’s work and his general approach to life and relationships. Artist and British Army lieutenant Kenneth Brill is complex and enigmatic enough, and his life is certainly eventful enough, to maintain the reader’s curiosity through nearly 500 pages of time-shifting first-person narrative.
As the novel begins, Brill is confined to a British military prison awaiting court martial. His first-chapter meeting with Captain Davies, the officer assigned to defend him, reveals some basic facts about Brill and the charge facing him while leaving plenty of gaps to fill in as the story goes on. His father, a former stage conjurer, once pretended to make Brill vanish, claiming that although he could see himself, he was invisible to everyone else. Brill’s history of school expulsions and his abandonment of his wife represent more vanishings, which Davies points out are “a noticeable theme” of his life. The reader later learns his time in art school included an embarrassing incident in which he fainted in the face of painting a nude male, but later he is involved in recruiting female prostitutes to serve as models. His spotty record includes a police charge for “an act of trespass in a royal household. The Palace, no less.” He has had some association with Fascist sympathizers.
He served his country with distinction through most of the war, helping create a historic deception on the enemy that turned the tide in the Battle of El Alamein. Brill was even shot in the line of duty—and Davies notes the irony of a camouflage officer being shot. Near the end of the war, however, Brill has been accused of spying for “painting a picture,” actually several paintings, drawings, and even (his accusers allege) diagrams, of the farming area near London, known as the Heath, where he grew up.
Though that may sound innocent enough, the subject was the site for which “one of the biggest military air bases in Europe” was planned—and which eventually would be the location of London’s Heathrow Airport. His defense: that these fields were important to him through his childhood and that he was “trying to make a record of them before they are gone.” When Davies asks him if he would prefer the land to be “swept away instead by a tide of Nazi jackboots,” Brill silently reflects that the “war had become a religion. To question its strategy was like questioning the tenets of a faith, and . . . it always came back to the same question: are you a believer or non-believer? As such, it allowed for no argument, no discussion.”
Few novels are packed with so much incident and background detail. The life of Brill’s father could make a book of its own: a music hall career in which he accidentally killed his partner in a comic dart-throwing act, a stint as a traveler in medical hardware, a mistaken attempt to corner the market in prosthetic legs, an inept effort at market gardening stifled by the “manure wars,” and finally making a fortune in sludgecakes, i.e., human excrement used as fertilizer.
Brill’s trial is covered from opening statements to final in-court surprise in five short scenes, widely spread apart in the nonlinear narrative. They total only about 30 pages, but the trial is the central event to which all the other action leads. Lawyer Davies, who believes the trial should more appropriately be taking place in a civilian court, gives Brill the dubious advice to wear civilian clothes during the proceedings, making him the only person in the courtroom not in uniform.
Though Brill finds the proceedings frustrating, he enjoys seeing his work displayed to the court: “I could imagine . . . that I was a successful artist enjoying my first one-man show in a well-known and respected gallery. In all, I felt pleased. My art, for whatever reason, was being taken seriously, perhaps more seriously than art was taken for any other artist. My art was evidence.” Explaining his previous brushes with the law under cross-examination, he blames his art: “I think it is a condition of being an artist that one walks across boundaries, sometimes not even knowing they are there. For us the visual world contains no boundaries—to us a fence is not an obstruction, it is an illustration of perspective, giving depth to the landscape.”
It is left to Learmouth, Brill’s fellow art student who studied law at Cambridge and will testify in Brill’s defense against a raft of prosecution witnesses deploring the continental, even fascistic influences of his work, to make the sweeping statements about the law that are a common element of legal fiction. Explaining his attraction to the field, he says, “The law is nothing less than the social imagination exposed and codified. Every aspect of the human experience has, at some point, found definition and expression in the law. Though, of course, it is the most pared down and minimal expression one can think of.” Later the same character states more sourly, “All human life is there, but crushed and desiccated down into dry crisp pages of parchment.”
Kenneth Brill has been cited as an example of that fixture of
postmodern fiction, the unreliable narrator. Though he doesn’t outright lie to the reader, which a literary guide to the action never should, he is certainly selective of what facts he chooses to tell, leaving his essential character open to varying interpretations.
So, by the end, is the serial vanisher now visible to the reader or still a mystery? We know that
author Woodward believes the “hamlet of Heathrow was destroyed by a disgraceful misuse of wartime powers by the British government”—he says so in his acknowledgments—but not how he expects us to feel about the protagonist of his remarkable, wide-ranging novel. The letter that comprises the last two pages of the book is open to two possible meanings, and the true choice might easily be missed on first reading. Vanishing reads so smoothly, it’s easy to overlook how challenging it is.
Jon L. Breen is the author, most recently, of The Threat of Nostalgia and Other Stories.
