| Surfing along the south coast a celebration of the books of Peter Benson |
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Surfing: I imagine that you're either for it, or deplore it as the province
of musclebound reprobates with waves of golden hair and far too much time on
their hands. If you're for it, you've probably also done it, or know and love
someone that does. If you're against it, and make no mistake, it is the kind
of activity like bungee jumping, badger baiting or market research that most
music and book-loving people passionately loathe, well, you probably don't
move in the same circles as surfers.
I confess that, up until last year, I numbered myself amongst the latter. Waves were for looking at or listening to; at best for swimming amongst. But then I read Riptide by English author Peter Benson, and watched him swish another stereotype aside with the exquisite craft and generous humour that had brought the Bayeux Tapestry to life in his previous novel. Yes, literature and surfing could co-exist in the same universe! Peter Benson has that facility as a writer to render any fragment of the world a foreground and essential part of it. In Riptide, set in Cornwall, nineteen year old Duncan gives the waves he catches a name to convey their surfing potential or wipeout factor. One such is `the Communist Master of Disease.' This wave has Duncan's name written on it: "It was rising behind me, a hump of steaming, manic water, as tall as a building and as busy as all the people who would be in that building. Hundreds of people, the lights are on in the rooms they work in, and their telephones are ringing. My telephone was ringing, and when I picked it up someone on the other end said `watch your arse'. Estelle. She had thighs like surf, and firm, round hips. I started to paddle madly, kicking and scrabbling to catch the hump, which had begun to cast a shadow over me. It was as dark as dusk, the rain fell in a solid wall, I locked my arms straight, tucked my feet up, pushed and was suddenly picked up by the hump that boiled above and around me, flattening the churning waves in front." It's such a filmic novel that I can't help being suspicious that he had the movie they'll make of it - no doubt relocated to Hawaii or Victoria - in mind when he wrote the book. But it will be a brave director who films a story with the ending Riptide has. In the course of the six novels Peter Benson has so far published, he's also breathed life into a small-time private eye in Brighton, the destruction of an Indian Ocean paradise, and basket making in The Levels of Somerset. At the start of this, his first novel, published in 1987, his young hero is visited in his workshop by people long since divorced from the countryside: `I have to tell them about willow. They bore so quickly. They always look lost between something they forgot to do when they were younger and something that is going to happen one day.' Billy is as full of sap as his willow is now dry of it. By the end of the novel he will have lost his first love. "The railway provides jobs. I don't begrudge anyone working on them. People have families to support. They couldn't have known they were taking her away. Many goods travel by rail; I have sent baskets that way." Billy of The Levels resurfaces in different guises in three of the other novels: as drifting Greg in The Other Occupant, sharp-witted Robert in Odo's Hanging, and the confident but needy Duncan in Riptide. These characters are not so much loners as content to be alone with their thoughts, which are arch and indifferent in equal measure. They keep their feet on the ground even though their heads are clouded with emotion. Each meets and falls in love with a girl, a Muriel, Sadie, or Martha. They invariably roll in the hay well together, especially Duncan and plump Estelle, whose loving frolicks are the most joyous you'll ever come across in print. They crack a good joke, Peter Benson's characters, or if not, maintain a stubborn streak of irony, like Frank, the dick in A Private Moon, watching everything around him die. These are stories of love and death - you would be lucky to emerge from reading one unscathed. Yet as his characters square up to an unforgiving world, he never fails to raise a swell of internal laughter. "She made two cups of cocoa with one arm and pancreatic cancer." It's a deadpan style, particularly when set against the ornate or drug-addled writings of the literati. But I can't think of any writer better at summoning up the feelings beyond the words, which are simple, precise, never fussy. Again, he's one of the few writers who could get away with letting Billy narrate, after Muriel has left Somerset forever and as he looks out on the rain-soaked fields in the direction that she once lived: "Imagine what I felt like." Death reaches its nadir in A Private Moon, where the pain and dignity of the cancer victim in The Other Occupant become the dull thud and meaninglessness of a body count. It's a horrific and bleak vision, lodged precariously and parodically in the private eye genre. A woman, her husband, his sister. A dog, a goldfish, a budgie. An embryo, a landlady, a cop, the bus driver that accidentally ran over the cop's dog, the cop's chief, Frank's partner - almost certainly this list is incomplete - all shuffle off this mortal coil. But it's only the logical stepping-up of the disillusion there from the first line of his first book. In this game of patterns and variants, Odo's Hanging is unique among Peter Benson's novels for not being set in the 20th century. The Bayeux Tapestry is transformed from a curio in a school history lesson, or a relic visited on a day-trip during a cross-Channel holiday, into the great story it is, full itself of tangential tales, including the one that Peter Benson tells. Much more than that deadening epithet, a historical novel, it is an analysis of the relations between patron and artist, and master and apprentice; it balances words against pictures and art against religion. More even than this, it conjures up the smells and sights of 11th century Winchester, and is filled with spine-tingling dramatic moments: the barbed arguments between Odo and the (reputed) creator of the Tapestry, Turold; the voiceless Robert's silent, yearning conversations with Martha; and the entrance of a King long before the world learnt to ridicule the monarchy. "As I followed the King, I felt power in the air. It followed him like foam in the wake of a ship, it smelt of fire and blood." As the stock cliche of literary critics might have it, Benson weaves together the variegated fibres of politics, art and religion into a rich tapestry of the times... Any thoughts to sober up the extravagance of all this celebratory toasting? Has this man made any mistakes? His second novel, A Lesser Dependency, whilst being the most distressing of his books, is the least well formulated, perhaps because it is the only one set outside of this fair isle. Other than that, a fellow Tangenteer isn't so sure about Duncan's liking for the Waterboys in Riptide. My friend has his doubts about authors' musical reference points. (I would contest it's in keeping with the character: as a surfer, young Duncan quite naturally also disses the Beach Boys; nevertheless, Peter Benson's heroes' dedication to the one girl is pure `God Only Knows'.) But in A Private Moon he more than makes up for the previous excess of Mike Scott and keeps my friend happy by including, as one item on a tour de force list of sexual experiences denied the unfortunate Sergeant Davis, the following: "He'd never prayed that a woman who wore cycling shorts would send him a record by Little Anthony and the Imperials because it reminded her of him." The cover of The Levels says, `Peter Benson's award-winning book', as if that was it, he'll never win another. I'd wager that he will, if he can remove or overcome the constraints of producing a book a year, which I suspect is what his current publisher requires of him. But for Odo's Hanging, which is in any case as self-contained as the others, his books have been of a uniformly short length. If he can find the time to write that epic that I'm certain he will have at the back of his mind, then a prize like the Booker ought to be his, though more important will be the recognition that hasn't yet been accorded his perfectly crafted slices of imperfect life. With another Cornish tale, The Shape of Clouds, just published, Peter Benson has written a novel for almost every county along the South coast of England. An ode to 20th century Hampshire has yet to appear - but if anyone after Jane Austen can do it, Peter Benson can. © Daniel Williams, September 1996. 
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