When the January sun creeps out of its hiding place, a person had better travel to Zeeland. There we remember Nescio’s tragic hero Bavink, who perished due to his desire to paint the sun: “Bavink became stapled. He wanted to walk towards the sun over the long, beautiful line, but he just stopped at the side of the water.” Poor Bavink ended up in the asylum, but on the side of the water, on the dike at Krabbendijke, the Zeeland light now scatters as unaffected as at the beginning of time.
Below the dike there is a heart painted on the knob of a bookcase. Unlike most, that cabinet does not have a viewing window but a dark green door, which entails a certain level of mystery. Located inside The pale companion by Andrew Motion, a book that is full of actions that many Krabbendijkers (during elections here the SGP towers far above the rest) certainly consider very sinful.
Because in his first novel (from 1989, translated a year later by Eric van Domburg Scipio) the British poet laureate Andrew Motion takes us to an Oxford boarding school where the screeching of boys’ hormones leads to a series of nonsense described in pleasant casualness. That sounds light, but not everything is light in the existence of Francis Mayne, the young hero of the story. For example, his relationship with the slightly older Keith Ogilvie, who initiates him into the secrets of the school newspaper and political commitment, has a persistent aftertaste of inequality. By the way, the year is 1968: Bobby Kennedy is shot, students rally against the Vietnam War, things explode on the school grounds.
Francis initially walks through them searching, which Motion makes quite clear in the dialogue-driven novel. Francis is the type of boy who later serves up observations he picks up in one conversation as his own invention in new company.
However, the boarding school moral sketch mainly serves as a packaging for the drama that The pale companion substance – and that Francis will push reality mercilessly hard. That is the disease (leukemia) and the death of his twin sister Catherine. For a whole summer, the last of her life, he cared for her in their father’s house. As Motion beautifully writes: “By mid-August, when Francis had been home for almost two months, he was no longer upset with Catherine.”
There are beautiful scenes between brother and sister, including a conversation about how they can talk about her impending end. Andrew Motion makes his characters talk a lot, to show what they can’t say.
Then there are the parents. The father is consistently referred to as ‘the Brigadier General’ and is very much a classic introvert. Francis’ mother’s name is simply Adele. After the divorce, she has thrown herself into a hip and semi-organized life. In a cloud of noisy cheerfulness she approaches her children, flirts with Francis’ friend Keith and otherwise tries to join in with the revolutionary spirit of the times.
The reader recognizes the powerlessness in her chatter, but her children have no patience with it. They turn away from her. Then Catherine dies. Adele’s image remains of a mother who has lost a child, but who has no one to share her grief with. Heartbreaking.