J. Robert Lennon: On the Night Plain

By ELSPETH SANDYS

In his first novel, The Light of Falling Stars, won the Barnes and Noble New Writer's Award. On the Night Plain is J. Robert Lennon's third.

All his books are published by Granta, in itself a sign of quality writing: all have been critically acclaimed, the author's spare poetic prose being singled out for special praise.

Lennon's prose is spare, and sometimes poetic, but for me it came across as leaden. Only in the book's closing pages is expression given to the full weight of the tragedy that has stalked the main character, Grant Person, from page one to the novel's cautiously redemptive ending.

Perhaps it's a reflection of the times we're living through, but I found the fatalism which is endemic to this story not only depressing, but infuriating. I longed for Grant to shake his fist at the gods, to break out from the prison of his repressed emotions and numb acceptance of fate and do something to change the seemingly predestined pattern of tragic events.

The story is set in the years after the Second World War. Grant has missed out on being a soldier, held back by his mother (a thinly drawn portrait that barely comes to life on the page).

His brother, Thorndon, is killed within weeks of enlisting. Another brother, Wesley, died as an infant. A third, Edwin, commits suicide; a fourth dies in a shooting accident. Add to this catalogue of sorrows the fact that the family barely scrapes a living on their ranch on the American Great Plains, enduring hardships too numerous to mention. The story opens with Grant suddenly, and without a word of explanation, leaving home, a pattern that will be repeated years later when his widowed father vanishes.

For three years he works on a fishing boat in the North Atlantic, an experience which leads to further descriptions of hardship and suffering. His decision to return to his family seems as arbitrary as the original decision to leave.

More setbacks follow, compounded by Grant's gradual realisation that he has fallen in love with Sophia, partner of his only surviving brother, Max. Needless to say, nothing good comes of this menage a trois, though there is a belated concession in the last few pages to the universal longing for happiness.

Having made clear this was not a book I enjoyed, I have to say it has crept into my consciousness in ways I find both irritating and haunting.

Something in me resists the notion that life can deal blow after undeserved blow to a good, or nearly good, person. But it can, and it does.

Where J. Robert Lennon succeeds is in his descriptions of the harshness of the subsistence life and of stoic endurance under almost unbearable conditions.

This story, though not the leadenness of its prose, reminded me of the novels of Annie Proulx. And just as The Shipping News and Postcards have continued to haunt me, I have a feeling this novel will too, forcing me in the end to admit to a reluctant admiration for the truth of its vision and the author's stark, uncompromising voice.

Granta NZ

$44.95

* Elspeth Sandys is an Auckland writer.