Linda Grant: Still here

By JENNY JONES*

The narrator of Still Here, Alix Rebick, would like to reverse time. She would take the old Jews in her dying mother's home and watch them grow until they were once again vigorous adults. She would have them back on the boat bound for Liverpool. But she cannot go to their lives in eastern Europe after the collapse of Communism because the memories have not been handed on.

In her Orange Prize-winning novel, When I Lived in Modern Times, Grant referred to "the old Jewish question of the nature of time and our place in it".

Still Here continues the exploration, presenting scars etched by the past, and ways people reveal themselves over time. We are invited to go back and ask the questions, who am I, who are you?

The title itself is a statement about time. The Jews are still here, Liverpool is still here, Alix Rebick, 49 and unhappily single, is still here. We are invited to look behind the existential truth and ask, how still here? How come, that is, and how well?

The structure of Still Here mimics a reversal of time. Alix starts with the present and takes us back through the past. We are told about her German-refugee mother, forced to leave Dresden at 14, who ended up with an apparently saintly doctor-husband in Liverpool, never quite making it to the land of immigrants' dreams, America, "where happiness was written into the Constitution and there was a limited supply of history".

As there is a co-narrator, Joseph Shields, we also have to be told about his parents and estranged wife, back in America. Then there's Joseph's military stint in Israel. Not to mention the history of Liverpool.

Setting up a novel in this way means there's an awful lot of filling in before we're fit to deal with anything that's not yet history. Just when you think you're ready for action you are told, "Wait, I've got to tell you this first".

The novel lacks tension. But as Still Here progresses, interest creeps up on you. You do care about what happens to Alix and Joseph, you do want to know what happened to him in the war.

In Grant's hands the Jewish question of the nature of time symbolises the universal dilemmas of immigrants, of people who have to work hard at knowing who they are and remembering where they came from, because they have no country.

This begs the question of how it is that when they do get a country, "a people who have been the victims of genocide" may end up "no longer able to distinguish between self-defence and aggressive indifference to the fate of others".

Grant asks this question but the answer seems to arrive from nowhere. It certainly doesn't grow organically out of the novel.

Her Liverpool, however, is magnificently drawn. This immigrants' town, with its own dilemma of how to cope with its past and its dying present, becomes my most enduring memory of the novel.

Penguin

$34.95

* Jenny Jones is an Auckland writer.