At first blush, Performance, David Coventry’s book about living with the debilitating disease myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), is “a novel” because of the most basic truth (or untruth) about a memoir: no one has that good a memory, can remember that much detail from so long ago, can recall conversations as extensively and accurately as that. Any memoir worth its salt is peppered with fabrication. That’s what brings it to life.
But Coventry is too ambitious and interesting a writer to call his book a novel for so mundane a reason as that. Performance has all the qualities of the best creative non-fiction – compelling characters, arresting situations, stimulating themes – but Coventry permits himself something more besides: points of view other than his own and fantastical flights (at one point literally) of imagination that take leave of reality altogether.
As with Coventry’s two earlier novels, The Invisible Mile (2015) and Dance Prone (2020), Performance is a giddy ride, but one weighed down by longueurs and that meanders, sometimes to places of possibly more interest to him than readers. Meaning can be elusive, too. Coventry is capable of sentences of powerful precision (for example, Covid-19 lockdowns in Wellington are “an abominable one-act play”) but also others that are word salads. Performance is, by his own admission, “a cryptic book for a cryptic disease”. Coventry is a risk taker as a writer, and in Performance, he fails more often than in his earlier novels. But by and large, he succeeds. Performance leaves more of an impression than many a more conventional book.
Coventry covers an astounding amount of ground in the novel, including family and personal history and of course the devastating impacts ME has had on his life, along with what is known about the disease and others like it. Its name “means the swelling of the brain, in Latin. Or close enough. It refers to pain. It refers to a chamber of hell. It refers to debilitation of cognitive functionality. It refers to the breakdown of the nervous system, of the immune system, of the gut, cells and mitochondria.”
He travels around New Zealand and wider afield to Ireland, Austria, the Italian and Swiss Alps (or rather the train tunnel under the Alps) and, for the longest time of all, one of Italy’s volcanic islands, where he’s stranded during another Covid-19 lockdown. We meet a cast of relatives, friends and others encountered along the way and are told tales of death, war and black metal music. Coventry is, as in Dance Prone, very good on music.
In many ways, Performance completes a triptych started with The Invisible Mile and Dance Prone.
It continues their themes, including the mutability and fallibility of memory, the sleights and slippages of language, who tells a story and how, the fictions we tell others and ourselves to the point they become (un)truths, the ways in which time is bent out of shape, assuming it ever had a shape to start with.
And then there’s that word “performance”. All three books grapple with it in one way or another – how we perform our lives, memory as performance, writing as performance, the physical and mental performance required for the Tour de France in The Invisible Mile and the extended avant-punk guitar improvisations in Dance Prone, and now, in Performance, the intense effort needed to do anything when you have ME. In fact, the punishing exertions of cycling and music-making in The Invisible Mile and Dance Prone might be read as displaced metaphorical representations of ME.
Where once I thought Coventry was an ill-disciplined writer, I now know he’s anything but.
I also know some of what spurs him on as a writer, which, in hindsight, is all too apparent in his novels. On being diagnosed with attention deficit disorder after a spell of life-threatening depression, Coventry learned that people with ADHD “have an ability to concentrate immensely on a specific task. Bore in on it. Stay there at its head until exhaustion kicks in and the shell of its thoughts lie in pieces on the screen”.
Where driving dangerously fast once offered Coventry a state of concentration that calmed his mind, he now feels the same thing “when writing endlessly and endlessly”.
Like the Tour de France in The Invisible Mile and guitar shredding in Dance Prone, Performance is an immersive experience for readers, at times even an endurance test. But as long-distance cyclists and guitar shredders will tell you, completing such a test brings its own rewards.
Performance: A Novel by David Coventry (Te Herenga Waka University Press, $30.00) is out now. A longer version of this review will appear on the Aotearoa NZ Review of Books site, nzreviewofbooks.com
