| Manacles - review by Robert Kenny |
| Speculating on Genres - Age Monthly Review, Volume 6, Number 3, July 1986 (page 4) | |
Robert Whyte's Manacles was published about the same time as Strange Attractors, although I have heard that it was written some years ago and that what is here published is a recent revision. It is definitely a book concerned with form: the writer is very apparent and he is writing a book in which the central character is writing a book. One gets to think a lot about the nature of fiction. In this respect it is similar to such works as Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds and Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew (itself dedicated to the memory of O'Brien) and like the former it is very obviously an early book. Unlike the latter it isn't a struggle to read from cover to cover and it is far more aware of the limitations. It isn't a novel but a reflection on the form of the novel, the process of its writing. When I first read it I was disappointed, feeling that Whyte, whose sheer ability produces passages of prose which are a joy to read, had not used his own potential fully. The second reading, while not dispelling this feeling completely, made me far more sympathetic. Whyte cleverly and skilfully handles the interactions between the various components of the book, even if sometimes passages are irrelevantly obscure. There is a sense that each of the book's six parts is a retry at the novel: both the novel of the actual book (the author's novel) and the novel within the book (the character's novel). In a way the retries follow failures, make fiction out of the failures, certainly speculative. It isn't as much fun as At Swim-Two Birds but it does have humour and in any case I don't imagine that Whyte aims to be a comic genius.
The dissatisfaction I felt on first reading it and have not completely dismissed was/is that, if some of the contributors to Broderick's anthology have forgotten the intrinsic nature of form, Whyte has forgotten the intrinsic nature of content: he doesn't fully allow the content that appears to extend from the form to do just that. Instead, he returns again and again to his influences. Influences are fine but they're there to use, not to submit to. But as a first effort and that of a few years back it's certainly brave and deserves attention. One awaits Whyte's next effort with curiosity. There is nothing wrong with making formal concern the content of a work, but it needs profound investigation and an unwillingness to sit back and comfortably rest on the laurels of your predecessors. Language guards its secrets too closely to give them up to casual inquiries (something that the lesser lights of the American L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E group fail to realise).
|
|  |
