“Your past really is a country where you used to live,” David Gilmour says in his latest novel, The Perfect Order of Things. Or: “As Leonard Cohen puts it, you ‘ache in the places you used to play.’”
An unnamed narrator (who shares a great many similarities with not only Gilmour, but the past protagonists of Gilmour’s novels) means to settle a debt to himself. He plans to revisit that country of his past and return to where he had suffered, reliving scenes of heartbreak, abandonment and loss. He wishes to see these places with his eyes open and pointed outward rather than within at his own misery.
Gilmour brings back Raissa Shestatsky, the Raissa of his earlier novel Sparrow Nights and that book’s source in Chekhov’s famous ‘sparrow nights,’ ‘the harrowing nights of the soul when a love is lost.’ It is Raissa that spurs the following epiphany in the narrator when by chance his train stops in Toulouse, the site of one of those past heartbreaks. “For six months I’d lived in Toulouse and I’d seen nothing except the furious wallpaper inside my head: its drastic scenarios, its pornographic reruns. What else had misery blinded me to?”
Gilmour’s narrator likes to introduce characters by their flaws, and with his irascible wit it is endearing despite the cutting nature of his comments. He saves some of his best venom for Clarissa Bentley: “Beneath those ample breasts beat the heart of a woman so unpleasant even the Borgias would have hesitated to have lunch with her.” Clarissa would be the source of the narrator’s sexual awakening as well as his first romantic betrayal.
As she prepares for their first night together, Clarissa’s undressing has a practiced quality to it—as do her stories of past adventures. “During these stories I had the feeling that I was being lied to, that something like these stories had happened, only in a smaller less spectacular way. But of course that’s true for almost everything you think of other people’s lives. Always smaller, always lonelier than you imagine.”
Eventually, Clarissa goes back to her old boyfriend (she “went up the ferris wheel with me as my girlfriend and when she came back down she was someone else’s”) while the narrator watches in the ferris wheel car behind them. Here Gilmour adroitly captures the visceral aching of unrequited or broken love. The narrator runs away from his humiliation and his boarding school full of “chronic masturbators and pimple squeezers and unloved children….” As much as he still loathes Clarissa forty years on, he admits that she gave him a “rule breaker’s freedom” that would inform the rest of his life. “A blessing from a monster.”
As the narrator felt the admixture of lies and truth in Clarissa’s stories, so the reader feels the same in Gilmour’s “fictional autobiography.”
As a young man, the narrator “entertained (and not always privately) the idea that my life was a novel, that “people” watched my trajectory with head-shaking admiration.” In his later years however “it seems that life itself, not I, has come to resemble a novel. Characters appear and disappear, resurfacing later in the story in ways that often beat the pants off fiction.” Elements drawn from Gilmour’s previous novels and life including wife M. from A Perfect Night to Go to China, the aforementioned lost love, Raissa, from Sparrow Nights, and the narrator’s book tour with his son to promote his memoir The Film Club, are combined into one extraordinary fictional life.
Gilmour’s use of sensory information and the physiological symptoms of emotion is another of the novel’s strengths:
“When you put it—your body—back in the same physical places where it once wilted, where it once suffered blows to the heart and blows to the vanity, sometimes, most of the time actually, your body forgets all the things that have happened in the interim and thinks the bad old days are still here.”
Gilmour often uses Tolstoy as a touchstone for whom to like and dislike. When the narrator states that he has “seen him in too many of my own life’s events… have quoted him too often (as I do with the Beatles)” it is as if he is begging his reader’s indulgence, before spending the next fifth of the novel ruminating on those two very subjects. But as Gilmour says “if you’re my age and have ever suffered in the name of love, chances are you’ve done it with the Beatles in the background.” And his four-line take on Anna Karenina is amusing:
“Is anything wrong?”
“No. You?”
“No, I’m fine.”
Ugh.
Finally, the protagonist realizes that as he revisits these old traumas and tries to shed their weight that he is preparing to die. Not with any sense of impending doom or morbidity but instead knowing “The goal of all philosophy, Montaigne says, is to learn how to die properly.”
When he looks at his new wife and his daughter and feels “a wave of almost unendurable good fortune.” He thinks: “You must not ask more from life than this.” He’s learned a few things “(Rule number one on how not to wreck a marriage: If it feels like something you should keep secret, you’re probably doing the wrong thing.)” Now when he states, “beds have become something mostly for sleep” the reader almost believes him.
The Perfect Order of Things, a comic and moving tale, reads as if Gilmour’s telling the reader a story over a drink. Only after the fact does one question the vividness of details that are presented amidst sessions of pill popping and rum swilling. Like an oft-told story the beats are honed to perfection over the telling and retelling.
Thomas Allen | 256 pages | $27.95 | cloth | ISBN #978-0887628078
‘The Perfect Order of Things’ by David Gilmour
Book Reviews
“Your past really is a country where you used to live,” David Gilmour says in his latest novel, The Perfect Order of Things. Or: “As Leonard Cohen puts it, you ‘ache in the places you used to play.’”
An unnamed narrator (who shares a great many similarities with not only Gilmour, but the past protagonists of Gilmour’s novels) means to settle a debt to himself. He plans to revisit that country of his past and return to where he had suffered, reliving scenes of heartbreak, abandonment and loss. He wishes to see these places with his eyes open and pointed outward rather than within at his own misery.
Gilmour brings back Raissa Shestatsky, the Raissa of his earlier novel Sparrow Nights and that book’s source in Chekhov’s famous ‘sparrow nights,’ ‘the harrowing nights of the soul when a love is lost.’ It is Raissa that spurs the following epiphany in the narrator when by chance his train stops in Toulouse, the site of one of those past heartbreaks. “For six months I’d lived in Toulouse and I’d seen nothing except the furious wallpaper inside my head: its drastic scenarios, its pornographic reruns. What else had misery blinded me to?”
Gilmour’s narrator likes to introduce characters by their flaws, and with his irascible wit it is endearing despite the cutting nature of his comments. He saves some of his best venom for Clarissa Bentley: “Beneath those ample breasts beat the heart of a woman so unpleasant even the Borgias would have hesitated to have lunch with her.” Clarissa would be the source of the narrator’s sexual awakening as well as his first romantic betrayal.
As she prepares for their first night together, Clarissa’s undressing has a practiced quality to it—as do her stories of past adventures. “During these stories I had the feeling that I was being lied to, that something like these stories had happened, only in a smaller less spectacular way. But of course that’s true for almost everything you think of other people’s lives. Always smaller, always lonelier than you imagine.”
Eventually, Clarissa goes back to her old boyfriend (she “went up the ferris wheel with me as my girlfriend and when she came back down she was someone else’s”) while the narrator watches in the ferris wheel car behind them. Here Gilmour adroitly captures the visceral aching of unrequited or broken love. The narrator runs away from his humiliation and his boarding school full of “chronic masturbators and pimple squeezers and unloved children….” As much as he still loathes Clarissa forty years on, he admits that she gave him a “rule breaker’s freedom” that would inform the rest of his life. “A blessing from a monster.”
As the narrator felt the admixture of lies and truth in Clarissa’s stories, so the reader feels the same in Gilmour’s “fictional autobiography.”
As a young man, the narrator “entertained (and not always privately) the idea that my life was a novel, that “people” watched my trajectory with head-shaking admiration.” In his later years however “it seems that life itself, not I, has come to resemble a novel. Characters appear and disappear, resurfacing later in the story in ways that often beat the pants off fiction.” Elements drawn from Gilmour’s previous novels and life including wife M. from A Perfect Night to Go to China, the aforementioned lost love, Raissa, from Sparrow Nights, and the narrator’s book tour with his son to promote his memoir The Film Club, are combined into one extraordinary fictional life.
Gilmour’s use of sensory information and the physiological symptoms of emotion is another of the novel’s strengths:
“When you put it—your body—back in the same physical places where it once wilted, where it once suffered blows to the heart and blows to the vanity, sometimes, most of the time actually, your body forgets all the things that have happened in the interim and thinks the bad old days are still here.”
Gilmour often uses Tolstoy as a touchstone for whom to like and dislike. When the narrator states that he has “seen him in too many of my own life’s events… have quoted him too often (as I do with the Beatles)” it is as if he is begging his reader’s indulgence, before spending the next fifth of the novel ruminating on those two very subjects. But as Gilmour says “if you’re my age and have ever suffered in the name of love, chances are you’ve done it with the Beatles in the background.” And his four-line take on Anna Karenina is amusing:
“Is anything wrong?”
“No. You?”
“No, I’m fine.”
Ugh.
Finally, the protagonist realizes that as he revisits these old traumas and tries to shed their weight that he is preparing to die. Not with any sense of impending doom or morbidity but instead knowing “The goal of all philosophy, Montaigne says, is to learn how to die properly.”
When he looks at his new wife and his daughter and feels “a wave of almost unendurable good fortune.” He thinks: “You must not ask more from life than this.” He’s learned a few things “(Rule number one on how not to wreck a marriage: If it feels like something you should keep secret, you’re probably doing the wrong thing.)” Now when he states, “beds have become something mostly for sleep” the reader almost believes him.
The Perfect Order of Things, a comic and moving tale, reads as if Gilmour’s telling the reader a story over a drink. Only after the fact does one question the vividness of details that are presented amidst sessions of pill popping and rum swilling. Like an oft-told story the beats are honed to perfection over the telling and retelling.
Thomas Allen | 256 pages | $27.95 | cloth | ISBN #978-0887628078