(courtesy Fourth Estate)
After watching far too many books sit trapped in my To Be Read (TBR) pile for years and years, I decided it was high time a month was devoted to rescuing them from the reading void and diving into their promising stories. So, for October, each book review will be a novel long neglected but never forgotten, finally read as the author and published intended …
It is until an innate sense of belonging is removed or sundered that we realise how much it matters to us.
We need not only to belong to a particular time and place, but also to people as well, whether that is in the context of an intimate relationship or through friendships which make the world a little bit less lonely and provide us with a sense of perspective and a worldview quite definitively not our own.
Take one or both of these things away, and while we can still function, life feels off-kilter, empty and almost distressingly in a quietly aggressive way as we flounder to find a place to hold onto as life run by, through and around us.
Quite how much belonging matters, and how we are defined by place and people, is on gloriously thoughtful and emotionally rich display in Joseph O’Neill’s 2008 novel, Netherland, in which Dutch finance worker Hans van den Broek finds himself estranged from his wife Rachel after a move to New York, rather fatefully just before the epoch-defining 9/11 attacks, quickly sours what was a brave and exciting new move from London for the young thirties couple and their new son, Jake.
What begins as a fun experiment in establishing roots in yet another country and society, something Hans undertook previously once before when the cricket-loving man moved across the North Sea to London, soon sours into something else entirely.
I went upstairs, where Jake was playing with his new toys. I picked him up and held him in my arms until began to protest. I flew back to New York. There is no describing the wretchedness I felt, which persisted, in one form or another, throughout my association with Chuck Ramkissoon.
As the couple grapple with the challenges and joys of getting to know one of the most famous and intensely frenetic cities on earth, the attack on 9/11 soon triggers not only a physical move to the Chelsea Hotel as they, like so many people in the lower Manhattan area have to find someone new to live, temporarily or permanently but a psychological and emotional shift from being secure in their marriage, new jobs and a bustling city ripe with possibility to feeling rattled and quite insecure.
So pronounced is this shift that Rachel decides to move back to London with Jake, finding safety in her parents’ grand home in London but also in being at a considerable remove from Hans, the fissures and distance in their marriage made ever more apparent and distressing by the dramatic physical changes around them.
Any sense of security and belonging they had with each other and in their adopted city is gone in an instant, and then corrosively bit by bit, and Netherland explores the effect this has on Hans particularly who is left behind to fashion some sort of life, one where he doesn’t really have a home, any friends worth speaking of nor an anchor to hold him close to anything or anyone.
The only ray of light, and he is a wavering one, there one day, not so much the next, is Chuck Ramkisson, a Caribbean immigrant in a country and city of the same, whose great overriding passion is cricket, a game Hans take up again after decades of dormancy, so his life has meaning, purpose, friendship and community.
To be fair, he takes up cricket before 9/11, but it’s only when that polarising event, and those that follow like the Iraq War, destabilise American society and in turn Hans’ marriage and sense of place, that it really becomes an anchor of sorts.
But an unstable and uncertain one because while Chuck dreams and talks big, his envisaged sport-defining cricket field on land on the edge of New York City a bright shining light of possibility in a time when everything feels curiously impossible and on hold, more mirage than actuality, his life is one lived in the shadows, both in business where his activities slide heavily on the suspected illegal side of things and in his personal relationships where fidelity is celebrated but not entirely lived out.
Chuck is all sparkle and diversion but Hans is wise and perceptive enough to know that all that glitters is not, you know, and while he welcomes Chuck’s presence in his moribund life, he also wonders whether it is entirely good to have such a close friendship, such as it is, with someone whose life is as uncertain as the newly ill-confident city around them.
Netherland explores what happens when we are caught in the weird chasm between being connected and not, of belonging somewhere and not, and how it feels when both states exist at once and it becomes increasingly challenging to exist in and between them.
I understood, now, the point of my driving lessons. It gave Chuck a measure of cover, maybe even prestige, to have a respectable-looking white man chauffeuring him while he ran around collecting bets all over Brooklyn. Apparently it had not bothered him that he was putting me at risk of arrest and imprisonment.
Written with a first-person perspective with Hans recalling events from his troubled New York years in 2006 after Chuck’s body is fished from the infamous Gowanas Canal, Netherland is a brilliantly-realised piece of work that compellingly lays bare what it means to feel adrift even as you can recall what it was to be anchored, either in childhood (where Hans is wise enough not to buy everything nostalgia is selling, including notoriously unreliable rose-coloured glasses) or his marriage where our narrative-driving protagonist is forced to admit there were problems long before the move to New York.
The language is enthrallingly beautiful without lacking emotional accessibility, and while there is a certain remove to proceedings, what cuts through is the sense any of us would have that the sense of belonging we crave and need and depend on can be so easily rent asunder and that while we might think we have it in us to roll with the punches, and do so handsomely, that we might, like Hans, find ourselves almost fatally unable to find purchase.
Alive with so much incisive insight and rich humanity stumbling to find its feet, Netherland wonderfully explores what it is to belong and not belong, sometimes simultaneously, how male friendship can be both a salve for the soul and an irritatingly shallow uncertainty, and how easily life and civilisation and our place in it can be rattled and shaken and lost, and how much it takes to get it back, if it can be retrieved at all.