Book review: Felix Culpa By Jeremy Gavron

Single sentences, often just words or phrases, become discrete paragraphs. Most are lifted from texts of great writers — Conrad, Chandler, Oz, Grossman, Cormac McCarthy.

The plot resembles a thriller: a prison visitor morphs into a detective following the track of a lad who was drawn into crime and sent to prison only to vanish on release. Theme: we cannot know ourselves fully unless we vicariously live the struggles of those less privileged, on the wind.

Gavron’s singular approach nudges his narrative towards the universal. Specifics are inconstant — are we in Latin America, the Middle East, Europe? Is the tale a parable about refugees and what their experience can teach us, or should that word be modified to include all fugitives?

In either case, survival is the aim: how to regain animal cunning and endure the elements; how to evade hostile mankind and civilisation’s miseries to beat death.

The last is not possible. Felix’s end becomes Gavron’s narrator’s obsession: its where, when and how. In a cave in high mountains where the boy apparently perished comes a new perception. Neither the wild child nor his pursuer should veer from the world of men for too long. Without mutual aid — the kindness of strangers — one cannot endure.

This poetic book may be self-consciously wrought but it is hardly false. Origins in writers’ enclaves notwithstanding, it rates high on the imaginative scale. A rite of passage conceived not just in mind but in heart, it recalls D H Lawrence’s dictum after Walt Whitman: “The soul is a wayfarer along the open road”. Gavron did not use that quote, but he could have.

 

Felix Culpa By Jeremy Gavron, Scribe, £12.99

Stoddard Martin is a critic, writer and publisher