NOBODY COULD ACCUSE Richard Mason of lacking literary ambition. And I don't mean prizes – although he has already won the Italian equivalent of a Booker for his 1999 debut, The Drowning People. In it he ignored the adage of "writing what you know b
est" and ushered in a 70-year-old narrator confessing to the murder of his wife. Almost ten years on, The Lighted Rooms shows no signs of Mason's heady aspirations having burned out.
Joan McAllister is 80 and can no longer live alone. A talented pianist, she craves the adrenalin of performance, a thrill now denied her by crippling arthritis. Her eldest daughter, Eloise, 49, is a single, ruthless, Blackberry-brandishing hedge-fund manager, living on little else but the buzz of big deals and a passionate loathing of her colleague who has stooped to bagging a husband and producing two children.
Eloise will do anything to make her mother's twilight years happy – anything but relinquish her own independence. Wandsworth's salubrious retirement home, The Albany, is by far the best place for her mother and, besides, Eloise's usual 16-hour days at Derby Capital would make her flat a very lonely place for Joan to spend her time. But before the move, she will take her mother on a trip of a lifetime to South Africa, the home of their ancestors.
Mason's characters are undeniably colourful – dazzlingly so – and perhaps that is their downfall. While the reasons behind Joan's eccentricities become clear as the novel progresses – she buys a mini-bus for a South African she has known for only a fortnight; talks to her walking frame, "Cordelia"; manages to summon a pair of piano pedals that allow her to travel back in time – the same cannot be said of her fellow characters. They are simply too extraordinary.
Eloise rises to exercise at 4:30am before heading to her London office to risk the company's future on a tip from Claude, an ex-lover, a troubled French scientist working with rare metals. He has his Eureka moment after applying the same rules to his troublesome atoms as to his love life – "It was not coercion that was required. It was seduction." The revelation that Eloise obsesses about her weight is thrown in as a clumsy implication that she is, really, just another Bridget Jones.
Mason can draw wonderful characters without toe-curling clichés. Patrick Derby, Eloise's Biro-munching boss, is wonderful. Patrick is an ordinary man, but an extraordinary character, honest and consistent in his quest for the only thing that matters to him, money. He serves as a warning to Eloise of what she might become if she does not see the error of her ways, but he never recognises the error himself. The true motives of others may remain a mystery, but Patrick's are laid refreshingly bare in a novel straining under so many intricacies.
Mason's boldness is to be admired – he is clearly a young writer who is not afraid to challenge himself. But to write convincingly he must narrow his scope. The Lighted Rooms takes the reader variously to modern-day South Africa, wartime Paris, 19th-century London, the South Africa of the Anglo-Boer war and back to 21st-century London. This, coupled with the challenge of convincing characterisation, seems to overwhelm what is itself a moving tale of wartime suffering and loss, based on Mason's own ancestral history.
Regrettably, he gets caught up in a precocious hammering home of the novel's strong themes of shifting family responsibilities and secret histories. "Now that her daughter stood before her," Joan over-thinks, "the prospect of confiding the existence … of a mysterious pair of pedals … was daunting … but the thought of her grandmother's endurance, and the need to live up to it, made her brave."
There is a lot to be said for ambition. But Mason's over-working of an essentially powerful story is testament also to the power of simplicity.
The full article contains 676 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
