In the Falling Snow is a story of where and how to belong, seen through the eyes of an immigrant’s son. It explores the forces that shape our desires and our capacity to live them out – subconscious, personal and social forces that interact across three generations. Perhaps it is also a novel about the attrition and sustainability of love.
Caryl Phillips is an award-winning writer whose work encompasses theatre, radio, television, screenplays and adaptations as well as novels. He is now an international award-winner in all these media and an editor, advisor and teacher in both Europe and America. He has been writer in residence in many countries around the world and is currently Professor of English at Yale University. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages and he is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
In the Falling Snow is his ninth novel. Keith’s story is the fulcrum on which past and present balance, uneasily. Phillips uses the apparently simple device of past and present tenses to shift between Keith’s present-day experience and his retelling or recalling of the actions, feelings and indecisions that have brought him to his current ambiguous situation.
Employed by a local authority as policy-maker for race equality initiatives (a position he sought so that he would not have to deal face to face with racially sensitive incidents) he is ironically suspended from work, accused of harassment and exploitation by one of his employees. He has been separated from his wife for three years following his confession of a single, meaningless act of adultery. He still does not understand why he told her; neither does he know why she reacted so strongly, or why he so inertly accepted his ejection from the family home. He is adrift. His work appears to have little meaning; he attempts to realise a fantasy of writing a book about popular music, but even this is abandoned as futile. His motivation vanishes; he is impelled by other people’s efforts to set him moving rather than any intrinsic desires.
The interweaving of past history and present action in the first part of the novel is somewhat ungainly, but in a writer of Phillips’ sophistication and skill, we should beware making a premature adverse judgement. Keith is a difficult character with whom to identify. He arouses enormous frustration in this reader because of his fumbling mismanagement of relationships through his lethargy, incompetence and deep-seated discomfort. But he was not always so. Moreover, he is gradually forced to engage with his father and his son – driven by his father’s ageing and by his estranged wife’s determination that he will confront his responsibility for his son. His memories of his parents and Brenda (the woman who brought him up and seems to have loved him unequivocally), are slowly uncovered and sifted, and the novel gathers pace and power until its deeply moving climax: not Keith’s story, but his father’s.
We hear a poignant and un-evasive voice, which strikes true perhaps because of its linguistic naivety. Earl tells Keith in the few hours before his death about his life in the West Indies and his coming to England. Past and present coalesce. Earl’s early life in the Caribbean, his numb recognition that the idea of England is best left as an idea rather than a painful reality, his confusion over why he was sectioned, and his effort to be a father, provide insights into Keith’s own struggle to know where and how to belong.
Much of what Earl recalls transcends racial prejudice.
‘I know the man don’t really be talking to me so I just watch and wait for him to turn back and look me in the face which he eventually decide to do. Dr Davies ask me if I have any family in English, but before I can answer the man is talking to himself again. He rest down the pipe and sigh. “You’re all so bloody young. Remarkable really, but you’re all just kids when it comes down to it, just kids.”’ What we might at first assume to be a token of racial prejudice becomes instead an evocation of the older generation’s bafflement about the young, of whatever colour. It is the more powerful because not generalised. ‘[He] look me in the face.'
The dilemmas Keith must resolve are not race-or class-specific although they have been shaped by both. Phillips conjures up lives which are detailed and specific, and at the same time representative and symbolic. What Keith assumes to be private acts have consequences beyond his control: his brushes with fellow workers (Yvette, Lesley, Clive), or the Polish migrants, his attempts to relate to his son. He has no sense of the way in which others are responding to his detachment, his failures of love. He has no idea of whether or not he loves his son, his father, his wife. But his previous relationship with Annabelle was rooted in shared life at university, shared values, shared passion, and her willingness to choose him despite the hostility of her white middle-class parents. Originally, he knew what it was to love and be loved.
Keith’s internal experience is permeated by half-articulated regret, frustration, and distance from the attachments which might give his life shape and direction. This ambiguity persists to the novel’s final words. Exhausted by coping with his father’s dying, he permits his wife to direct his actions, even though he deludes himself that he will resume control. The details, recounted without commentary, present to the reader the man who has lost his conscious sense of place, and yet accepts the place he is given. Although he tries to avoid making decisions that commit him, he returns, if inadvertently, to the marriage that once inspired him. Keith’s son is bent upon shaping his life, and although Keith has drifted from exuberance to ennui, Annabelle has surrendered nothing. This is a novel that reminds us that we are able to choose. We can reinvent ourselves.
Caryl Phillips will give a literary reading at Culture Lab, Newcastle University at 7pm on 22th March 2010. Tickets are priced £6/£4 and are available by e-mailing Melanie.Birch@ncl.ac.uk or from the online shop.