'Fever of Animals' by Miles Allinson

“Why this insistent past, I wonder, like a wad of phlegm that will not go down?” This claustrophobic novel is about a young man, Miles, whose small accumulation of experience becomes a shackle to him, or, I could say, the novel, narrated by Miles, is an attempt to divest himself of that shackle, but at the risk of making it heavier and tighter, of creating for himself some sort of embalming cognitive-therapy legend. Going back over his memories, especially those of his past relationship with Alice, from whom he seems incapable of satisfactorily detaching himself, he attempts to create a consistent story from his self-obsessed perspective but largely fails due to the limited perspective of this self-obsession (from which his other obsessions depend). Briefly, the novel moves from the first person into the third, allowing Miles a more objective (or ‘objective’) perspective, and even, almost, giving Alice’s experience of him a moment of expression (we otherwise must intuit this from his bald statements and lacunae), but we are swiftly drawn back into the limitations of his self-awareness. Sensing that he had insufficient authenticity to be a painter himself, Miles intends to write a book about Emil Bafdescu, a minor Hungarian Surrealist painter who abandoned Surrealism, became provincial and conformist, and finally disappeared (a trajectory that is perhaps Miles’s own). “For a long time I thought of myself as a painter. The thought, the knowledge that I was, at heart, an artist, protected me against every other failure. I always felt as if I were carrying around inside myself an invulnerable seed that would burst into the world sooner or later. But it didn’t burst. It withered and wrinkled and finally it died away. … Having given up on that, I wonder whether I am good enough to write a book about painting, instead. … My fear is, if I fail at this, I will have run out of things to fail at.” Miles, obsessed with Bafdescu, tracks him across Europe and attempts to meet his descendants, without getting at all closer to him. This book could be seen as Miles writing a book about his failure to write the book he wanted to write. His own memories, which superimpose themselves on whatever he is aware of, and the fact that Bafdescu, apart from his meagre oeuvre, lies irretrievably in the past mean that his project is impossible. Whatever Miles is aware of is distorted by his subjectivity; authenticity lies always beyond the fence at the edge of himself.

October 2015