Mapping the Edge
Sarah Dunant
Virago trd pbk, 342 pgs, £10.99
Review by Gerald Houghton (1999)
Sarah Dunant's last, Transgressions, earned more column inches (and shelf space) for perceived controversy than for its actual value as a novel. A shame because, although its story of seemingly compliant rape trod genuinely dangerous ground, it did tend to overshadow the fact that, sentence on sentence, Dunant is a rigorous and very accessible writer. No, if the scribes felt impelled to swoop then heed no more than her failure of nerve in the final pages, where she looks to dull woman-in-peril convention to replace anything, well, anything really transgressive. An aggravatingly sour final note.
Not so the dislocating Mapping The Edge. As the final pages fall it becomes increasingly clear that this strange, edgy book is as determined to leave as many questions as answers.
Anna is missing. Thirty-nine years-old, 5’7", striking - "pretty was always too tame a word" - a journalist from London. Single mother to six year-old Lilly. She went to Italy for a few days but didn’t come back. So, in London, in Anna’s home, are a confused little girl and Anna’s best friend, Stella, flown in from Amsterdam, and Paul, gay lodger and de facto father. They are waiting.
In Italy, Anna has been kidnapped by an urbane but dangerous local, a man looking to replace his own dear dead spouse with a nice new English one. Or:
In Italy, Anna has been having an affair with a married art dealer. They met through ‘The Guardian’ personals while she researched a story. Only, now that she looks at Samuel she begins to wonder if Samuel has more than just a wife he’s lying to.
Dunant cleverly intercuts these strands, chapter to chapter, thus staffing the book with an energy its wait-and-see narrative would otherwise have sucked dry. Mind you, it does rather point up the (largely filmic) influences. An unexplained disappearance? Italy? That’ll be Antonioni’s masterpiece, L’Avventura then. The creepy kidnapper? George Sluizer’s The Vanishing. Photographs? Voyeurism? Peeping Tom. And whichever way you cut it, Anna’s various adventures owe a debt to Barbara Vine and Patricia Highsmith, those grand dames of the psychological thriller. We have no way of knowing which Italian scenario is for real, if either. Are these Anna’s fantasy constructs? Was she ever really in Italy? Or, since the remainder is first person, are they simply TV plots extended by Stella to fill the void; what Dunant calls the "cancer of the imagination"? Or two of an infinite multiverse woven by the author herself?
Fortunately, although all of her novels are issue based, Dunant is more than satisfied to let it fester, not surrender to some awful didactic tub-thumping; her books do not have an agenda. Which means, of course, that she sometimes has to take abuse on the chin, as she did for Transgressions. Not that we’ll see a repeat: Mapping The Edge has no built-in ‘Guardian’ columnist-friendly agenda.
It does, though, permit Dunant to extend her games through the climax without revealing her hand, to give her characters a life beyond. The result is a novel that promises answers but, disturbingly, doesn’t deliver - perhaps because their author knows answers it will inevitably disappoint. Having written herself into a formal, almost ritualistic corner, the brilliant solution Antonioni found is the only one open. The final pages (final paragraph) work brilliantly. Mapping The Edge: sometimes it is better to travel in hope than to arrive.