A Dead Language - Hardcover

Rushforth, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1596921927 ISBN 13: 9781596921924

Publisher: MacAdam Cage, 2006

Synopsis

From the author of the critically acclaimed Pinkerton’s Sister comes volume two of this extraordinary sequence of novels.

Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton — the faithless young naval lieutenant who abandons Madam Butterfly — was glimpsed fleetingly in Peter Rushforth's previous novel, Pinkerton's Sister. Now Ben steps out of the shadows and into the center of the stage, a young man haunted by the desolation of his boyhood years, unable to show or respond to love.

Once again, in his mastery of language, his humor, his extraordinary imagination, and his superb sense of time and place, Peter Rushforth has given the world another masterpiece, ranking alongside, or surpassing, his earlier triumphs.

About this title

About the Author

Peter Rushforth’s brilliant first novel, Kindergarten, was published in 1979 and won the Hawthornden Prize, awarded to the best work of imaginative literature. After an absence of twenty-five years he returned to the literary scene in 2004 with the epic novel Pinkerton’s Sister, which charmed critics at the Washington Post, New Yorker, and San Francisco Chronicle, and was named a BookSense selection in March 2005. In the fall of 2005 Rushforth finished a sequel to Pinkerton’s Sister, an elegant novel entitled A Dead Language.

Sadly, after making his final revisions to his work, Peter Rushforth passed away while walking on the Yorkshire Moors. A Dead Language was published posthumously in the U.K. by Simon & Schuster.

Reviews

"To die in an instant, without premonition, among close friends, walking through wonderful countryside towards a fine lunch, is probably as good an end as anyone could hope for."

So wrote Colin Rendall in the Guardian obituary for his friend the novelist Peter Rushforth, who died last year at the age of 60 after suffering a heart attack while hiking on the Yorkshire moors. What made Rushforth's death especially poignant was that his literary career had so recently reawakened. His award-winning first novel, Kindergarten, appeared in 1979, a tale of the Holocaust and contemporary terrorism infused with the dark energy of Grimms' fairy tales, "Hansel and Gretel" in particular.

But then he seemed to fall silent for 25 years till the publication of his second novel, in 2004, the overstuffed and unabashedly bibliophilic Pinkerton's Sister. That capacious book brought Rushforth wide acclaim and was the start of one of the more ambitious literary undertakings of recent years: a quintet called "A Malady of Thought." The projected sequence involves the family of Lt. Benjamin Pinkerton, the feckless seducer of Puccini's "Madame Butterfly." The first two books, Pinkerton's Sister and now A Dead Language, immerse readers in this spectacularly dysfunctional clan through an idiosyncratic, stream-of-consciousness narrative as affecting as it is sometimes unwieldy.

Pinkerton's Sister presented a single day in the life of Alice Pinkerton, a self-proclaimed madwoman in the attic of her affluent family home. Rushforth's new novel focuses on the childhood and adolescence of Alice's brother, Ben. A brief prologue cues the reader to Ben's later life as the man who impregnated and then abandoned his young Japanese bride in Nagasaki. From there, the story flashes back and forth across Ben's schoolboy experiences in the fictional New York town of Hudson Heights, from the late 1880s until 1894, when he's 16.

The dead language of the title is Latin, lingua franca of "The Bearded Ones," Alice Pinkerton's terse nickname for the men in her father's circle. Pinkerton senior is one of the most monstrous characters in recent literature, a man who "experienced the delirium of godlike power" primarily through goading his son.

In the world of The Bearded Ones, Ben has the great misfortune to be physically delicate. He's also very musical and blushes easily, attributes that encourage his father to torment him without mercy. "For a time he had expected his father's large hairy-backed hand to grasp him around the mouth and pinch his nose (it would cover almost the whole of his face), to stop him from breathing, to make him faint again, just so that he could laugh at him."

A Dead Language invokes boys' stories -- Tom Brown's School Days, Nicholas Nickleby, Penrod -- as signposts for Ben's harrowing journey to manhood. Much of the novel takes place during Latin lessons, taught at different schools by two men who embody wildly different forms of masculinity. Dr. Crowninshield's one-class schoolhouse favors an open, humorous take on the classics, heavy on Shakespeare and real-world application of knowledge, light on punishment and arithmetic. Dr. Crowninshield is helpless with numbers; he is also a fraud.

After the good doctor is run out of town, his students, including Ben and his friends Oliver Comstock and Linnaeus Finch, are sent to the Otsego Lake Academy, which belongs in that infernal catalog of Hell's secondary schools, alongside Dickens's Salem House and Charlotte Brontė's Lowood. Mr. Rappaport, Otsego's sadistic Latin teacher, is a terrifying creation. A "sleekly poisonous sneerer," Rappaport viciously harasses Ben and his "artistic" friends -- Linnaeus, a talented painter, and Oliver, an unrepentant aesthete who proudly shares a birthday with Dorian Gray. Latin may be the public language of The Bearded Ones, "but Ben thought that another language was involved, another private code for use in girlie-free rooms with closed doors and a smoky atmosphere." Rappaport's job, as he sees it, is to exorcise the girlie-boys from the real men and keep them from breaching those closed doors.

Rushforth's storytelling is dense and discursive, circling back and forth between Ben's boyhood and his later experiences at Otsego. The effect can be confusing, especially when some scenes are revealed to be extended daydreams, and the author's eccentric style (heavy on parentheses) can cause narrative gridlock. But the novel brightens whenever the unflappable Oliver appears. It's a mark of Rushforth's brilliance that this foppish, rapier-witted teenager is the one who finally challenges the horrible Rappaport during an extended, page-turningly intense sequence that is the book's grand finale.

It is also, sadly, Rushforth's last stand. The third volume of his quintet, Touching the Wound, was outlined but not completed when he died, which makes the final lines of A Dead Language all the more haunting.

"What could he see?

"What could he see?

"What could he see?

"Emptiness."

Reviewed by Elizabeth Hand
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Starred Review. The British Rushforth (1945-2005) wrote just three novels: Kindergarten (1979), which won Britains Hawthornden Prize; Pinkerton's Sister, which appeared 25 years later to acclaim; and this follow-up to Pinkerton's, finished but unpublished at his death. It's a sprawling, stream-of-consciousness sequel that chronicles the school days of that title's namesake, Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton-the same Lieutenant Pinkerton who abandons Madam Butterfly in the Gilbert & Sullivan opera. Ben is a sensitive, smart boy growing up in an upper-class upstate New York household in the waning 19th century. His sisters, his mama, his kind headmaster Dr. Crowninshield and his best friend Oliver Comstock (another misfit like himself) provide solace from a cruel father and world of manly men (or "Beards"), all shown through a time-hopping, kaleidoscopic lens of thoughts, digressions, 19th century pop culture references and witty deconstruction. As Ben and Oliver transfer from the haven of Crowninshield's school to his father's former stomping grounds, Otsego Lake Academy, each scene slows to a hilarious, manic crawl. Though comparisons to history-obsessed, stream-of-consciousness masters like Joyce and Pynchon are inevitable, Rushforth has the unique ability to draw a chapter out like a rubber band-digressing for 20 pages to, say, describe an imaginary confrontation between the town gossip and the local Reverend-and then to let it snap back with a satisfying sting. In Ben, he has crafted a character mesmerizing in his thoughtfulness and fear, setting the stage not only for Ben's heartbreaking betrayal of Butterfly (which Rushforth cleverly couches at the beginning of the story) but also, ultimately, of himself. For those who can abide repetition and Pynchon-esque disquisition, this is a novel to savor page-by-page.
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Edition details

• Publisher: MacAdam Cage
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1596921927
• ISBN 13: 9781596921924
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 750