SEPTEMBER 14 2019 LISTENER 51
by KIRAN DASST
he Man Who Saw Everything is
Deborah Levy’s third consecutive
longlisting for the Booker Prize, and
with it, she accelerates the moody
intrigue of her earlier nominated novels,
Swimming Home and Hot Milk.
The UK author has delivered her books
in a sequence, alternating between instal-
ments of her “living autobiography”. In
the first, Things I Don’t Want to Know, she
details her life in her forties, and it’s a kindof riff on George Orwell’s Why I Write.
The second, 2018’s sensationally good The
Cost of Living, documents her fifties and
is a response to Virginia Woolf’s A Room
of One’s Own. A third instalment is set to
follow The Man Who Saw Everything. Each
book serves as a palate cleanser for the
next, and each shows Levy to be a writer
of immense control and clarity.
Exploring coincidence, dualities, his-
tory, politics, the Brexit fiasco, beauty,
envy and language, The Man Who Saw
Every thing is a cleverly structured postmod-
ern novel of two halves.
The first half opens in 1988 in London.
Saul Adler is a young, androgynousSomething
in her style
Deborah Levy’s latest
novel keeps crossing
Abbey Rd in a
time-bending tale
that’s quite brilliant.
GE
TT
Y
IM
AG
ESbisexual historian study-
ing communist Eastern
Europe, which is on the
brink of collapse. He is
hit by a car on London’s
iconic Abbey Rd crossing.
With superficial injuries,
he trudges off to girl-
friend Jennifer Moreau,
an alluring photography
student. With his star-
tling beauty and “intense
blue Blade Runner eyes”,
he has acted as her muse.
She breaks up with him.
Saul travels to East
Germany to continue
his research for a paper
about Stalin and tyrannical men. There,
Saul falls in love with Walter, his transla-
tor. He also sleeps with Walter’s sister,
Luna. A Beatles obsessive, Luna has asked
Saul for a photo of himself on the cross-
ing that the Beatles made famous on the
cover of their Abbey Road LP, released 50
years ago this month.
In the second half, it’s 2016 and Ger-
many has long been reunited. A badly
injured Saul is in hospital after being hit
by a car on Abbey Rd. Sound familiar?
Heavily medicated, Saul is an unreliable
narrator in his unstable emotional and
psychological state. It’s for us to figure
out the connections, real or imagined,
between the two halves, but all the care-
fully placed little clues and recurring
motifs that Levy has laid out for the
reader come together to make sense
in a tremendously effective and
compelling way. How Saul expe-
riences the fluidity of time
as he moves from past to
present is beautifully han-
dled by Levy as her book
asks the question of who
writes the story of our
life – and what happens
when one steps outside
that and attempts a
rewrite?
Originally from
an avant-garde
theatre background,
Levy demonstrates a
sharp understanding ofdramatic tension, pace
and momentum here.
Her writing is hard-
hitting and, as with all
of Levy’s novels, there is
also a delicious offbeat,
macabre humour and
sense of the absurd
running just below its
sinister tension, and
there’s a moody intrigue
that keeps things
moving in its concise
198 pages.
It may sound like an
experimental novel, but
it’s not. It is, though,
existential, subversive
and quite brilliant. Just give her the
bloody Booker, already. l
THE MAN WHO SAW EVERYTHING, by
Deborah Levy (Hamish Hamilton, $37)The Man Who Saw
Every thing explorescoincidence, dualities,
history, politics, the Brexit
fiasco, beauty, envy andlanguage.
Deborah Levy: a sharp
understanding of dramatic
tension, pace and momentum.