A review by variousfictions
Berg by Ann Quin

4.0

There's something peculiar and off-kilter about British seaside towns. They attract the artist, the outsider, and the wanderer. The final destination of the runaway. The edge. Preserved in time since the collapse of the coastal resort boom in the 60s and 70s, they are often places stricken by poverty and life in stark contrast to the bustling beach-filled summers of yesteryear. The once shiny attractions and freshly painted shopfronts now decaying and rusting from neglect in the humid salt air that blows in from the sea.

It's in such a place that Ann Quin sets her debut novel, Berg. A Shakespearean farce that unfolds into a surrealist tragedy. Half an Oedipal legend. Not discounting the possibility Alistair and his mother once pushed each other on the swings of some incestuous playground, and given Quin's tendency towards scenes of absurd eroticism and Freudian overtones, there is a good chance of that.

Having spent a childhood in and out of the waters of places like Southend and Clacton, the setting for the novel, with its strange and disconcerting atmosphere twisted its way between old memories, leaving me changed. The rose-tinted echoes of youth reshaping themselves into something increasingly sinister and psychedelic. As if the filter of my childhood was disintegrating purely by coming into contact with Quin's prose until all that remained was the residue of a reality that I had previously remembered so fondly. And to cement my anxiety—the haunting image of a ventriloquist dummy. Nothing in the world frightens me more than that, except perhaps the kind of person who is willing to use one.

But Greb is here to save me. To save himself. A patricide to annihilate the sins of the past and to be reborn into something new. Something better. But vengeance is like drinking poison and expecting someone else to suffer. And so Greb must suffer. And we suffer with him in this fever dream, on the other side of that partition where our base animalism is goaded into action. A Father, his mistress, and a ventriloquist dummy wrapped in a carpet; a rotten holy trinity who appear and reappear in sequences unknown to normal time. Walking around this crooked house, like the one I used to stumble through with my family on Adventure Island; the distorted reflections of my parent's bodies and faces in the array of warped mirrors becoming what is now my undeniable truth. It's just like Faulkner said: Memory believes before knowing remembers. And for Greb, whose surrogacy for this new life has been incubated in a timeline stretching back to his conception, is ready to slip into the old man's shoes as seamlessly as if he'd been wearing them all along. Not so much a rebirth as an inescapable destiny.