Combining hilarious detail with harsh observation, this rediscovered novel takes the reader on an exhilaratingly strange journey ‘But after all, writing is nothing more than a guided dream,” wrote Jorge Luis Borges. Dreams and dreaming are fertile concerns for Rosalind Belben, too.
Her fourth book, originally published in 1979 and reissued last year, was titled Dreaming of Dead People. It was followed, a decade later, by Is Beauty Good. Now available in a new edition from the Sheffield indie And Other Stories, this eccentric polyphonic novel contains dozens of considerations of dreams, including dogs’ dreams and horses’ dreams as well as human beings’.
Yet what makes it extraordinary is Belben’s ability to capture in words the slippery state that is neither dreaming nor sleeping nor waking, but somewhere in the edgelands between all three.“I fall awake and think, I want to go home. But there is no home.” So begins the chapter entitled Exile, a deliciously elusive story that is, most of the time at least, narrated in the first person by someone who is probably a woman, “a grizzled, cropped person”, and probably quite old and alone.
They might be travelling through mountains somewhere, perhaps on a bus. They aren’t sure: “I am quite lost, wherever I am. I want to surrender. I wish to retire. I am tired.” Swishing about are uncertain memories of a childhood “shrouded” in nightmares: there was an orchard with an abundance of flora and fauna, and larks and swallows and “swifts to scream”.
Like the author, the narrator was “born in the mud month” of February, and longs to disappear into marshlands to “be touched and stroked by plants”. But Belben never lets us rest in one place for long. Slipping in and out of sleep, “suffering glimpses”, the narrator stares at “a pink and blue angel” in the plaster of the wall.
Which wall, you wonder, and how did we get here? This is the lure of Belben’s hypnagogia, the dizzying space into which she writes. Continue reading…
