G.G.'s Reviews > The Bradshaw Variations

Cusk is brilliant at suggesting an entire life in a few careful sentences. Here is the eldest Bradshaw brother:

Howard is a person whose jesting nature, which seemed when he was young to connote a disregard for convention in all its forms, has suffused his adult life with an atmosphere of irony in which his more-than-average conservatism wears the vague disguise of a joke. Thomas [the middle Bradshaw brother] sometimes wonders whether his belief that Howard is different from other people is nourished solely by the backgrounds against which he sees him; whether, in a different setting, he might perceive that Howard is, after all, ordinary, and not just pretending to be. (p. 28)

The passage I've just quoted also reveals another of Cusk's abilities, and that is to show obliquely, via the observing eye of another character, what someone is like.

Cusk also understands women. Thomas's wife Tonie recalls the beginning of their relationship:

While he gave unfettered expression to his guilt, his anxiety, his conception of honour, she suppressed the small, indignant voice that told her she was entitled, while taking the risk of love, to his full attention. (p. 100)

Who hasn't been there?

So there is much to admire in this novel. Still, I found the narrative voice a bit beady-eyed and unsympathetic at times. Sentences like:

He sees her, a nondescript person with cropped, rigid hair, holding up a tan-colored anorak. Her husband is a tall silent hunk of grey flesh who stands beside her with his giant hands hanging lifelessly at his sides. (p. 176)

Or

She sleeps in his bed, beside his body that is like a long white root, firm and forked. He sucks her large breasts in the darkness, while cars roar along the road outside. (p. 202)

And yet Cusk's observations on love, the undercurrents of marriage, and way family dynamics echo down the generations are such that I feel sure I'll be reading more of her in future.