From A to X - A Story in Letters By John Berger Verso, 197pp. £12.99A WOMAN DESPATCHES vivid, affectionate letters to her lover. Her writing is cheerful if undercut by yearning. She is busy, alert to daily life, working in a village pharmacy; but the man to whom she sends her lively reports is in prison.
This little book is magic, a world evoked through the voice of a woman intent on making the best of a difficult situation. It is original and graceful, sustained by a quiet rage. Few writers would have attempted it, yet even if his name was not on the cover, chances are many readers would have guessed the identity of the author - the iconic John Berger. Poet, thinker, art critic and storyteller, this most original of artists has yet again looked to the profound in the ordinary.
Now 82, John Berger, long settled in the French Alps and the winner of the 1972 Booker Prize for G, is not only a major British literary figure, he is also one of Europe's enduring intellectual voices. Ways of Seeing and About Looking have changed the way we look at art, and life itself. Berger's defining achievement as a novelist is that he has brought a European dimension to British fiction. Whatever about the several outrageous omissions, such as James Kelman and Damon Galgut from the recently announced Man Booker fiction prize long list, the unexpected and welcome inclusion of Berger's characteristically unusual new work is cause for celebration.
THE NARRATIVE IS arranged in three sequences, the content of three packets of letters. The missives have been found and are not dated, some were not even sent. We do not know if the lovers have been re-united, or if they are even alive. Yet the emotion is real. A'ida wills her lover,Xavier , who is serving two life sentences, to be by her side, she describes the light, the smells, the sounds of the world about her. She is not only romantic, she is practical, sending Xavier food supplies and asking about his minor injuries. Her observations are conversational, anecdotal and leave no doubt that she is well aware that the censor is looking over her shoulder as she writes. The anger is there, so is the caution. The setting is contemporary and it is a world riven by politics.
Most importantly and this is so true of Berger's vision, this is a book about community. A'ida addresses her lover with gentle urgency, skilfully keeping her despair at bay, yet she is also very much a part of the small village society going about its daily life. From A to X evokes a similar sense of a country community to that which dominated Berger's Pig Earth (1979), the evocative opening book of his wonderful "Into Their Labours'' trilogy which continued with Once in Europa (1989) and Lilac and Flag (1990). It those books he chronicled the rural way of life - and lamented its passing.
A'ida is lonely but busy. Her place in life is defined, she works in the pharmacy which is presided over by Idelmis of whom A'ida writes: "Her pharmaceutical memory is still extraordinary. She knows precisely where each medicine is to be found and what its active ingredients are and the precautions they imply . . . Only when somebody's complaint or question interests her, or when it's somebody she has known for fifty years, does she appear and take over."
DESPITE THE INTENSITY of A'ida's feelings for her lover, she is still capable of responding to life and it is this which makes her narrative so beguiling. Having described Idelmis as "a woman for whom science was a sister. And for her the pharmaceutical is close to the maternal", she makes the pharmacist live off the page. She is dynamic and knowledgeable, sufficiently remote and self-contained to sit amidst her potions reading travel books unless a patient needs her. "Yet", and it is in this "yet" that Berger and A'ida arrive at new levels of storytelling, "when she takes off her white overall and leaves the Sucrat pharmacy to walk home through the bus station, she's a frail, hesitant, old woman. She's aged since you've seen her. So have I."
A'ida is likeable, deeply human. Every thing she sees, every chance observation spills into a story. She sees a man sitting on the ground, "beside him was a smashed bicycle with a buckled front wheel" she feels for the man and then wonders if the bike is stolen. "When you're alone a lot like I am, you get to speculating about stupid things like this." She will relay information about the village and then calmly inform her lover: "Every night I put you together - bone by delicate bone."
Her letters have warmth and life and convincing uncertainty. Berger has created a character who seduces through her honesty. As she writes to her lover: "You and I are between two generations. The first is made up of the company of those close to us, who died or were killed. Many of them younger than we have become." Her candour is brilliantly countered by the darker figure of Xavier. At intervals we are made privy to the rather more cryptic thoughts of this enigmatic figure, a welder with the mind of a revolutionary. Trapped in cell 73, he reflects how "specialised prison architects were commissioned to design abattoirs". He is aware of the anger, the rhetoric and the helplessness.
"In cell reading and note-taking. Where there is little else, words count." His contributions are edgier, harsher. As the narrative progresses, we discover more about A'ida. It is as if she is determined to become closer to her lover by revealing more about herself. "When I was a small girl I had a collection of feathers. Nearly 200. From 27 species. Each bird had its own envelope."
Although she seldom laments, in a moment of intense pain she remarks: "We haven't talked much about our childhoods, have we? It's something I look forward to us doing . . . People talk about their childhoods when they fall in love and we didn't talk. Why do you think that was? I think I know but I can't find the words."
Elsewhere she tells him of a visit she made to his mother. The old woman presented A'ida with a ring and A'ida, recalling the moment, asks: "Do the precious stones of old women sparkle more than the jewels of other women? Perhaps, the jewels they wore when young retain the glow they themselves once had. Like the glow we see in certain flowers, immediately after the sun has gone down."
Meanwhile, for Xavier hearing Mussorgsky's Tableaux d'une Exposition makes him imagine that "what the piano was playing was a prisoner's walk from the prison after his release".
From A to X is about what happens when freedom is compromised, it is also about the business of loving and living and reacting. Berger won the Booker Prize with G, a narrative of extraordinary imagination. Half a lifetime later, he is continuing to unleash that singular imaginative power in a narrative possessing the passion of a love song, the vision of a seer and the anger of a militant.
•Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
