V.S. Naipaul attracted a lot of flak when, in an interview a few
years ago, he claimed that men and women wrote different kinds of novels. He
went on to claim that he could make out within the first few pages of a novel
whether it was written by a man or a woman.
I would have had no difficulty in guessing within the first five
pages of Sex and Stravinsky that it was written by a woman. Why? Read
this paragraph on page six:
'.
. . she knows the uses of coconut milk and cardamom pods. While her
contemporaries stuck with pulses and tinned pilchards, and mounds of oily
grated cheddar she is already making her own pesto with fresh basil which she
grows from seeds in flowerpots and her careful student budgeting allows for
tiny bags of pine nuts and pecorino cheese. . . She makes glazed fruit tarts.
She makes fruit mousse, mixing dried apricots, stewed and pureed, with
gelatine, whipped cream and frothed egg whites. For Josh she makes an airy
angel whip.’
As you read on, there are detailed descriptions of clothes worn by
some or more female protagonists, descriptions of the dressing rooms of houses,
so on and so forth.
As it happened I did not have to guess, as I knew that the novel was written by a woman, Barbara Trapido, who,
while she will not feature in the top-ten list of my favourite novelists, is a
writer I have time for.
Sex and Stravinsky is Trapido’s first novel since
the 2002’s Frankie and Stankie, which I thought was brilliant. The
autobiographical novel which told the story of two white girls growing up in
the apartheid era South Africa was something of a departure for Trapido, whose
earlier novels could be best described as romantic comedies or comedies of
error. I have read two of them. The Brother of the More Famous Jack,
Trapido’s debut novel which won the Whitbread (now Costa) award, and The
Travelling Horn Player, which came out in 1998 and was very well
received critically. The Brother of the More Famous Jack
was, I thought, thematically very similar to an earlier novel by Margaret
Drabble (Jerusalem the Golden), although Trapido’s treatment of the
subject matter was different and was characterised by what was to become her
trademark—light and comic touch. The Travelling Horn Player was an
effervescent novel which did not linger on in your mind.
With Sex and Stravinsky Trapido has returned to her terra firma—romantic comedies. The
setting of Sex and Stravinsky is South Africa (where Trapido was born and
grew up) and Oxford (where she has spent most of her adult life). Like her
earlier romantic comedies (for example Travelling Horn Player), Sex
and Stravinsky is breezy and cheerful, with—in tandem, perhaps, with
the mood of the novel—carefree unconcern for realism. Her comedy is almost
Shakespearean in this sense, full of chance meetings and coincidences.
The main characters in Sex and Stravinsky meet one another
from time to time, without knowing that they are connected, the pattern hidden
behind their movements and decisions being governed by the all-seeing
omnipresent fate, or, the writer.
This is the story of two couples Josh and Caroline, and Hattie and
Herman. Caroline is an Ozzie while the others are South Africans. Hattie is
Josh’s first love but she declined to accompany him to England when he wins a
scholarship to study ballet dancing in England. In England Josh meets the
super-efficient Caroline and marries her, forgetting, with the passage of time,
his first love. Hattie is locked in an outwardly successful but increasingly
loveless marriage to Herman who is an acquaintance of Josh at the University
and is different from him in every conceivable way. They have three children,
of whom the youngest, Kate, or Cat, is at home. Cat, who despises her mother with
a passion, is tentatively embarking on what promises to be a successful career
in bulimia. Hattie writes moderately successful children’s books on—you have
guessed it— ballet dancing. In the meanwhile, Josh and Caroline, in England,
are happily married—or so they think. Josh is a dance academic while Caroline
is a head-mistress and can command everyone except her caricaturesquely
obnoxious mother, who, no matter what Caroline does to please her, is never
pleased and always favours the younger daughter, Janet, who lives in Australia
and wants nothing to do with her. Josh and Caroline, too, have a daughter,
named Zoe who is a minor neurotic. These are the main characters in the drama.
Then there is the supporting cast. It includes, in no particular order,
Caroline’s ghoulish mother (already mentioned) and ghastly sister (ditto);
Josh’s parents—Josh is their adopted son—who are Jewish and are anti-apartheid
activists in South Africa; and Jack, the illegitimate son of their Black maid,
Gertrude.
As the novel progresses, we learn more about the lives of the
protagonists. Caroline, who has gone out of her way to be subservient to her
mother and has subjected her family to sacrifices in order to keep her mother
sweet but has always been the less loved, unfavoured daughter, discovers that
she was adopted (in a manner of speaking—she was given to Caroline’s mother,
adoptive mother that is, on a bus in Sydney). This knowledge about her
provenance triggers the kind of upheaval in Caroline’s attitude to everything,
compared to which the revolution in Russia was a tea party. She turns up in
South Africa with her daughter to inform Josh, who has travelled there to
participate in a conference, that her mother, though she wasn’t her real mother,
had died (although why the news couldn’t wait—seeing as Caroline has decided
that the woman was a bitch— till Josh returned from the conference is not
clear). And whom should Caroline run into upon landing in South Africa? Why,
Herman, Hattie’s husband, who, in the tradition of randy White South African
men, is always looking for opportunities to get his leg over. Caroline and
Herman hit it off straightaway and the woman whose boldest decision until that
time was to add a twist to a lemon meringue pie, allows herself to be taken
first to Herman’s house (which is also Hattie’s house), and then to be, well,
taken. Josh in the meanwhile has run into Hattie at a local café, and the two
ex-but-about-to-be-current lovers are visiting museums and galleries and
animatedly discussing finer points of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella. It doesn’t end here: Herman and Hattie have a lodger
named Giacomo, who is none other than Jack, the son of the maid who worked for
Josh’s parents. And the man who impregnated the Black maid was none other than
Hattie’s reprobate brother James when she worked for her parents, although
neither Hattie nor Josh is aware of this link till the very end. Have I missed
any more co-incidences? I might have. This is a novel so full of co-incidences
that you are left wondering whether co-incidences aren’t travelling around
looking for their lost twins.
I shall not be giving away any secrets, I hope, when I say that it
all ends happily with the main protagonists realigning themselves with each
other’s partners, the arrangements and exchanges taking place more smoothly
than a transaction at the Tesco counter.
Trapido employs the tried and tested literary tropes—secret
paternity and adoption, sibling rivalries—to embellish the narrative, mostly to
impressive effect. The prose is elegant and has a kind of rhythm and flow to it
which, for the most part, carries the novel through.
Nevertheless, reading Sex and Stravinsky is a strange
experience. The characters are contemporary; the story takes place mostly in
the here-and-now, and when it deals with the past, it’s still twentieth century.
The problems and dilemmas faced by the protagonists are real enough; yet they
are dealt with in a manner that is very unreal. Towards the end, especially
after Caroline’s discovery that her mother was a manipulative harridan, the
pace of the novel increases, the co-incidences and chance encounters come thick
and fast, so much so that the plot runs the danger of appearing contrived. The
narrative tone, throughout, is facetious, almost fatuous; and the resolution of
the mismatched relationships is slapdash. It is almost as if the author is
begging you not to take any of it seriously because she herself isn’t treating
it seriously. There is a token nod to the apartheid inequalities in South
Africa, but here, too, in contrast to the superb Frankie and Stankie, in
which the heroines come slowly to realise the inequalities of the world around
them in which they enjoy privileged positions, the matter is treated with about
as much gravity as in a Christmas pantomime.
The title of the novel is a tad misleading. There is no sex and
Stravinsky’s Pulcinella has no bearing on the narrative; it plays no pivotal
part and is mentioned almost as an aside—a ballet Hattie likes.
Reading Sex and Stravinsky is like eating a
happy meal at McDonald’s: it is cheap and cheerful, it will fill your stomach;
but if you want a gourmet experience, you will need to look elsewhere.
