Here Is Where We Meet
John Berger Bloomsbury, 237pp, £14.99
ISBN 0747573174
John Berger's new book is a story of spectres, a work in which magic and empiricism, this world and the next, brush against each other with arresting delicacy. In the opening chapter, the narrator, John (who shares several biographical details with Berger), meets the shadow of his mother in Lisbon. Her expression, he tells us, "is one of happy impertinence, for she is sure now that she is beyond reach". She is the first in a succession of revenants who materialise in cities across Europe, turning up in cafes, market places and hotel foyers. Each emanates from a period of flux or of learning from John's past: they are all in some sense his teachers.
In Madrid, he meets Tyler, the schoolmaster who, in a freezing hut at the edge of a field, had taught him how to write and how to catch a ball. (They amount to the same thing: "you don't snatch at it in the air, you watch it coming and then place your hands accordingly".) In Krakow, he encounters Ken, who, aged 40 to his 11, had introduced him to books, later to sex and, in the interim, to the art of criticism (via regular trips to the music hall). And in London, he visits a student friend from the war years, hoping to recall the name of a girl with whom he had an intimate but distant relationship: "like an elderly couple who happened to be working in the same school".
Here Is Where We Meet is a work concerned with evanescent beings, yet there is nothing vague about the writing in it. As ever, Berger's prose is characterised by an almost preternatural precision and tact. The Berger sentence addresses itself to the physical world like a seasoned con-fessor: he has seen and heard everything, and will absolve everyone - but not be-fore he has coaxed the world into letting down its guard and divulging its secrets in a new lexicon.
Reflecting on prehistoric cave paintings at Chauvet in France, he notes that a stalactite has grown to resemble a mammoth: "the reference could easily be missed and so a Cro-Magnon painter, with four brief lines in red, brought the tiny mammoth nearer". The "reference" (not "resemblance") is the cave's: the painter merely adds a belated confirmation. An adjacent outcrop of rock, on which are painted two butterflies, "is shaped like the tip of a pancreas"; the oddity of the image works precisely because it neglects to mention that a pancreas looks like a leaf.
Berger may well be the only writer who could turn the description of a piece of fruit into something not merely poetic or metaphysical, but political - as he does in "Some Fruit as Remembered by the Dead". For him, it is as if the canniest description of the world would be that written by the dead (the dead of the sev-eral wars which haunt this book) as they are seized by the memory of warmth and succulence.
Formally, Here Is Where We Meet is recognisably of a genre that Berger long ago made his own: the rich amalgam of novel, essay and autobiography. It seems, in this tale of slow recollection and historical acceleration (Berger's narrator speeds across Europe on a motorbike), very much a genre of the future. Where a comparable writer, W G Sebald, always risked a certain nostalgia in his invention of an erudite, time-travelling persona, Berger reads as if he is reaching for forms as yet not invented. Style, he reflects at one point, is a matter of looking as though you have arrived from another time, as if you have left something behind and are paying homage to it at the same time. Berger's uncanny knack is to seize consistently on that sense of anachronism, to seem always (as one of his ghostly interlocutors has it) "a beginner".
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