TO HEAVEN BY WATER
Justin Cartwright
Bloomsbury USA
Fiction
ISBN: 9781596916210
Justin Cartwright isn’t what you might call a limited writer stylistically, or an author with nothing to say. Two of his books have been shortlisted (IN EVERY FACE I MEETfor the Booker Prize, WHITE LIGHTNING for the Whitbread Novel Award), and one, LEADING THE CHEERS, won the Whitbread in 1999. But his latest novel, TO HEAVEN BY WATER, is a bit of a slow read --- not because it’s poorly written or uninteresting, but because Cartwright has taken a fairly meditative subject matter (the death of a spouse) and has, well, meditated on it…for 300 pages.
TO HEAVEN BY WATER’s premise is a simple one. David Cross is a retired news anchor for London’s Global Television’s Sunrise Report. His wife, Nancy, has just recently passed away (offstage) after a losing battle with cancer, and his kids --- Ed, a lawyer whose marriage is crumbling because he and his wife, Rosalie, can’t get pregnant, and Lucy, an adrift 26-year-old cataloguer of ancient coins who’s still flitting around with the wrong men --- think he’s not dealing with it properly. As for David? That’s a different story: “To his own mind he is more himself than he has been for nearly forty years…He is not unhappy.” Thus, the majority of the book consists of scenes where Ed and Lucy debate whether or not their father is in denial or coping correctly, while David merely goes on with his life as if something is a bit different but he can’t quite summon up enough energy to care.
So nothing really happens, per se. There’s no flashy writing, no dramatic moments where characters rant and rage, no twists and turns where the reader is left deliciously mystified. But there’s certainly a lot to think about as the characters meander through their fairly routine routines. For one, Cartwright allows his characters --- mostly David and his chums (although Ed dips into the nostalgia tank as well) --- to wax on about what it means to get older. There’s a lot of talk about “old times” and “the way things were,” and how things could’ve been different if only other choices were made. Perhaps it’s a true reflection of what happens as we age, but Cartwright’s characters seem to wallow in it.
There’s also a certain resigned fatalism to Cartwright’s characters’ take on courtship and marriage --- that a partnership is a worthwhile venture to enter into, but trust, love and loyalty are suspiciously absent from the deal. Lucy’s petering relationship with her obsessive, deadbeat boyfriend is unmistakably toxic (“She tries to forget that he is fantastically stupid despite his misleading good looks, and that he is sexually disturbed, chronically promiscuous and vicious when drunk.”), and Ed’s perception of marriage is but a poor substitute for what it should be (“Ed thinks --- he has intimations already --- that marriage can impose a sort of heaviness that never lifts, a sort of muting of the senses…”). He acts like a wounded child, temporarily placated by his affair with Alice (a trainee at his law firm who he’s “shagging”), but caught off guard by Rosalie’s silence (she never admits to him that she knows about his infidelity, but instead sleeps with his father [gasp!]). As for David, he never got over the affair his wife had years earlier, and instead of confronting her about it, he merely distanced himself until there was nothing really left.
But beyond relationships, marriage, loss, freedom from obligations, and all the rest, Cartwright paints a picture of a fairly ordinary family --- one with its intricacies and banalities that, in the end, are no different from any other family’s. (What’s that you say, Tolstoy?) “That’s what families are for, to remind you of what you really are,” Ed says to David in one of their heart-to-hearts. Sure, that’s one way to see it. Or, from David: “I think that the real you, the one the family sees, is actually the you that suits them. But there’s no point in fighting it because it’s unavoidable.” These ideas are either side of the same coin --- both true, depending on how you look at it.
In the end, “people’s lives, when you get to know them well, are infinitely more complex than you could ever have imagined.” Yes. But as illustrated in TO HEAVEN BY WATER, they’re also incredibly simple.
--- Reviewed by Alexis Burling
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