Anna Vaux reviews poet Carol Rumens’s first novel

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Carol Rumens has always been something of a Russophile. When she was five years old and still in kindergarten she sat on a wall next to a small and sobbing Czech child who spoke no English and began to cry. “We sat there crying and understood each other perfectly, ” she explains. Years later she wrote a poem about it, “Geography Lesson”, where all Czechoslovakia is the refugee child. Indeed, there is much of that image in Rumens’s recent poetry, which has shifted its focus from Croydon and the North Circular Road to an Eastern Block landscape full of exiles and emigrants, fear and apathy. There is also something of it in her West Harrow house where, surrounded by dictionaries and grammar books, she lives with an ex-Russian, Yuri, who speaks just slightly more English then she speaks Russian.

“I used to watch the refugee children at school; theirs was like a closed world I could only admire from a distance. Likewise, it was a catholic school, although I wasn’t a Catholic – and I desperately wanted to be one. I was always the outsider looking in”.

And Rumens’s first novel “Plato Park”, set partly in Moscow and partly in London, is very much a look at both from the wrong side of the fence. Arkady, a Russian writer, womaniser and agoniser, looks to “the land of Shakespeare, Byron and Roger McGough” to piece together his shattered illusions. He begins to find what he is looking for in Elizabeth, daughter of an English academic, well-read in “Dr. Zhivago” but little versed in anything else, who finds in Moscow a focus for her free-wheeling and adolescent liberalism. Rumens plays the one against the other, calls down their gods, and sets out to test “the dream against the reality”.

“Plato Park” is a love-story – and then again, it isn’t. Although her characters believe in love (Arkady talks of its “all- transcending value” and Elizabeth considers love her one “scrap of authenticity”), Rumens is more sceptical. She divides it first between its promise and its practicalities, and then between three people, to reveal all its dishonesty and infidelities. And her characters invent their love, as they have invented their East and West – Arkady for Elizabeth, and Elizabeth for a better revolutionary than Arkady.

Elizabeth belongs to that regiment of “starry-eyed” idealists Rumens writes about in her poem “Revolutionary Women”, where she characterizes herself as “cherishing/nothing better than a just cause/except perhaps the man who’d die for it”. “There is a lot of me in Elizabeth, ” she confesses. “I have heroes and ideals emotionally, but not intellectually: I argue myself out of them. Elizabeth doesn’t.” It’s a sceptical story, full of doubts and suspicions and unanswered questions – but one that is convincing, for all its moral and emotional arithmetic. Whatever the gravity of her themes, Rumens’s prose remains animated and light-weight enough to make this an engaging and ambitious first novel. There are small failures; but Carol Rumens is a bold writer, and her daring pays off.

“Plato Park” is an almost plotless novel. Consisting of pages from notebooks, diaries and letters, the novel progresses through instalments that don’t always appear in the right order, but which nonetheless build up a densely detailed picture. It comes as something of a surprise, then, to learn that Rumens has never been to Russia. “Obviously I rely on Yuri for details of his country. But part of the art of being a writer is to imagine yourself in numerous different situations. I don’t think I could have written it if I were writing from personal experience.” Whatever the temptations to build up a solid autobiography from the personal narratives of Rumens’s poetry that spill out into “Plato Park”, one must obviously tread with care. There is nonetheless a certain restless impulse in her as in her characters. “I used to write my poetry on the train. Travelling, I think, is the most authentic mode of existence – when you are eternally between places.” It is a romantic notion, but one that maps out the neither-here-nor-there geography of “Plato Park”.

VII. Give a summary of the article and say if this review sounds attractive enough and if you would like to read this novel or not. Explain your choice.

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