You Are History: The Man Who Saw Everything

‘I don’t want to talk about it now’

But you must” she said firmly ‘You are history’

There is no conceivable way to do justice to the absorbing, subtle complexity of this novel in a few, inevitably rather schematic, observations. But here goes.

All that you really need to know is that the main protagonist (Saul) suffers two traffic accidents, both on the zebra crossing made famous by the cover of the Beatles' Abbey Road album. These incidents occur in 1988 just before the fall of the Berlin Wall and in 2016 just after the referendum on UK membership of the European Union. Two pivotal events in European history. 

The book is concerned with the way that the perception, experience and recollection of events is mediated between the individual and the wider world. One lives through events in both senses of the word: through in the sense of being present on the journey and through in the sense of being an actor - doing, and not doing, things during those wider events.

History happens to us and through us and there are parallels between how we behave and how the wider world is taken to behave. We may study East German dictatorships because our father was a bully. We may wish to leave East Germany for Liverpool because the Beatles offer a sense of artistic freedom which must, surely, be reflected in that city.

The way that this becomes apparent in the novel is little short of wizardry. To be ludicrously schematic about it one can see it as a series of palimpsests relating to different time periods when the external world changed markedly or was about to change. However, these palimpsests tilt and intersect vertically rather than just sitting one over another. Intersection is the product of the individual who provides the vertical connections. And the external palimpsest alters its angle depending on the relationships between the individual and other individuals who were also observing the same events.

This is dizzying particularly when past and present and future start to bleed into each other through these points of intersection within the mind of a character:

‘I’ve mixed then and now all up’

To which his girlfriend from 1988 (Jennifer) replies:

‘That’s what I do in my photographs’

And indeed photographs are crucial. There is quote from Susan Sontag in the frontispiece about how photographs turn people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. But these are for the benefit of the person taking and viewing the photographs - not the subject.

There is no reciprocal. As the 1988 Jennifer says: ‘Its not as if its my life’s work to help you see me. I’ve got other things to do’.

The belief of some animists that photography steals the soul has some resonance here as well as the sense that consent to being observed can never truly be given because the observation relating to the photograph can never be fully and consistently consented: photographs are very clearly owned throughout the novel. As the subject you can never know who owns you in the future. 

There is a huge difference between Saul mixing up time and Jennifer mixing up photographs. The latter does, however, have profound implications for the former.

Spectres and revenants haunt the novel. They populate the intersections. 

My father was sitting on a chair near the telephone

'You're dead' I whispered

He laughed 'Not yet'.

In other words people 'die' in terms of how far the impact and implications of their death have been processed.

Haunting can also alter in nature. Changed perspective in the present can alter the way that someone is perceived in the past. This may happen when there is a physical interaction in one time period. In one gorgeous, completely breathtaking moment it is said that : ‘I reached for her new older hand with my new older hand’.

There are parallels and doublings throughout the novel: the jaguar which supposedly wanders in the old East Berlin; the car accidents involve a Jaguar car. In other words the 'jaguar' is one of the points of vertical intersection: the shards of glass lodged in the brain of the victim are like the Stasi getting inside the head of the dissident making them imagine that they can be punished for their thoughts. 

To be more fanciful one also wonders if the spookiness is also quantum. In the old East Berlin there is a statue of an astronaut called: Man Overcomes Space and Time. Are these entanglements and intersections between time periods also a reference to non-local effects and the spookiness of the quantum world in which the particles that make the universe run have what in everyday terms are wholly bizarre connections. Is time, in those terms, an emergent phenomenon which reflects network effects?

These wonders are to be found in a book which could be summarised as being about crossing a road in central London. But successfully crossing a road is not only down to you. 

‘You’ve been trying to cross the road for thirty years but stuff happened on the way’.