A Possible Life, by Sebastian Faulks

A Possible Life is a quietly interesting and intriguing book, and one that's quite hard to pinpoint onto paper. It's created through five individual stories, showing five different lives, different times, different countries, different perspectives, and it's probably a couple of months since I read it now, which makes reviewing it even harder!

So, five stories, five people. First there is Geoffrey, 1938, caught up in the second world war. Then Billy, 1859, growing up in the workhouse, a place virtually beyond the modern western imagination to comprehend. Elena, 2029, a strange, withdrawn girl growing up in Italy; Jeanne, 1822, whose story I remember the least; and Anya, 1971, a Californian singer-songwriter headed for the stars.

I could draw a comparison to Sam Thompson’s Communion Town or David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, each of which are novels composed of different stories in a similar way to this one, but really that is the only similarity between them. Sebastian Faulks’ new book, for one, is subtler. Whilst reading it, I spent much of my time trying to identify what twists within each story linked them all together, which was a significant mistake on my part, for it is not the stories themselves that are linked, but rather their essence. The title is, after all, A Possible Life, and to me, I think that is what it's all about: possible lives.

In some cases the chapter is told from the point of view of the person named, in others it's another’s experience or memories of that person, and for the most part we are shown a sweeping view of each character’s life. As another reviewer has commented, each individual story is likely to speak to different readers differently. For me, I connected more strongly with Billy, Geoffrey and Anya than I did with Elena and Jeanne, though I imagine other readers may have a different response. What stands out are the themes of humanity that run through each character’s life: the search for love, connection, understanding. Each character finds - or fails to find - these things in a different way. Each life is a possibility: is it up to us what we make of it, or is it out of our control?

From an external vantage point, or before I had completed the book, I would have said the individual stories felt disparate and vaguely inconclusive, yet by the time I got to the end, somehow they had all coalesced in mind in a way that made the novel complete and whole. Strange and, as I said at the start, intriguing.

Communion Town by Sam Thompson

Communion Town is the story of one city, told by ten people. Ten points of view, ten different experiences.

Its a cool premise, the idea that every person who inhabits a place experiences it differently and has a different story to tell. Common sense, really, but rarely explored. From the foreigner passing through on her travels, to the immigrant seeking refuge, the Sherlockian private detective, the university graduate; each chapter gives the reader a different glimpse at life in this nameless, timeless place. Do they run parallel to one another or do the stories stretch over the years? How do they interconnect - or do they connect at all?

Comparisons are being made to David Mitchell, and understandably so: each storyteller has a different voice, a different style, almost a different genre. But Thompson isn't quite as adept at this as Mitchell - the differences are not as distinct or crisp. Perhaps, though, this was a deliberate choice: the book by no means suffers for it - if anything, it makes it easier to digest.

The best parts of Communion Town, though, are the hints of a macabre edge. In some chapters these hints are more subtle than in others, yet the idea of this oddness, this surreality remain almost unspoken, just out of reach. Some chapters reference a specific creature, The Flaneur, but he/it remains illusory. Who is The Flaneur? Is it the same person appearing every time, but viewed differently? Or is The Flaneur a myth that develops and changes over time? This would perhaps explain why he is represented slightly differently in each chapter. And - even where the name itself isn’t mentioned - each chapter contains a description somewhere of a shady character with a limp that corresponds with the physical descriptions each time The Flaneur is named. Is he the tramp with the carnation in his buttonhole? The strange, jumbled man the boy meets on the riverbank? The invisible entity haunting Stephen? A nameless monster who stalks the city at night, or merely a man bent on murder?

Wanting to know more, I looked up the word ‘flaneur’. Basically, it means ‘stroller’, ‘lounger’, ‘saunterer’. This makes sense: the flaneurs encountered in Communion Town all walk - or stalk - the streets of the city. But Charles Baudelaire developed the term further, extending it to encompass the idea that a flaneur is ‘a person who walks the city to experience it.’ This, then, enables Thompson to include most of his ten storytellers themselves as flaneurs - they all walk and experience the streets of the city, and regale the reader with their various experiences. And, furthermore, a flaneur can even incorporate a ‘complete philosophical way of living and thinking’, which reminds me of chapter seven, the story of Lazarus Glass, a city crime lord who has created a whole version of the city in his own mind - he lives and thinks the city, and cannot be separated from it; he is the city, or so he believes.

So, the whole idea of The Flaneur is itself embedded within the city and the book, far more deeply than is at first obvious. Very clever, and a sign - to me, at least - of careful thought and careful writing. This said, I did find some chapters more interesting than others. I was particularly intrigued by the ‘monsters’ mentioned in chapter one, but sadly they, or nothing similar to them, were ever mentioned again. Perhaps each person sees their own kind of monster.

Each storyteller ends their tale on a slight cliff-hanger, the hint of more story, which takes the risk of making them - and the book as a whole - feel incomplete. Yet it does feel complete - perhaps because we understand that the city continues outside the book and its story can never be fully told or finished.