After the end of the Second World War, an expatriate community
is formed in Venezuela. Made up of English, American and Dutch
oil workers and their families, this ‘privileged minority’ combat
homesickness, isolation and memories of war through a frenetically
hedonistic lifestyle. The endless round of parties, gossip and
extra-marital affairs is haunted by largely unspoken horrors;
combat, bereavement, deprivation, and of course, the Holocaust.
This is a world that seems very little like reality to the adults
who live in it, and is the only reality for their children, too
young to remember the war, for whom this brightly coloured, arid
wasteland has been their first home.
At the centre of Christina Koning’s novel is a young English war
widow, Vivienne, her new American husband and her eleven year
old daughter from her first marriage. Their ultimately tragic
entanglement with a neighbouring Dutch family forms the main thread
of the narrative and Koning sensitively portrays the disparity
between the innocence of a child’s perception of events and the
darker world inhabited by the novel’s adult protagonists. Against
the backdrop of an alien landscape, a dying relationship and a
new passion are played out, a community is shattered by mental
illness and an ‘undiscovered country’ ravaged by the ruthless
capitalism of the oil companies. Whilst Koning’s novel constructs
itself around a group of disparate and damaged individuals, it
has a wider social and historical agenda, raising issues about
post-imperial colonialism and exploring with insight the precarious
position of the ‘survivor’ after an event like World War Two.
Koning’s novel is self-consciously writerly, employing what has
become a stock device of the literary novel by writing the entire
narrative in the present tense. Whilst her prose is accomplished
and beautifully descriptive, this mode of writing serves to make
the narrative seem tentative and elusive, as if the author lacks
the confidence to commit her tale to history by writing it into
the past. The structure of the novel, with its glimpses into some
unspecified future, makes it clear that the events of the book
are being written from the standpoint of memory. Whose memories
it is that we are reading is less clear, as no one character in
the novel can lay claim to the title of main protagonist or even
to being the novel’s primary focal point. The narrative stance
shifts between characters, writing each of their actions, thought
and emotions into the same oddly bland present. There is little
here for the reader to fix upon or engage with and thus reading
Undiscovered Country becomes a passive experience rather
than an active engagement with the text. It is rather like watching
a very beautiful film in which character and plot development
have been overlooked in favour of stunning cinematography.
The author of Undiscovered Country grew up in Venezuela
and Jamaica and the first hand experience of expatriate life and
of gaudy heat of the Tropics lends her novel a freshness and ‘authenticity’
that gives life to her meticulously descriptive prose. The story
itself is initially intriguing but frustratingly underdeveloped.
Christina Koning is undoubtedly a talented author and there is
much to be admired in Undiscovered Country. Unfortunately,
however, this book often seems less like a novel than an overlong
exercise in creative writing.
Reviewed by Polly Rance
