Wheels within wheels

Jonathan Coe relays a dying woman's story through a third party to unveil human truths

Understated plot rather than humor is the driving force behind Jonathan's Coe's new novel.

The Rain Before It Falls
By Jonathan Coe
Knopf, 240 pp., $23.95

In Jonathan Coe's "The Closed Circle" (2004) a character asks, ambitiously, "Does narrative serve any function?" His short new novel offers one answer: It serves the function of being necessary to human life. Coe himself might shrink from such an encompassing explanation. At one moment in "The Rain Before It Falls," a landscape is described as "English and undemonstrative." The writing in this novel is similarly understated, less explicatory than quietly exploratory. But it convinces the reader of the human need for narrative in a way that Coe's earlier and more elaborately plotted novels never wholly succeed in doing, or think of doing.

What is new is the author's willingness to sustain an urgent, deeply serious human voice over the length of the novel, uninterrupted by satirical episodes or by the kind of companionable playfulness found in his earliest novels - what the narrator of his first book, "The Accidental Woman" (1987), calls "chattering with the reader."

As "The Rain Before It Falls" opens, Gill, married, middle-aged, learns of the death of her aunt Rosamond. After attending her funeral in rural Shropshire, Gill visits the woman's home ("a dead person's house; nothing could take the chill off it") and discovers four audiotapes and instructions from Rosamond to deliver them to a woman named Imogen. Gill remembers meeting Imogen, a blind girl, 20 years earlier but does not know her relation to the family. After a profitless search for her, Gill decides to listen to the tapes with her two daughters. They hear Rosamond's voice, recorded in the days leading up to her death.

The greater part of the novel is given over to Rosamond's narrative, which is addressed to Imogen. Rosamond declares early in her recording, "What I want you to have, Imogen, above all, is a sense of your own history; a sense of where you come from, and of the forces that made you." But there is another, more necessary motive: "It will give you a context in which to understand the difficult things, the painful things you will hear at the end."

These painful things are not only heard, they are unrelentingly "seen." Rosamond aims to tell the blind woman "what they looked like, the people who came before you; the houses that they lived in, the places they visited," just as Gill, earlier in the novel, remembers trying to describe to the young Imogen the view from a window, "piece by piece, item by item."

Rosamond's descriptions are centered on a series of 20 photographs of herself and Imogen's family, taken at various points over almost 50 years. Like many novelists (most notably, Tolstoy) Coe is aware of the limitations of words to describe people, events, feelings; it is something of a motif in this work ("It's terribly hard to convey that, in words," "I find myself lost for words," "Once again, words are inadequate"). His decision to use descriptions of photographs to relate events places this difficulty at the heart of the novel. It is a brave and self-conscious method, and in spite of his occasional impulse toward the obvious, deadening word ("fearful anticipation," "deep red Merlot"), the writing is precise and considered, restrained but unblinking.

Like all of the author's previous seven novels, "The Rain Before It Falls" presents the reader with characters whose impassioned selfishness is as disturbing as it is bleak. Indeed, when reading him, one sometimes thinks of a question asked by 19th-century critics of Balzac's novels: In life, are people, universally, really as malevolent as this? In Coe's darkly comic novels, "The Winshaw Legacy" (1994) and "The House of Sleep" (1997), the human element in the more unpleasant characters is often reduced to caricature by his satirical purposes. In "The Rain Before It Falls," however, he recounts "the difficult things, the painful things" without any nervous recourse to comedy and satire. The result is his tensest and most affecting work.

In his recent biography of English novelist B. S. Johnson, Coe wrote of Johnson's belief in the "chaos" of human life and its resistance to pattern and purpose. Most moving in "The Rain Before It Falls" is Rosamond's effort both to comfort Imogen and to be truthful about the past - in other words, both to state events and to find pattern and purpose in her narrative ("There is a reason for everything, in case you haven't learned it yet, in your short life").

Toward the end of her narrative, Rosamond recognizes the difficulty of her task in (B.S.) Johnsonian terms: "Perhaps chaos and randomness are the natural order of things." Indeed, after listening to the tapes, Gill acknowledges finally that she can find no pattern in her own life or in Rosamond's. But Coe's novel suggests something more important: It was necessary for Rosamond to tell her story; life would not be endurable without the attempt to narrate. That Rosamond does not endure is a closing irony of this book. But that would not itself be puzzling to her. Near the end of her story, sounding like critic William Empson, she states that "life only starts to make sense when you realize that sometimes - often - all the time - two completely contradictory ideas can be true." That is something that a successful narrative can make you realize.

Matthew Peters is a freelance book reviewer who lives in London.