'Morant' by Roy Goddard — Julian Girdham

On page 255 in Roy Goddard’s novel Morant (2022), just 15 pages before the end, there it is: reference to a book and a writer I often thought of during my reading:

On evening he went to bed early to continue reading, for the third time, Sebald’s ‘The Rings of Saturn’ … He read for twenty minutes or so, immersing in the strangely pleasurable verbal textures and the interlapping narratives that seem to come unbidden to the writer.

The sentence continues for several more lines, ending in the character falling asleep after taking tablets for his arthritis.

Strangely pleasurable verbal textures and interlapping are very much the warp and weft of this unusual narrative. While there is much that is nothing like Sebald (and there are no photographs other than the Sebaldian one on the cover), Goddard’s prose is similarly incantatory and absorbing, and similarly anxious. Most typically, he is extraordinary with long sentences, which can take off on one part of the page and end a long way away without faltering: there is even a touch of Henry James at times.

There are no chapters but more startlingly virtually no paragraphs, just the occasional section break: for instance, one part starts on page 92 and ends, after no break, on page 111. Some readers will react negatively to this, and I can understand why, but I never found the book less than compelling. But truly this is a ‘Marmite book’.

So what is it ‘about’? The life of an English teacher and an academic, certainly the life of an Englishman, with the emphasis on both ‘English’ and ‘man’, mostly in the latter years of the twentieth century. The narrative circles and spins off, sometimes bewilderingly. Sometimes you find yourself in an almost standalone bravura short sequence (the sad life of a teaching colleague, a scathing account of the Thatcher years), before the story takes off in another direction. It ranges from the demotic to the philosophical.

There is none of the scaffolding you normally get with novels to provide you with some bearings: no author biography, no pull quotes or press reviews, and little more on the publisher’s website. It starts with a train journey troubled by diarrhoea and vomiting, and ends, unexpectedly, in images of joy.