At Oxford we’re pressed for time. So, if you decide to spend some hours reading, you want value for money. Sebastian Faulks’ A Possible Life gives you a five-in-one deal: five stories, each of which could stand on its own as a novella.
But the novel is not fragmentary. In a world in which machine-generated nonsense can pass as poetry on the internet and postmodernists keep winning the Nobel Prize, Faulks’ novel stands as a piece of good, solid literature. The stories are united around recurring, age-old themes: soul-mates, loss, and the moment of self-reflexive epiphany that comes shortly before death.
The attentive reader will notice ingenious connections between the novel’s five parts: places from someone’s dream recur in another’s reality, and a certain statuette of the Virgin Mary resurfaces a century later.
That said, A Possible Life is sometimes too well calculated. All stories are designed to fit the scheme of the whole book, and some seem more honest than others. The second one, whose main characters embody the two sides of the faith vs. science debate, felt a little flat. The cognitive scientist consumed by her work at the expense of true emotion was more a record of certain prejudices than a person. The story in which Faulks writes from the point of view of a working-class Londoner also raises some issues. William the dockyards worker says “we was” not “we were”, but his outlook on life is not much different to the aforementioned brain scientist. Does that show respect or condescension? I’m not sure.
Faulks has set out to write a book that defines our shared humanity across time periods, nations, and social classes. For those modern souls among us who are used to random code-generated poetry, this might seem like a bit too much. How much structure can you have before your writing begins to seem rather academic? But, for all the hopes and doubts it leaves you with, reading it you will dream of love and travel; you will reflect about where your life is going. Faulks gives you all these things that literature was invented for in the first place.
THREE STARS
