The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Damascus by Richard Beard
Matthew Roberson

Richard Beard. Damascus. Flamingo (England), 1998. 310 pp. £12.99.

One of the main characters in Richard Beard’s new novel, Damascus, expresses not a little frustration when she recognizes that “the end of the century was turning everyone into her mother.” What this means is that everyone she encounters is virtually paralyzed by his or her acute understanding that the world is altogether too “full”: full of objects, events, people, stories, memories, plans for the future, and, probably, bad decisions and ensuing disasters. No one, not least the man from who she wants a commitment of love, is capable of living in the present, because the present of the novel is November 1, 1993, the day their Britain joins the European Union and becomes instantly too large to conceive of in traditional, safe® ways, a place that is, in theory at least, impossible to live in authoritatively. The novel is itself reflexively aware of this end-of-the-century (and millennium) fullness. As the narrator tells us again and again throughout the book, all its action (at least two lifetimes worth)
can happen on a single day and is likely happening, “somewhere in Britain, in Staines or Swindon or Narberth or Horsham, in Melksham or Melrose or Erewash or Huddersfield.” Whether Beard is kidding or not when his postscript acknowledges that “All except twelve of the nouns in Damascus can also be found in the Times (London) of 1 November 1993,” his point is clear: the age of Damascus is one in which worlds of information appear daily with each morning’s newspaper, and it is through these worlds we must navigate. The novel finally refuses to surrender its main characters to the condition of anxiety it describes, however. In a moving answer to the questions of how “people get anywhere” and where they find “the courage to move on,” Beard’s heroine and hero manage to put memory, multiplicity, and fear of the future aside in a moment of meaningfulness, a coming together. [Matthew Roberson]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Damascus by Richard Beard Matthew Roberson Richard Beard. Damascus. Flamingo (England), 1998. 310 pp. £12.99. One of the main characters in Richard Beard’s new novel, Damascus, expresses not a little frustration when she recognizes that “the end of the century was turning everyone into her mother.” What this means is that everyone she encounters is virtually paralyzed by his or her acute understanding that the world is altogether too “full”: full of objects, events, people, stories, memories, plans for the future, and, probably, bad decisions and ensuing disasters. No one, not least the man from who she wants a commitment of love, is capable of living in the present, because the present of the novel is November 1, 1993, the day their Britain joins the European Union and becomes instantly too large to conceive of in traditional, safe® ways, a place that is, in theory at least, impossible to live in authoritatively. The novel is itself reflexively aware of this end-of-the-century (and millennium) fullness. As the narrator tells us again and again throughout the book, all its action (at least two lifetimes worth) can happen on a single day and is likely happening, “somewhere in Britain, in Staines or Swindon or Narberth or Horsham, in Melksham or Melrose or Erewash or Huddersfield.” Whether Beard is kidding or not when his postscript acknowledges that “All except twelve of the nouns in Damascus can also be found in the Times (London) of 1 November 1993,” his point is clear: the age of Damascus is one in which worlds of information appear daily with each morning’s newspaper, and it is through these worlds we must navigate. The novel finally refuses to surrender its main characters to the condition of anxiety it describes, however. In a moving answer to the questions of how “people get anywhere” and where they find “the courage to move on,” Beard’s heroine and hero manage to put memory, multiplicity, and fear of the future aside in a moment of meaningfulness, a coming together. [Matthew Roberson]

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