Reviews - 13 July 2008
The Lighted Rooms - Richard Mason
Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Review by Jennifer Crocker
Richard Mason made a splash in the publishing world when, aged 21, his first book was published. Rumours of huge advances for The Drowning People abounded, and Us followed rapidly.
Mason could have coasted on these successes but instead chose to spend his 20s refining his craft and his third novel, The Lighted Rooms, is an incandescent and mature novel without having lost any of the author's early passion.
In South Africa for the launch of The Lighted Rooms, Mason is a calm and happy man, no longer having to live up to the hype of being the bestselling wunderkind.
This novel brings together several stories conjuring up a sense of reality and place that takes the reader into the characters' hearts and souls. It opens as Eloise, a successful businesswoman in her 40s, is preparing to place her mother, Joan, in a home for the aged. She has conflicting feelings about what she is about to do, and stanches her guilt by choosing the upmarket home The Albany.
Eloise is a wired character and when Mason is writing her story the text becomes fraught with urgent preoccupations.
Mason has succeeded in capturing the essence of two women, one in her 40s and one in her 80s. He raises provocative questions in the story, "Why is it that it is expected of women that they will want to have children? Eloise has other conflicts but this is not one of them."
Mason says: "People ask me what makes a good book, and that's a question that each writer has to answer for themselves; for me, good fiction has rich features and is fully realised."
But this isn't just a book about women and choices; it's also about South African history: Joan's grandmother has survived incarceration in a concentration camp during the South African War, and Mason wanted to include this largely forgotten war in his story.
"People really don't know, or care, much about the Boer War anymore, and yet it holds great lessons for us today. I wanted to subtly draw a comparison between the Boer War and the war in Iraq: both wars fought by the most powerful countries in the world at the time with the aim of securing resources," says Mason.
A visit to Bloemfontein that Eloise and Joan make before Joan's incarceration in The Albany leads her to a story of her great-grandmother's incarceration in the concentration camps and Mason recreates a "testimony" of Joan's ancestor. It's a gruelling and beautifully told story.
Mason reproduces a text drawn from research on life in the camps that ends with the ironic and chilling words for a 21st-century reader: "Let it be remembered what terrible things were done, that they may not be repeated - so that the very name 'Concentration Camp' may perish, because it has no meaning."
Old age is a major feature in The Lighted Rooms, a state Mason researched, "I spent a lot of time with old people in homes and they are wonderful, and I said to one old woman that it must be terrifying when your mind starts playing tricks on you in your age, but I think it could, possibly, be fun too, she leant forward and patted my hand and said 'it is'."
Joan, who had been a very fine pianist in her younger life, can summon up piano pedals that can change the reality around her and it is tempting to see this as magical realism, but Mason says, "There are very many different realities in a situation: Joan could be suffering from dementia or she could be experiencing another reality."
Mason uses literary devices, not as clever affectations but as a mature novelist should: to enhance the progress and enjoyment of his story.
The book launch in Cape Town is at St Cyprian's School, in Nooitgedacht House, which features in the book, and it is about the house that he chooses to read. As he reads it is as if history is being summoned up.
Setting the book aside, in the room in which he celebrated his 21st birthday as a wunderkind writer, it is clear that he is no longer that young man. He has matured and redefined his craft - producing a book that adds with grace, humour and compassion to the South African canon of literature.
And then he says, "Imagine what this room has witnessed over the years?" And, for a minute, the room is illuminated.
This review appeared in the Sunday Independent on 13 July 2008.
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