Pond - Claire-Louise Bennett

'Enforced remembrance is a stultifying thing... when I am alone it is very difficult for me to gauge distance, and so, perhaps for that reason, I haven't acquired a particularly distinct sense of the past'

Pond is a psychological portrait of a solitary woman living in a coastal town. Past and present run into each other as the nameless narrator’s interior monologue is presented over twenty segments of varying length and style. By turns funny, sexy, poignant and caustic, Pond is a strange, poetic and beautiful debut.

Bennett’s writing recalls Beckett in the same way that Eimear McBride’s brought Joyce to mind. There is a mixture of ennui and mordant humour running through Pond, and the narrator’s thought processes run in circles rather than following the traditional narrative arc of fiction. Beckett’s influence is particularly apparent in a section during which the narrator describes her feelings as a young, unfamiliar man passes by her on a country lane. The writing reaches an emotional pitch, anticipating a defining experience which never arrives – Godot in miniature.

Yet there is also a strong Romantic sensibility running through the text, in the sense of the ‘spirit that impels all thinking things’. The narrator lacks affectation, and places few barriers between herself and the world around her, giving the prose a piercing and occasionally electrifying quality. The amount of time she has spent in solitude has made her aware of a gap between her socialisation and her instinctive method of communicating: 'English, strictly speaking, is not my first language by the way. I haven't yet discovered what my first language is... regrettably I don't think my first language can be written down at all'. Small-r romance, by contrast, is largely avoided: love is 'a vicious and divine disintegration of selfhood'.

Her relationship with the world around her is explored further in a section dealing with the preparations for a party at a neighbour’s house. In the interests of health and safety, the neighbour places a warning sign next to a pond in the garden. This infuriates the narrator, who sees it as interfering with the natural process of discovery:

If it were up to me I wouldn't put a sign next to a pond saying pond, either I’d write something else, such as pig swill, or I wouldn’t bother at all. I know what the purpose of it is, I know it’s to prevent children from coming upon the pond too quickly and toppling in, but still I don’t quite agree with it. It’s not that I want children to fall into the pond per se, though I can’t really see what harm it would do them; it’s that I can’t help but assess the situation from the child’s perspective. And quite frankly, I would be disgusted to the point of taking immediate vengeance if I was bought to a purportedly magical place one afternoon in late September and thereupon belted down to the pond, all by myself most likely, only to discover the word pond scrawled on a poxy piece of damp plywood right there beside it. Oh I’d be hopping.

Social convention interferes with the relationship between the individual and the world around them, stunting emotional and imaginative growth:

One sets off to investigate you see, to develop the facility to really notice things so that, over time and with enough practice, one becomes attuned to the earth’s embedded logos and can experience the enriching joy of moving about in deep and direct accordance with things. Yet invariably this vital process is abruptly thwarted by an idiotic overlay of literal designations and inane alerts so that the whole terrain is obscured and inaccessible until eventually it is all quite formidable.

The routines of solitary existence become a method for the narrator to re-attune herself to the natural rhythms of life. Routine is important in Pond, acquiring an almost mystical significance. Personal needs are privileged over chores; porridge for example, if taken too late, after 'a neighbour has been overheard or the towels folded', will 'feel vertical and oppressive, like a gloomy repast from the underworld... a submerged stump of resentment will begin to perk up right at the first mouthful and will very likely preside dumbly over the entire day'.

We gradually build up a picture of the narrator through asides. We learn that she has 'the hands of someone very charming and refined who has had to dig themselves up out of some dank and wretched spot they really shouldn't have fallen into', and 'the appearance and occasionally... the demeanour of someone who grows things. That's to say, I might, from time to time, be considered earthy, in its most narrow application'. Her character is defined by a 'radical immaturity - characterised by a persistent lack of ambition'. Yet we do not see enough of her past for her to be effectively psychologised, allowing Pond to retain an air of mystique.

Pond has been presented as short fiction, but reads as a coherent whole. The book’s timeline is seemingly linear, as much as anything so concerned with memory can be; there are moments when the text breaks down into Lydia Davis style fragments, but these still fit comfortably into the rhythm of the narrative. The effect of the writing is cumulative, and any individual section would feel weakened if abstracted from the whole. It’s a shame that the Goldsmith’s Prize didn’t accept Pond, since it pushes the boundaries of what a novel can be as much as anything I’ve read recently. Ultimately, though, whether Pond is a novel or not doesn’t matter – the important thing is that Claire-Louise Bennett is very much the real deal.

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