Oh dear, I thought: it’s a fancy dress party. Why didn’t anyone tell me it was a fancy dress party? Here I am in my dull grey suit and it’s a fancy dress party! It wouldn’t be the first time that this had happened. Back at school I misread the date of a mufti day. Five hundred kids were kitted out in the coolest clothes they owned. I moped about in my uniform: a sea slug amongst brightly coloured anemones. A year later I did the same thing, but in reverse. There I was in my torn jeans and proud slogan-bearing t-shirt (‘Long Live Death’ was its peculiar proclamation) only to find everyone in their uniform. Know ye this: there’s some patch on my old school’s upper sports field that will be forever damp with my tears.
When the child becomes the man, he doesn’t stop making mistakes. He simply learns to cover them up with more skill (and cry about them a little less). So: how to slink my way out of this one? I fished my invitation out of my pocket. Two years I’d been waiting to be invited to one of these parties. They always said to me that getting an invite to one of Mrs —–’s cocktail parties was a sign that you’d ‘made it’ I could now call myself a ‘part of the literary world’. A small part, maybe (it it was a jigsaw, I’d be a bit of sky) but still a part. And here I was, about to mess it up, before I’d even entered the building. Oh great.
But no. The invite said nothing at all about fancy dress. Not a word. Hmm. So why on earth was that man dressed up as a caveman? Had he misread his invitation? Oh, the boot’s on the other boot now! An ex-idiot ought to empathise with the current brood. He doesn’t: he merely takes comfort that his days of idiocy are over. It’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it. Every party needs an idiot. And boy was this caveman an idiot! Suits all round and there he was, the skin of a dead bear slung across his shoulder and another (a fox skin, was it?) tied carelessly (and I mean carelessly) around his waist. Scuffed up hair and dry mud falling in flakes from his arms. He’d made an effort with the costume, I remarked to an acquaintance as I helped myself to a cocktail, you had to give him that.
‘Costume?’ questioned my companion. ‘Why, that’s no costume’.
I spat out a chunk of mango.
‘What do you mean it’s no costume?’
The man smiled. ‘But that’s Roc Quarrét’, he explained.
I knew the name, of course I knew the name. But that was all I knew. Beyond the name, I was lost.
‘Oh yeah,’ I said, ‘the French writer. Roc Quarrét.’
It was a weak attempt to scramble back up the cliff, and my companion knew it.
‘He’s been going about as a caveman for two years now,’ he explained: ‘It’s part of his programme to get back to the root of things.’
‘The root of things?’
‘That’s right. The essence of life. The beginning. Square one. The foundation stone. The early bird w…’
‘Ok, ok – I get the picture. But is it really necessary for, ah, Monsieur Quarrét, to dress up as a caveman?’
‘Apparently so. Roc thinks that it’d be hypocritical not to.’
‘Oh, so it’s Roc to you is it?’ I said (except that I didn’t).
‘The way he sees it,’ went on my increasingly tiresome acquaintance, ‘there’s so many novelists writing challenging stuff in their books, but failing to live up to their words’.
A quick glance around the room proved him right. But that’s what makes a writer a writer, no?
‘So,’ the man was saying, ‘Ever since they published Hewn he’s been dressed like that. Every day for two years. Never takes a shower, they say.’
I concurred. ‘Methinks I can smell him from here.’
The man gave what I took to be a rather false smirk. Here endeth our conversation.
The next day I sought out a copy of Roc Quarrét’s novel Hewn. My primary research done, I moved with some enthusiasm into the territory of the secondary. I was right in thinking that the type of man who spends two years of his life dressed as a caveman might have generated a lot of gossip. Unfortunately, most of it was written in French. The instant hit that juicy gossip offers is, I think, somewhat tempered when one has to translate it. Nevertheless, I’m nothing if not perseverant – and pretty soon I’d found a friend willing to do the work for me.
Here follows a potted history of Charles (aka Roc) Quarrét, whose shenanigans may never have set the French literary scene alight, but have nevertheless kept its embers glowing for a few years now. Indeed, as it turns out, various members of the Quarrét have kept the gossipmongers happy for many decades now – for they are, to put it mildly, what might be called an ‘eccentric family’. And seeing as Roc is fond of ‘beginnings’, it only seems to right to delve, not all the way to the beginning (that might take some time), but a little closer to some of the sources.
The roots of the Quarrét family lie in Angouleme where, since the early seventeenth century, they have inhabited a large country house, acquired with the money made in – you guessed it – the local quarries. Did the name derive from the source of their wealth or was it just coincidence? The name dates back to the fourteenth, so the latter would appear to win out, though there’s every possibility that it served as an inspiration, reflected in the way that Charles used ‘Roc’ (his nickname from an early age) as a signpost to a career in which the concept of rocks – and, indeed, quarries – would figure highly (mostly in a metaphorical, but also in a physical sense).
The Quarrét residence, I noted, was a large one – and needed to be, for the Quarrét family has never been short on members. Charles himself is the tenth of eleven children. He has two older brothers, Marcel and Honore. Amongst the eight girls of the family, seven are senior to him: they are, in order, Corinne, Elisabeth, Stephanie, Juliette, Barbara, Jacqueline and Audrey. This leaves ‘Little Beau’.
Their father is the flamboyant Christophe Quarrét, who aside from these eleven children (produced between two wives) has fathered at least seven others, one of whom is currently attempting to sue him, another of whom wants to live with him and cook him his breakfast every morning (which consists, I am told, of buttered kippers and garlic mushrooms). Christophe’s first wife was the famous Jewish singer, Hannah Seebohm, who scored a top ten hit on the Belgian charts in 1971 with a song about taramosalata. His second wife (Charles’ mother) was Marion de Rocalis, ex-wife (and ongoing lover) of the German oologist Hans Earhart, renowned for his work on the platypus. Despite the fact that Earhart was essentially cuckolding his father, Charles and Hans have always had a good relationship, which is not all that surprising, seeing they share an obsession with the early stages of life.
Christophe was one of five brothers, including Georges (who played right back for FC Nantes first team in the late ’60s) and Simon, (who left home as a teenager, only to turn up playing second clarinet in the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, despite showing no musical talent as a child). Neither of these men shared their brother’s luck with women – nor, indeed, their father’s. This man, also called Christophe, married a succession of fascinating woman, including Klara Effenberg, the Swedish ballet dancer and Lucy Brown, second daughter of the great English social reformer Reginald Brown. Christophe’s fourth wife, who bore him no child, never had a surname. She was also missing the central toe on her right foot. Christophe junior was born either to Lucy Brown or to the third wife, Coralie Caillebotte, whom Christophe senior married in the same year (1946). Since both women died young and no one bothered to write it down, this fact must remain a mystery. It is said that Christophe resembled neither woman – nor, indeed, his father.
Amongst members of the extended family can be found the following: the President’s wife’s hairdresser (which president, I cannot say), the first man to ride across India on a pig, a minor Surrealist who claims to have given lectures in a diving suit long before Dali (but with no audience), a man who collected first editions of texts by nineteenth century philosophers and went mad (as any sane man would) after his library burnt down and an apiarist who wrote some interesting papers on ‘bumblebees and aerodynamics’, only to become unnaturally obsessed with bumblebee honey, which he mistakenly claimed to be far superior to that of its honeybee cousin.
If you haven’t got the message by now, you never will. There aren’t many truly normal families, granted, but there can be few so strange as this. It doesn’t come as a surprise that the majority of Charles’ siblings have reacted to several generations of eccentricity by leading relatively dull lives. Five of his sisters are married to ostensibly uninteresting types. True, Juliette and Corinne play twins in a French soap opera (though they aren’t in fact twins) and their ‘hell raising exploits’ are often found in the gossip magazines – but, when all the birds have come home to roost, it must be admitted that their idea of fun and games place in comparison to those of preceding generations. In truth, hell is barely elevated by their behaviour. Indeed, the role of ‘most interesting sister’ falls to Jacqueline, a sickly child, who has not been heard of since 1996, when she entered a mental hospital near La Rochelle, after repeated attempts to ‘become a hedgehog’ (her words, not mine).
As for Charles’ brothers, Marcel died last year after a sporadically eccentric career, most of it spent as an architect, except for two months in 1995 when he took on a job at a small patisserie in Paris, claiming that ‘icing buns was all he was ever made for – and vice versa’. Sadly, the beautiful relationship that had sprung up between him and iced buns was only a short-lived one. Some even believe that the buns had the last laugh, as the heart attack from which Marcel died, in his late forties, was thought to have been caused by his predilection for unhealthy foodstuffs.
I have barely plunged my pick-axe into the great rock face of eccentricity that is the Quarrét family, and yet some points may already be made. You might have noticed that I have not mentioned any novelists. This is because there aren’t any. Singers, painters, professors, actors, poets and cooks. There are plenty of these to be found. Writers of fiction, though, are few and far between. Only one comes to mind: Charles senior’s father Nicholas, who was the third of three brothers. Born with a clubfoot, Nicholas grew up in the shadow of his elder brothers, both models of athleticism. It was their father’s wish that his son’s should join the army. They duly did – Nicholas excepted – and were duly killed. Nine years later Nicholas published a novel entitled The Main Course at the Dinner Table of Guilt. Though marketed as fiction, it is best read as a memoir.
All of which leaves Charles (to be called Roc hereafter) as the only true novelist of the family. Something new there, although you may have noticed that aspects of Roc’s behaviour are very much in keeping with his ancestors. Perhaps you’re right. He’s a Quarrét all right. But like some of his siblings, he’s not especially proud of the family past. However, where they have decided to keep their heads down and pretend that none of this ever existed, Roc has sought a way of simultaneously escaping and following the family eccentricity. Dressing up as a caveman is, you may be thinking, a highly appropriate addition to this peculiar history. Roc, meanwhile, likes to think of it as a new chapter: a break with tradition.
Charles Rocalis Quarrét was born in 1975, his middle name taken from the maiden name of his mother, Marion de Rocalis. The point at which this became the source of his nickname has, as I have noted, yet to be confirmed: suffice it to say the young Roc was always keen on the cause of his family’s wealth. Stone. He simply loved stone. From the age of five he thought of himself as an amateur geologist. While other children focussed on the salivating, strong-limbed dinosaurs that roamed the earth, Roc’s attentions were on the earth itself. From here his interests expanded. Centuries of human history were swept from the record. The only humans he was interested in were the unknown. People of the old earth. Hunter-gatherers, flint chippers, cave wall daubers. In 1989 Roc and a school friend tried to break into the caves at Lascaux. Problems with attention? It’d be strange of him to have expected any. The Quarrét’s did large families, not tight ones. Every child was expected to fend for his or herself. Roc’s raid on Lascaux was no mere jape: he truly believed that he had a right to see that artwork.
Why cavemen, why rocks – other than the relationship to his name and to the family money? It was, he has always argued, the ‘elemental associations’ that attracted him. ‘Elemental’ is a typical Roc Quarrét word. ‘Base’ is another. ‘Foundations’ a third. Whichever way you look at it, Quarrét is enamoured of a kind of earnest simplicity. It is, in his opinion, a reaction to decades of Quarrét indulgence; of a tendency towards over-complicating matters. This is, Roc says, what Hewn is all about: it is an answer to the question that has been forever dancing in the ballroom of the author’s brain: How did things get so complicated?
Beats me. And it beats Roc Quarrét also, which is a shame, but then I can’t fault a writer for having wild ambitions. Hewn is none the worse for failing to live up to its own ideals, which is hardly surprisingly when you look at the following remark, made by Roc shortly before the publication of said work:
‘Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night, seized by a thought. The time has come to write a history of the world! It will encompass everything – everything, I tell you! It’ll go from the start and move on until the end. Mostly it will deal with the middle. That’s the bit when things happen, when things go wrong.’
Roc Quarrét expected a lot from Hewn, much of which he was unable to deliver. But never mind: the real joy of this novel lies in the writer’s inner struggle; his valiant craving, constantly undercut by flashes of cynical reality, and sprinkled with the sand of resilient sincerity. And on top of all of this, there are some wonderful descriptive passages. As you might expect from a man who spent so much of his childhood messing about in quarries and studying geology, Roc sure knows how to describe a stone. I know no other writer who could come even close to him in this respect. The same goes for many other details. I’m thinking, especially, of the moment in chapter four when he compares the growth of several types of lichen. There’s nothing like it in the history of Western literature (though I daresay that one or two of the Eastern poets might give it a run for its money).
Plot-wise, it must be admitted, Hewn rarely rises above a caveman soap-opera. Is this an insult? Perhaps it isn’t. If soap operas have any qualities – and I’m not convinced they do – it lies in their adherence to basic human storylines revolving around basic human emotions. They don’t ‘do’ complex: and neither does Roc Quarrét. Which, in the circumstances, is no bad thing. It is, for instance, a great relief that he doesn’t attempt to imitate ‘caveman language’ – a trap into which other, arguably better, writers have fallen. Nor does he go down the line of giving his protagonists names like ‘Ug’ or ‘Doh’. Names are, instead, given according to salient features. We have, therefore, the ‘woman with the green eyes’ and ‘boy with the large knuckles’. In only one case does this system fall flat, which is also one of a few instances in which Quarrét’s otherwise candid renunciation of modernity begins to crack a little. In the first two hundred pages he doesn’t allow his readers the tiniest glimpse of contemporary culture. We’re securely in caveman territory. Then, all of a sudden, we are given a character called ‘the man with the ski slope nose’ and, a page or two after that, a reference to Brigitte Bardot. It’s an unforgivable lapse.
But what the hell, we’ll forgive him, for like I said – it’s often the struggle within the writer’s mind that makes the book, rather than the story itself. Not that it’s a bad story, but there’s more than an air of earnestness about it. There are several gusts of it, in fact, punctuated by great squalls of sincerity. One chapter is portentously entitled ‘The First Lie’; another ‘The First Affair’. Quarrét truly thinks that he is on top of mankind, which is cute, but misguided. Nevertheless, it’s still nice to see a novel in which nature runs riot, without the whole thing turning into a wildlife documentary. And the effort to dig into big themes is admirable. And for those for whom ‘big themes’ are a turn-off (which, at a guess, is most of us) there is a brief splash of comedy. At least, I think it’s comedy. Now I think of it, perhaps the elephant’s death was intended to be noble. No, surely not? Roc was never that solemn – though ‘nobility’ is, no surprises, another of his ‘keywords’. Now, there’s a comedic concept: nobility! Full marks for Quarrét for trying to take serious things seriously.
The problem is, is he really as serious as all that? I don’t doubt that Hewn is a serious novel. Not at all. Nor that Quarrét’s caveman act wasn’t kicked off with the best intentions. Far be it from me to criticise a man who’s doing something that most of us would never get to grips with. I’m in no position to call him a hypocrite. Then again…
Here’s the thing. Most of us don’t preach. Of those who do, few of them come close to practicing it. Some would see Roc Quarrét as an exception. I’m not so sure. Something tells me that he only dresses what he preaches. He doesn’t quite practice it – and he doesn’t quite practice it because there isn’t all that much to practice. What is this simplicity he yearns for? Is it in any way attainable?
This is not to say that his efforts are necessarily in vain. On the contrary, I love him as a yearner. Yearning is a quality artistic fuel – and Hewn is a fairly brilliant product. An artist who doesn’t know exactly what he wants can be as entertaining, or more entertaining, than one who feels confident in his goal. Quarrét falls somewhere between these two. Sometimes I feel that he is perfectly confident in his beliefs; more often than not he seems to be locked in some struggle.
If this is borne out by anything, it is borne out in this first glimpse I had of the man. My first question was, it turns out, a fair one. What was a caveman doing at a cocktail party? My sarcastic companion was wrong to dampen the enquiry – it was an unconsciously pertinent one. It is not enough to say that dressing up as a caveman is eccentric. In the right circumstances, the act may have some validity – it could be just. A cocktail party, however, does not seem to me to represent the ‘right circumstances‘. Roc Quarrét is drawing too much attention to himself by keeping such company. So why does he do it? I cannot say: suffice to say, he either needs to stop dressing what he preaches and start practising it, or stop preaching altogether. Or else keep struggling, accept the hypocrisy and, I dare say, resolve or display the contradictions in another decent novel. The noble part of me suggests he should choose between the contents of the former sentence. The part of me that is not a dream presumes (and tentatively advises) that he might follow the latter.
Review by Sebastian Cheraz
Further Reading:
