Review of Louis de Bernieres' Notwithstanding
New Short Stories From the Author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin
Sep 27, 2009 Elizabeth Gregory
Despite being best known for his 1993 novel Captain Corelli's Mandolin, set on the Greek island of Kefalonia, Louis de Bernieres was in fact brought up in a small village in Surrey, England. His memories of living in the English countryside are the inspiration for his new collection of short stories, each of which is set in the fictional village of Notwithstanding and draw upon the characters who populated his own childhood.
No Rural Idyll
De Bernieres is at pains to point out that he has no desire to romanticise the country way of life, acknowledging in his Afterword that even when he was a boy the village in which he lived "was many years past the era of rural idyll", and recognising that this nostalgic vision of a perfect past is largely inaccurate anyway: "People died not of old age, but of being worn out".
However, what de Bernieres does try to capture in this new collection is a sense of unity: "What was really special about those times was that everyone knew everyone else. Villages were proper communities, with all that entails in terms of social support". This idea suffuses a number of the stories in the collection; "Obadiah Oak, Mrs Griffiths and the Carol Singers" is the tale of a widow rather distanced from her community, mistrustful of carol singers and unfriendly towards "the village's last peasant", but who learns the value of friendship through the power of a box of mince pies and some highly alcoholic punch. It is simply unnatural not to know your neightbours in Notwithstanding.
Characters Reappearing in Other Stories
Indeed, although each of the stories is self-contained, many of the characters reappear in each other's stories in order to reinforce the idea of a community where everyone knows one another. Even the animals have personalities; one of the most engaging characters who - literally - runs throughout the book is Archie, a black retriever who takes his fetching duties so seriously that his owner considers sending him out to find him a wife.
As with any collection of short stories, some are more successful than others. Many of the tales here are very short indeed and feel more like vignettes than fully developed stories, although even these become more satisfying as the book goes on, building gradually upon each other to form a picture of day to day village life. The strongest stories are those which reveal the truly English character; in "Talking to George", an unexpected friendship grows up between an ageing gardener and the boy who assists him, prompted by affection for a spider named George and marked by the acknowledgement that the two men "find their intimacy, as Britons do, not in words, but in the common labour of their hands".
The book was apparently inspired by a comment from a Frenchman, who remarked that Britain was an immense lunatic asylum. De Bernieres has interpreted this remark as confirmation that the English have a freedom not enjoyed by other nations, an acceptance that it is fine to be different or eccentric. The gentle tales of Notwithstanding celebrate this variety and freedom, and many of the characters live on in the reader's mind long after the stories are finished.
Notwithstanding is published in the UK in hardcover by Harvill Secker (2009), ISBN 978-1-846-55330-1.
Cover of Notwithstanding
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