boredom is always counter-revolutionary

He looked round: a deserted beach. But there again, a vast shadow thrown in a slanting way to his right now. He moved a step or two, then halted. Was he being followed, perhaps someone had seen him? In the act of pouncing maybe, right this minute, lurking behind a rock, and behind another one the old man probably signalling instructions. Down with him, tear him to shreds, he’s not human, such things as he does, assaults my woman, takes his pleasure how and where he can find it, blasted pimp, screw him up good and proper, throw him to the gulls, the sea can lap up his remains.

Following some discussion on this blog – and as another key in unlocking Stewart Home’s 69 Things to do with a Dead Princess – I recently read Ann Quin’s Berg. She’d been mentioned in relation to how she committed suicide by swimming out to sea alongside Brighton Pier: “British experimentalism died there, within sight of the amusement arcade”.

The Brighton of this novel wades in this sense of doom, jumping between its dual identity as chips’n'peas, seaside resort and out-of-season, weather-beaten relic. Its quite hallucinatory: not in the neon lights and electric sounds of the Pier, but in the shadows cast by the moon and the lamps, the lack of quiet. The seafront is always there, disrupting any attempts to immerse yourself in civil affairs and normal behaviour. The sea laps at the town, teasing it, lurking at the periphery of vision like a spectre of finality and inescapable doom. This is the end of the road. We find Berg at the beach whenever he is in his most haunted mindset, at his most schizophrenic and paranoid, rolling amongst the pebbles and staggering between the rotting wooden planks that hold up the pier, taunted by tramps and circled by seagulls.

This seaside town offers itself as an escape, the sea as a glimpse of something bigger than the trivialities of normal life. Quin herself, it seems, enacted the ultimate seaside escape.