katharine kilalea, 'ok, mr field'
In 1928, the architect Le Corbusier was commissioned to design a country retreat outside Paris for Pierre and Eugenie Savoye. It wasn’t his first private home – he’d done fifteen already – but it was his boldest to date. The Villa Savoye survives today in its field above the Seine, a piece of deceptively complex design: thin supporting piers, a striking cuboid above them, the curves of a solarium on top.
Now, in present-day South Africa, the narrator of Katharine Kilalea’s new novel OK, Mr Field is living in a replica of Corbu’s work. Max Field is a former concert pianist, retired on full compensation after a train crash that shattered his wrist. He and Mim, his wife, have moved into the ‘House for the Study of Water’, a Villa Savoye clone installed at ‘False Bay’ on the Cape Town coast.
This building’s architect, or pasticheur, was one Jan Kallenbach. After Jan’s death by shark, Field reads about the house in the paper, and buys it from Kallenbach’s widow Hannah. ‘Are you an architect?’ she asks Max. ‘No’, he replies, ‘I know nothing about architecture.’ It’s unclear why he bought it, though it seems clear that he couldn’t have let it go. ‘Why did I like the house? Who knows. A man feels what he feels and he can’t feel anything else.’ This doesn’t please Mim – ‘she mumbled what sounded like savoir faire and ruffled her hair and laughed a laugh that betrayed the hateful things she thought about me’ – but all that was a memory, ‘some time ago now’, and here is Mr Field, indelibly locked in the gravity of the house.
The Villa Savoye was not a project overburdened with savoir faire. Having commissioned one of Corbusier’s machines à habiter, the Savoyes were unable to inhabit it. When it rained, which it frequently did, there were leaks all over, from the entrance hall to Mme Savoye’s boudoir, even streaming down the internal ramp. As if in sympathy, the gardener’s lodge was ridden with damp. The blame lay with both architect and builder, a combination of over-ambitious designs and underwhelming execution; the faults were never properly fixed before the Nazi invasion rendered them moot.
Jan Kallenbach was clearly a perfect craftsman, replicating all the disasters of the Villa Savoye. Lying at night in the House for the Study of Water, Field feels a slim gust of air come in; he pries at the living-room window, trying to find the hole, and ends up unscrewing the whole thing. It then rains ‘for days, for weeks’, not just pouring through the glassless space but leaking, as in the Parisian original, ‘through the corners of the ceiling where the flat roof was improperly sealed’. Meanwhile, Mim is fading out, rarely in Field’s sleepy eyeshot or his auditory range. At one point he sees her behind a glass wall, silently moving her lips; he observes ‘something strange about the way she moves’. Soon she’s gone. He has no idea where, and finds himself hardly caring. ‘I missed her, but not often.’
When Kilalea began OK, Mr Field, she was trying to map an architectural dream against a human state of mind. ‘The house’, she said, ‘became a sort of screen for Mr Field – a way to write about his situation without making anything happen.’ But this kind of nothingness is acutely and slowly entropic. Field spends his time wandering about the house, orbiting something like emotion but never quite spiralling in. He develops an obsession with Hannah Kallenbach, loitering around her house, and soon imagining her in his own. In her car, he sees her profiled in sunlight, and finds her enigmatically gorgeous; when he dreams of her, she’s telling onlookers that ‘once [Field] felt differently… but not lately. These days, he mostly feels the same’. Her purpose is folded into his mental confusion; he connects everything around him to his inability to live.
OK, Mr Field is a magnificent blend of tenderness and fear. It’s a novel about frustration; about trying to visualise, or envision, a world of spirit and life, and seeing it coolly recede. Field has, very exactly, as few physical prospects as existential ones. The table on the rooftop solarium is poorly placed for the study of the ocean below, and whenever it isn’t raining, the mists are rolling onto the land. There are glimmers of radiance, and in the end, a mysterious bond with a stray dog, but no sense of a destination. Field’s viewpoint goes on greying, lapsing into desensitisation. So Mim is gone, so it’s raining harder; none of that matters any more. Paralysis creeps over Mr Field, and he remains in his impossible house, ‘encircled by strange thoughts’. It’s all very strange, but very beautiful too.
[for the Telegraph, 18/8/18]
