Pollen: A Novel in Black and White

 

Pollen: A Novel in Black and White by Beresford Egan
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Pollen is a novel, a work of art, really, from the delicious prose to the lavish black and white illustrations by the author and artist Beresford Egan, to the stunning presentation by publisher Sidereal Press - a novel that unfolds in so many ways, revealing itself in a long, slow burn that takes the reader by surprise, in time, like a frog discovering it's being boiled after having hopped into a nice cool pan of water on a heretofore unlit stove. That's not to say that there is any degree of deus ex machina here, no, not at all! There is a natural progression of attitudes and events, but they are handled so deftly that one realizes what is happening and damns their lack of foresight, only right before the consequences strike.

The narrative mostly centers around the actions of one Lancelot Daurimer, "man of the world" as they say, a dilettante, a scoundrel, an aesthete. At times, one sees aspects of Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster, at others, Huysman's Essientes, and others, Wilde's Dorian Gray. And yet, he is his own man, a man who changes throughout the novel while, in the end, remaining very much himself. Lance Daurimer is one of the most compelling characters I've read in many, many years. He reflects us at our cruelest, our most irresponsible . . . and our most repentant and most vulnerable. For me, this carried a strong emotional resonance with my own life and the changes I have undergone through the years. In some ways (but, thankfully, not all), I am Lance Daurimer. I understand that this novel is semi-autobiographical for Beresford Egan, and one can tell that the depths of pain and self-loathing that are laid out on the page come from the author's personal experience. Egan was exorcising some demons here, but it never feels self-indulgent.

It is clearly evident that Egan paid careful attention to his text while writing and editing it. For example, the banter between Lance Daurimer and Vernon Batty is quite good. It feels natural, but on very close examination, you can see the grammatical and metaphorical craftsmanship with which it was created. I wish we had more dialogue like this in more (post?)modern literature. Dialogue can be witty and baroque and yet still feel natural if the characters participating in it are both cynical and humorous. Egan rides the razor's edge between the decadents and the modern without missing a step. though it was written in the 1930s, it feels like it is bridging the gap between the 1880s and the 1920s. But it does so without self-awareness; fluidly.

For all its cynical humor and wit, this book is definitely not a comedy. Even if it was to take a strong turn into comedic channels and stay there till the end, the laughter would always be echoed by a sense of sorrow and loss. The pain here is quite real, as we learn in the conversation between Daurimer and his father. The dialogue here is brilliant, even in its own darkness. Pollen is complex and requires something on the part of the reader: the ability to unpack and examine the growth of character (not just Daurimer's, it should be noted). Though it reads smoothly, it is not an "easy" read. One might be forgiven for thinking the book is much less than it is if the reader doesn't read the book to the end. This is one that rewards the reader who sticks it out to the end, not because of any surprise ending, but because at the end of it all, the reader can look back and fully appreciate what Egan has built here in all of it's elegance and depravity.

While there really is no "weird" or "fantastical" element, Daurimer has a daytime vision in which he sees "Lucifera," the feminine aspect of the devil himself. What decadent-leaning novel would be complete without a hallucinatory manifestation of Lucifer's feminine aspect? It goes with the territory, N'est ce Pas?

Egan's illustrations are possibly the "weirdest" feature of the book. One should probably expect this from the same author who drew illustrations for one of the more beutiful presentations of Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal. Most of it would be considered quite risque in 1930s England, though Egan eschews pornography, per se, in the concluding essay "Black and White Art - What Is It?" which Sidereal rightfully saw fit to include after the book's conclusion. This essay actually tells quite a bit about what Egan was trying to do with Pollen without referring to Pollen at all. It was not to take sides with good or evil at all, but to side only with Art, erasing the man-made lines between "good" and "evil". In this novel, he has quite definitely succeeded.

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