The unnamed narrator of Patrick Holland’s Oblivion begins the novel contently, if not happily adrift. An Australian nominally based in Beijing, he works in either trade or diplomacy, and spends his time travelling between Asian megacities.
Middle-aged and without any attachment to the idea of “home”, his world consists of departure lounges and hotel rooms, bars, shopping arcades and long, desolate stretches of highway.
He is a man without a history, or even a clear identity, at the novel’s opening. Beyond his nebulous job, his interests include a lot of whisky, some poetry, one-night stands and the occasional droplet of opium. His principal ambition is to accumulate enough wealth via dubious side-deals to purchase a high-rise apartment in Saigon, where he will live in lofty, remote luxury.
Review: Oblivion – Patrick Holland (Transit Lounge)
Throughout this novel, Holland seeks to capture the strangeness and occasional beauty of “non-spaces”. This term refers to the blank, functional locations that are unintentionally created through urbanism.
As Holland articulates in the PhD thesis that gave rise to this novel, Western thought tends to characterise these anonymous territories in wholly negative terms. He is interested in exploring alternative perspectives and aesthetics, which highlight how these transitory “non-spaces” can gradually prompt reflection and transformation.
Holland has been justly praised as an accomplished prose stylist. Spare, striking language is used to depict the loneliness of airports, hallways and city streets. Consider:
Rats jumped at finches in the shadows on the scrap of runway. LED and halogen airfield lights marked the way to the concrete and glass phantasms that haunted the grey distance.
And:
Before nightfall I rode a taxi through Narita. Neon-lit restaurants and bars and dark cypress. The snow and a wind from the Sea of Japan had all but cleared the streets. Cedar temples sat beneath grey skies. Vending machines lit the wet and empty paths to their gates. I told the driver to go on to the city.
‘Electrifying’ descriptions of place
Oblivion perfectly captures the occasionally disorienting nature of transnational dislocation. During his travels between these vast impersonal cities, the people the narrator encounters often feel vague and one-dimensional, which fits with Oblivion’s loose, drifting atmosphere.
However, there is also a lot of dialogue in the novel, and we get some protracted, yet ultimately empty exchanges about the various semi-legal arrangements that the protagonist is brokering. I found Oblivion absolutely electrifying when describing place and location, but less so when characters start to talk.
Early in the novel, the protagonist’s wanderings lead to a connection that may change his trajectory. One of his business contacts introduces him to Tien, “a 21st century floating world courtesan” with whom he becomes enamoured. When he first meets her, in a generic high-rise bar, she threatens to make him “weep like a child” by singing Khúc Hát Sông Quê (a Vietnamese song about countryside). From their first meeting, he is drawn to her because she offers a kind of authenticity missing from his life.
While it begins in “non-space”, his relationship with Tien gradually leads him to connect more fulsomely with the culture, history and politics that lie beneath the antiseptic, interchangeable locations he is used to. It also exposes him to unforeseen risk, when Tien’s patriotism causes her to compromise one of his illicit diplomatic missions.
Unsuccessful espionage
The novel’s pivot into a kind of espionage fiction does not feel entirely successful, however. Oblivion’s hazy, dreamlike tone means the stakes are never entirely clear. We are told the narrator is under threat or in peril, but the danger is usually easily resolved, sliding away before it is really apparent.
Your mileage may also vary on the central romance with Tien. On one level, she is the most fully realised character in the novel, whose concrete personality, backstory and relationships contrast with and exposes the narrator’s shadowy lack of definition.
On another, the persistent idea that the narrator is developing an appreciation of a more real or genuine Asian world through their relationship has the potential to be uncomfortable. Late in the novel, he reflects:
No government can save us, Bill. Neither ours nor theirs. If we are to be saved, it is a rustle of chiffon on silk, a girl in an ao dai moving like a dream through the dark and light of a lantern-lit alleyway, the notes of a folk song that has lived on the banks of a river for centuries and lives still, the patience of a man who can make a buffalo walk beside him in a field, who can teach his son that patience, an old desert woman who recalls the rites of burial.
I was expecting a more cynical turn in the novel that might complicate or rebuke this trajectory (especially given the comparisons with Graham Greene’s The Quiet American), but it never quite arrives.
The unabashedly romantic treatment of the narrator’s relationship with Tien, despite various misunderstandings and betrayals, has a certain value. But the assuredness of his reflections and perceptions are never really challenged in the novel.
Overly familiar
Other reviewers have found more substance in the protagonist’s initial unmoored detachment, and his gradual movement towards some form of growth or renewal. You should probably read or listen to them before deciding on Oblivion.
However, while I was often captivated by the narration, I found the narrator himself a little tired. I’ll confess to having less patience for these solitary, dissolute, eloquently hard-boiled yet secretly sensitive types than I once did.
Whisky sipping, poetry reading, gazing out of hotel windows at the blinking lights of an unfamiliar city. Aloof disenchantment with readily available recreational drugs and casual sex. Acute, poignant observations and lots of quiet yearning.
In its exploration of the empty spaces and lives created by urbanism, Oblivion comes close, at times, to indulging an overly familiar fantasy of high-rolling disconnection. It is a thoughtful, well-wrought and sometimes strikingly beautiful novel. But it may have just caught me in the wrong decade.
