Having recently finished reading Anne Bronte's novel Agnes Grey, I decided to take a break from 19th-century Victorian classic literature and, before getting stuck in to that same author's other novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, I've decided to read a contemporary novel instead.
The work I chose is Paul Auster's 2017 Man Booker prize-shortlisted novel 4 3 2 1, in which the picaresque David Copperfield-style narration of the life story of the central character, Archie Ferguson, born in 1947, offers a bildungsroman with a difference: in this novel, not only is the reader presented with one version of Ferguson's life story, but in addition, there are three other alternative, parallel versions of how that life story would have differed through different choices or events having had disproportionately larger consequences for the characters. So the reader is constantly being presented with these alternate realities - four different versions of the hero's life story. The book is divided into groups of four chapters, within which each chapter offers a slightly (significantly?) modified version of events ... slight differences initially, which have much more significant repercussions subsequently. I'm only in the early chapters, so it is as yet too early to comment on how the book ultimately unfolds, or how this very original, creative idea of four alternate realities ultimately succeeds or otherwise by the end of this (very long) tome.
Critics have been reminded, by this novel's premise, of Robert Frost (name-checked in this book) and his poem The Road Less Travelled: '... two roads diverged in a yellow wood ... and I took the one less travelled ... and that has made all the difference'. A concept we can all identify with as we reflect on our own life journeys.
This novel also reminds me of a short story I read over forty years ago in my Intermediate Certificate English anthology of short stories Exploring English, edited by the late Professor Augustine Martin of UCD, a story entitled The Story of the Widow's Son by the great Irish writer Mary Lavin. In that story, two versions of the son's life are recounted, to very moving, haunting effect ... I would highly recommend that story. No matter which of two courses of action the son decided to take at a critical juncture in his life, the outcome in each case was tragic.
I look forward to finishing Auster's novel and posting a proper review of it here in due course. (And perhaps to eventually studying it in French translation!)
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