Introduction

Marie's job as a guard at the National Gallery in London offers her the life she always wanted, one of invisibility and quiet contemplation. But amid the hushed corridors of the Gallery surge currents of history and violence, paintings whose power belies their own fragility. There also lingers the legacy of her great-grandfather Ted, the museum guard who slipped and fell moments before reaching the suffragette Mary Richardson as she took a blade to one of the gallery's masterpieces on the eve of the First World War.

After nine years there, Marie begins to feel the tug of restlessness. A decisive change comes in the form of a winter trip to Paris, where, with the arrival of an uninvited guest and an unexpected encounter, her carefully contained world is torn open.

Asunder is a rich, resonant novel of beguiling depths and beautiful strangeness, exploring the delicate balance between creation and destruction, control and surrender.

Editorial Review

No editorial review at this time.

Excerpt

ONE

They call us guards, warders, invigilators, room keepers, gallery assistants. We are watchmen, sentinels, but we don’t polish guns, shoes or egos. We are custodians of a national treasure, a treasure beyond value stored behind eight Corinthian columns of a neoclassical façade, the dreams of the ancients stuccoed to our building. And our title should honour that.

I came to my profession half by chance, half following an ancestral call. After stumbling upon an ad for a Travelling Exhibition Assistant, I applied for the position but found the vacancy had been filled. Yet the kind man who answered my call mentioned another opening, this one at the British Museum. A guard had just resigned due to the diagnosis of an incurable ailment, and decided he wanted to spend his remaining months staring at something other than nymphs and satyrs locked in battle. They offered him the choice of other wings but he said he wanted to leave London and retire from culture.

My time there didn’t last but it led me to my calling. After the British Museum came the National Gallery, and nine years later I have come to know all the paintings and panels better than the palm of my hand.

How will you handle the boredom, they had first asked at the job interview. I laughed before realising they were serious, and told them I didn’t easily grow bored. But you will, they warned, and I replied that I would then simply draw up lists in my head or count the number of skirts or stripes in the room. You’re meant to protect the works of art, they said, to which I replied of course, yes, I would.

Acedia plagues the novice much more than the experienced solitary; unlike some of the new guards, I do not suffer from boredom or listlessness. Half of us have the right temperament, the other half don’t. Only time can distinguish us. Yet museum acedia isn’t triggered by a crisis of faith or the shifting angle of the sun and, what’s more, my profession is actually suited to those afflicted by it, perfect for individuals who are unconcerned with their position in the world and have fallen prey to a relatively permanent mental or physical sloth. The museum provides an activity for which we are paid to do little more than stand or sit for hours contemplating immobile images and mobile figures.

Occasionally I remind myself that I could have become a dozen things in life. I could have finished university, got a degree in English, perhaps added some letters after my name. I could have had a desk and a fountain pen, people knocking at the door bringing in papers to sign. Or, at the very least, my own filing cabinet and phone extension. But I have always been more interested in being than becoming, and as soon as I stumbled upon this job I knew nothing would budge me. Ambition has never been high on the list, nor marriage or adventure: the only thing that occasionally tempts me is the thought of another museum.

And I admit that at first I was more than a little jealous of the guards at Tate Modern, watching over their collection housed within an old power station, yet the energy being generated, while neither nuclear nor electric, came with its own set of perils. But it wasn’t until the Scandinavian artist set up an immense fake sun in the Turbine Hall that I thanked my guardian angels for my job at the National Gallery.

Until then, it is true, I envied my colleagues at the new Tate, and when this sun first rose I would, on days off, walk along the river to the museum and spend long whiles on my back staring upwards. A mirror had been fastened to the ceiling and there’d be dozens of us lying in random configurations on the concrete floor, waving at our reflections above, and I felt like I was at a site of pagan worship, all eyes converging on this great yellow sphere whose emanations remained a mystery – that is, until the guards began complaining of headaches and dizziness and cursing the fumes released from the artificial astral body, especially Martin Strake who, already prone to migraines and sensitivity to light, made a point from the start of looking the other way. After a few weeks the monofrequency lamps really took their toll; Martin succumbed to their haze, his legs grew weaker, his eyesight began to blur, his movements trance-like as if dictated by this overhead sun, attached to it by invisible strings.

And I succumbed, I too, and for several weeks went to worship the ephemeral god, until I found out this supposed orb wasn’t even a whole but a semicircle. We had been going to pay our respects to a semicircle, made whole by its reflection in a mirror. To this day I wish I hadn’t looked at the catalogue and had continued with my fantasy of the whole, but in the end, all that matters is that the Scandinavian’s piece was eventually replaced by something else of monstrous proportions yet not as precarious and that Martin Strake gradually regained his former self and could turn his eyes towards the Turbine Hall without dissolving. I used to envy those who were assigned temporary rather than permanent exhibits before realising that temporary is too risky; you never know what you are going to get.

Life at our Gallery is more predictable.

Early each week we are assigned different sections of a wing and, within these sections, four rooms a day. In the morning we shed our civvy clothes and slip on our uniform: a mouse-grey jacket with matching trousers or skirt, a pale lilac shirt and a shiny purple tie. We are given twenty-four minutes a day to change, an iron always available in the changing room, and in my nine years working here those twelve minutes in the morning and twelve in the evening, during which all kinds of little transformations take place, have gone by in a flash.

Once the museum opens at ten we must be in uniform and at our post. As of that moment we start patrolling our rooms, followed by a forty-five-minute lunch break, then back to our rooms. We have two twenty-minute tea breaks, morning and afternoon. It works well, this variation, after a while even beauty grows tiresome, and I have served every room in the Gallery except for the Portico Patrol, for which special training and a more assertive temperament, ideally, are required. Rotation is the salvation of the museum guard.

Our job has often been regarded as a knacker’s yard, the final outpost at the end of a long journey. Many of my colleagues are in their fifties and sixties, a few even older. People usually end up here after working in something else for years. George used to sort letters at the head post office at Mount Pleasant from midnight to four in the morning. Charlie worked as a car mechanic at his brother’s garage in Clapton. Pat began the job only after the last of her six children had left home. John was a nightwatchman at a bank for three decades. Dave spent twenty-eight years tweaking rides at the carny. Janet had gone bankrupt and was forced to sell her pub. Roland worked at a construction company called Sisyphus until suffering a nervous breakdown caused by a speed habit and industrial fatigue.

Some of us live in Zone 1 or 2, others in Zone 3 or 4 and spend an hour on public transport each morning. Some of us have a degree, most of us don’t. Some of us look at the art, some of us don’t. But we all protect the pictures and are able to direct visitors towards an entrance, an exit, towards whatever they want to aim for or depart from.

In the canteen, during one of the many hypothetical conversations we liked to engage in, conversations that led nowhere and for that very reason were all the more entertaining, we established that if most of us were given a painting we would sell it off immediately. Another hypothetical scenario is Which painting would you save if there were a fire. Some colleagues would choose a specific work they’d run to remove from the wall, others had none in mind, and yet others tried to think of the most valuable, usually a da Vinci or, for some reason, a Manet.

I was fond of my colleagues, every one of them, and welcomed the sight and sound of them most mornings, first my female colleagues in the changing rooms, where we’d often touch up our faces and comb the city from our hair, and then the male ones during team assembly, always taking note when Roland or another favourite was absent, which wasn’t often, given the serious nature of our job. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. Early in the novel Marie concedes that her position as guard is “actually suited to those afflicted by” acedia , a state of torpor in which a person no longer cares about her position or condition in the world. She claims to be free of the ailment, stating (on page 2): “ . . . I do not suffer from boredom or listlessness.” Yet we rarely see her act — at least in the beginning of the novel — and her primary interest seems to be inaction or immobility in one form or another. Do you agree with Marie that she does not suffer from acedia?

2. One could say that Marie is defined by her inaction. As a museum guard, she considers intervening several times (on pages 65 and 68, for example) but stays still. She never voices her opinion of Daniel’s poetry to him, and her response to his timid advance in Paris is to remain silent. Do you see a change in this aspect of her character as the novel progresses?

3. The story of Mary Richardson’s attack on Velázquez’s Venus seems to haunt Marie nearly as much as it did her great-grandfather Ted. But she hints (on page 30) that her loyalties are divided: “I loved him just a tiny bit more for not having reached her in time.” What do you think the appeal of such an attack might be to someone who respects great works of art as much as Marie does?

4. Richardson herself claimed that her attack on the Rokeby Venus was in protest of the recent imprisonment of the prominent suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, who was, she claimed, “the most beautiful character in modern history.” Do you think the attack was purely an act of vandalism? If not, what kind of message do you think Richardson sent with her protest?

5. Marie is fascinated when she first learns about the phenomenon of craquelure (on pages 60–62), the network of cracks that develop through “release of stress ” in an old oil painting. Almost immediately after hearing the art historian describe this process, she begins to notice “small changes in mood” and finds it increasingly difficult to exert her self-control. What other examples of craquelure do you observe in Marie?

6. How does this concept of craquelure as a metaphor contrast with the violent slashes that Mary Richardson left in the Rokeby Venus? Do you see a metaphor for any part of Marie’s life in those slashes?

7. In Paris, Marie and Daniel receive an unexpected guest: Pierre, the self-medicating poet. On page 147 Marie complains: “Lying there, just lying there. And yet, from the moment he appeared to the moment he departed, Pierre exerted his influence. How could it be that someone who spent most of his time immobile could have such a strong hold on my friend?” How would you answer that question?

8. What do you think Pierre’s role is in the novel? What purpose does his appearance serve in Marie’s gradual awakening?

9. In contrast to her time with Pierre, Marie’s brief encounter with Marc Cointe — who is described both as a chatelain (the owner and controller of an estate) and as a clochard (a vagrant) — is marked by startling movements, even a chase. What do you think drives Marie to follow Cointe when he runs away from her?

10. Decay and decomposition are ever-present themes in this novel. Craquelure is a form of slow decomposition, of course, and Marie tracks the decay of moths in her miniature landscapes with avid interest. When she finally destroys the landscapes, Marie takes particular satisfaction in “the yielding of the eggshells,” which crumble away to dust. Are there other images of decay or decomposition that stand out to you? How are they significant in the novel’s development?

11. As Marie destroys the landscapes that have been her hobby and “collection” for so long, she says, “The more I thought back on the chatelain the greater my contempt for these misshapen things” (page 183). Why do you think that is?

12. How does Marie’s destruction of her landscapes compare with Mary Richardson’s attempted destruction of the Venus?

13. Why do you think Marie quits her job?

Weblinks

»	Publisher's Book Info

Book Club Recommendations

Recommended to book clubs by 0 of 0 members.

Member Reviews

There are no user reviews at this time.
Rate this book