On Norman Manea

The Lair is a novel by Norman Manea, translated by Oana Sanziana Marian and published in 2012 by Yale University Press. I wrote this review on spec at the time for a distinguished literary periodical and it was for some reason turned down. Yesterday's blog on Claudio Magris prompts me to resurrect this.  I've cut some of it, but not much.

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Norman Manea recently became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the induction ceremony coinciding with the appearance in English of The Lair, published as Vizuina in Romania in 2010. The author has lived in the United States for the past twenty-five years, a notable exile who has continued to write in his native Romanian. Following the collapse of the Ceaușescu dictatorship in 1989 his work started to re-emerge and has now gained widespread recognition. He has a claim on our attention because he is, as Eliot said of Yeats 'one of those few whose history is the history of their own time, who are part of the unconsciousness of an age.' 

The Lair references Mann's The Magic Mountain, the Ficciones of Borges, Ambrose Bierce and (inevitably) Kafka. Everything revolves around texts - a review, a memoir and an anonymous death threat which is repeatedly discussed, speculated upon, dissected. There are many references to mirrors. 

The main character is Professor Augustin Gora, a dissident Romanian academic who has settled in New York. One day his ex-wife Lu and her lover Peter (who is also her first cousin) arrive on his doorstep looking for refuge. This banal set-up is an armature around which Manea reflects on the nature of exile. There is a plot, of sorts, but it's hard to summarise or even to recall. The Lair is densely written and the characters (most of whom have several names, some of whom share the same name) are opaque and without any distinctive traits apart from a shared tendency to deliver interminable telephone monologues in the type of language that is never encountered in life and only rarely - thank God - in novels. 

The simple business of booking a hotel room is treated thus by a character named either Beatrice Artwein, or Betty: 

"A small, simple room. A bed. A shower, toilet, mirror. Without towels, but cheap," Beatrice had explained. "Without perfumes, creams, towels. You don't forget where you are, nor what you're there for. Promiscuity intensifies the promiscuous appetite. It defies conventions, sharpens pleasure."

It's would be a challenge to find any American hotel room without towels, but perhaps Manea is making some other point here. Betty sounds like a barrel of laughs and there follows, as night follows day, a wince-inducingly atrocious passage that should be awarded the Literary Review's annual Bad Sex Award in perpetuity.

Manea has received countless cultural and literary prizes, is acclaimed in France, Italy and the United States and regarded as a likely Nobel laureate Nothing I say will dent his reputation - but The Lair is a mind-numbingly, spirit-drainingly, joylessly awful novel. 

Extracts © Norman Manea / Yale University Press

On Claudio Magris

Some thoughts on Blindly, a novel by Claudio Magris translated by Anne Milano Appel and published by Yale University Press:

Is this really, as Nadine Gordimer implies in a lengthy blurb, the most significant novel since Ulysses?  Or is it, as they say, all gong and no dinner? Faced with Gordimer's oddly-phrased claim that '[n]ot since Joyce's Ulysses has there been great revelation of what the novel can be' one is immediately on guard. Surely there have been many other novels published since 1922 that offered readers a comparable revelation, not least Finnegans Wake. Other encomia from John Banville ('It is surely a masterpiece') and Mario Vargas Llosa ('A magnificent book'), lead one to approach this novel with a wary scepticism. Is it really that good?

Magris, the author of over 35 books, is little known in the Anglophone world. Born in Trieste in 1939 (home in earlier years of Italo Svevo and, of course, James Joyce, whose brother Stanislaus taught Magris's father English), he is a professor of modern German literature at the University of Trieste and an essayist and columnist for Corriere della Sera whose celebrated Page 3, once given over entirely to cultural matters, has featured the work of just about every major writer in Italy, including Eugenio Montale, Italo Calvino, Pasolini, Oriana Fallaci and Indro Montanelli. Magris is a class act, a big hitter, a major European writer.

Magris has form. He won the Bagutta Prize (1987), the Strega Prize (1997), the Erasmus Prize and the Leipzig Book Award (2001), the gold medal from Madrid's Círculo de Bellas Artes (2003), a Prince of Asturias Award for Literature (2004), the Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Literary Prize (2005), the Austrian State Prize for European Literature (2006), the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade and the Prix européen de l'Essai Charles Veillon (both 2009). He's also been hotly-tipped  for the Nobel Prize. (although 'hotly-tipped' is a phrase that always implies ultimate failure, as in 'hotly-tipped to be the next Tory PM'') All of which again makes one somehow resistant. To cap it all he spent two years as a senator in the Italian government and, his Wikipedia entry adds, 'his numerous studies have helped to promote an awareness in Italy of Central European culture and of the literature of the Habsburg myth.'

The Hapsburg myth may or may not be a subject to set your pulses racing, but there's plenty to command your interest and admiration in Blindly which is, I can confirm, an extraordinary and challenging novel. 

First published in Italy in 2006 as Alla cieca, it was the author's first novel in twenty years and caused quite a stir.. It's a torrential first person narrative delivered, or so it seems at first, by one Jorgen Jorgensen, a nineteenth-century Danish explorer who briefly and farcically became ruler of Iceland and subsequently led a ramshackle life as a gambler, drunk and spy, spending stretches in Newgate Prison before being deported to Tasmania where he assisted in the aboriginal clearances, an atrocious genocide which completely wiped out the aboriginal population by 1876. But Jorgensen is, we learn, a literary device - the actual narrator is an unnamed pazzo lucido, or lucid madman, who appears elsewhere in the book as the fervent anti-communist Comrade Cippico - aka Tore (Salvatore) Cippico-Čipiko (Cipico) - imprisoned in Tito's notorious gulag on the barren Adriatic island of Goti Otok. Created after the Second World War, it was a Dachau-like hellhole - a place of violence, torture and massacre for Ustashi and Yugoslavian Fascists and (after 1948) Stalinists. Around 2,000 communist workers from Monfalcone, a small town near Trieste, were also rounded up and incarcerated and their fate forms the dark heart of this novel. It remained in operation until 1988, and was a taboo subject in Yugoslavia until Antonije Isaković's best-selling novel Tren (Moment), published only after Tito's death in 1980.

Cipico is also the voice of many other characters - prisoners, sailors, dissidents - in what the publishers call a 'choral monologue" but which might also, more pretentiously, be described as an aural palimpsest. The translation doesn't make much distinction between the different voices although this may well be an effect the author intended. The initial challenge (for this reader, at least) was to find much interest in any of these necessarily unreliable and opaquely-rendered voices, but by page thirty I was gripped, and completely won over because, some tiresome post-modern trickery aside, Magris has an important and compelling story to tell and tells it masterfully. The translator provides a helpful Afterword (best read, I suggest, before tackling the novel itself) giving the historic background to Goli Otok, the depiction of which is the novel's real strength. The two principle voices of Jorgensen and Cipico are interchangeable and shared with the aforementioned madman. The whole book is structured - rather unoriginally - as a sort of confessional letter to the lunatic narrator's psychiatrist, a Doctor Ulcigrai. The text raises the usual post-modern issues of identity, of coherence and integrities both personal and aesthetic, but it does so in unpredictable ways, through the glass of history, darkly. 

Comparisons with Joyce - while inevitable - are misleading, despite the intriguing links to Trieste. No writer has yet come close to doing what Joyce did in his masterpiece, and what writer would even bother to try? Come to that, why don't we all settle for the fact that Ulysses is, and will remain, the pinnacle of achievement in the novel at at time when the novel carried greater cultural weight, especially among a small and influential audience, and that almost everything since amounts to footnotes and postscripts and academic exegesis. 

As a fictional account of the twentieth century Blindly falls somewhere between Anthony Burgess's boisterous Earthly Powers and the melancholy reflections of W. G. Sebald. Yale recently published The Lair by the Romanian novelist Norman Manea and I was reminded too often when reading Blindly of that novel's shortcomings - its opacity, dullness, repetition and redundancy; its sub-Kafkaesque meanderings and its pervading blah-ness. Is this an issue of translation only? Or a problem faced by the average (and above-average) reader when engaging with these very literary, highly talented yet conventional writers with their grab-bag of post-modern tricks and treats). For all I know Joyce's magnum opus is a dud in Serbo-Croat or Tagalog. Their loss.

Henningham Family Press: Maximum Wage

A man with £3 a week and a man with £1500 a year can feel themselves fellow creatures, which the Duke of Westminster and the sleepers on the Embankment benches cannot.

George Orwell in The Lion and the Unicorn, his essay on the state of Britiain in wartime, published in 1941. His lines occur to me when, most mornings, I walk through the Embankment Gardens and see homeless men (and women too, but mostly men) asleep under the trees or just stirring in the early light. This has always been a place to which London's homeless drift, not least because of the soup kitchen at the nearby church of St Martins-in-the-Fields. Many of them clearly have problems, both physical and mental. They are increasing in number daily, the dispossessed and disenfranchised. But what about us 'fellow creatures', those of us who have a financial stake, however modest, in what we still call society?

In 1980 Chief Executive Officers of companies listed on the London Stock Exchange earned around 15 times the average salary of the workers they employed. Last year this had risen to 183 times. Orwell's belief that there should be a 10:1 ratio - that heads of companies should earn no more than ten times the average workers' salary - remains a pipe dream.

Orwell's writing inspires a forthcoming one-day performance event organised by Henningham Family Press, the name under which the artists David and Ping Henningham collaborate. MAXIMUM WAGE: A Performance Publishing Extravaganza, a free event and open to all, will take place in Stoke Newington, North London, on Saturday March 12th. Eight artists will be taking part and it promises to be an intriguing and subversive interrogation of money culture. Full details here. For an earlier TLS blog on Henningham Family Press click here.

A postscript:

I recently went to a Soho whiskey seller, looking for a bottle of malt whiskey as a gift (and I know nothing at all about whiskey, being a GIN man). I asked for Macallan, having read somewhere that this was a reliable choice. In the cabinet at the back of the shop were a shelf of bottles, the cheapest of which was £19,999. I needed a stiff drink, as my budget was around forty quid. How was it possible, I boggled at the friendly shop manager - wham did this happen? I felt like a Wellsian time traveller fetching up in the unimaginably remote future when a cup of tea costs a king's ransom. He shrugged and said that such high ticket items tended to sell to - well, you've guessed it. Oligarchs and their ilk. Being that rich is a pissing contest - a bottle of scotch that costs more than a car is nothing much to a billionaire (and I reflected glumly that my modest budget represented a larger proportion of my available capital than £20k to the average billionaire). But how does one drink such liquor? I was told that a particular brand of whiskey sells in a double measure at a swank London hotel for £5,000. The mind reels. He also told me that he once observed a chap adding lemonade to his . . .

Philip Maltman and About a Girl

My book About a Girl is published on 17th March (St Patrick's Day, as it happens) by CB editions. Subtitled 'A Reader's Guide to Eimear McBride's A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing', it's a book about a book. You can order your copy here.

The cover features a painting by the artist Philip Maltman entitled (and this is no coincidence) A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing. The image was prompted by his reading of, and his great admiration for, Eimear McBride's debut novel. He must have been one of the early adopters, as marketing types say. He generously presented the author with the original (which must be one of the more unexpected and appealing consequences of her literary fame) and, equally generously, gave my publisher permission to use the image on the cover of About a Girl. I'm really delighted that he agreed to this.





I've been looking at Philip Maltman's website. 

Maltman is, like Eimear McBride, a great admirer of Joyce and has made a series of images prompted by close readings of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. I relish his wonderfully energetic and cerebral paintings, his fine colour sense (look at the bilious yellows and greens of the dust jacket image); the gauche unlettered lettering, the confidence. He also appears to be very productive, a profligate sense of potential realised.

When you're on his website look out for a short series from 2014 inspired by page 7 of A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing and entitled GIHFT, four  pieces in oil on plywood). They really capture the saturated prose of McBride's brilliant debut - the lake water, the tears, the snot, the blood and other body fluids. They do not make for easy viewing, just as McBridean prose does not make for easy reading. Both have an intense beauty.

Then have a look at an earlier series from 2012: Impregnated with Raindew Moisture, glossed as 'a series of 100 Watercolours inspired by James Joyce’s Ulysses Notebooks'. They are wonderfully torrential. Maltman is also a writer and poet (and that's another blog for another time).

Did I mention that you can but a copy of About a Girl direct from the publisher here ?

Manuela and Sam act 5 © David Collard

If you're still reading - thank you. Here's the last act of Manuela and Sam. This is also my 500th published blog. There now.

Reaction has been encouraging. I was inundated with an email saying how much the sender had quite enjoyed it. I don't suppose it will ever be performed, but it's cheering to think it has been, or will have been, read.


Manuela and Sam © David Collard

Act 5

(Many years later. Night time. A full moon shines on a still ocean. The island has returned to its original position  as seen in Act 1. Sam, now a very old man with a very long beard, is sitting in the same place on the sea cliff where we first saw Manuela. He recites in a cracked voice.)

Sam:              Who would be

                   A mermaid fair,

                   Singing alone,

                   Combing her hair

                   Under the sea,

                   In a golden curl

                   With a comb of pearl,

                   On a throne?

(He looks around and for the first time becomes aware of the audience.)

I know what you're thinking. And you're wrong. I'm not mad and I do not think I'm a mermaid. So. My name is Sam. We haven't been introduced and it's getting late in the day and I know this is a big thing to ask of strangers but I wonder if I could? If we could. Would you mind. I mean, if you could do that thing you did once, you remember? A long long time ago? The storm? It would take my mind off things as they are. Make a bit of a change. Come on. You liked the shanty didn't you? Well?

(Under Sam's erratic direction the audience make storm noises (with assistance from the sound crew and lighting as the shelter collapses and the palm tree sways before falling to the ground. When the storm is at its height  a lightning flash reveals Manuela, back in mermaid form, washed up on the beach. Sam looks at her confusedly, signalling the audience to stop. Silence. He clambers slowly and cautiously towards Manuela. She is confused, exhausted and not her old self.)

Manuela (groggily):  Hello sailor.

Sam:                Oh God.

Manuela:          Parlez-vous Français ?? Sprechen Sie Deutsch? ¿Habla Español? Parliamo Glasgow? Do you 

                       speak -

Sam:                English.

Manuela:          English? (Sam grunts) What do y'kmow 'bout oysters?          

Sam:                Noise. Any noise. Any noise annoys an oyster -

Manuela:          Have we met before?

Sam:                It's been a long time. .

Manuela:          Alan? Angus? Archie? Jimmy? Jock?

Sam:               AGH!

Manuela:         Not Jock? Willie? Ahmed? Did I say Alan already? Boris?

Sam:               Sam.

Manuela:         Stan?

Sam:               Sam.

Manuela:         Sam.

Sam:              Yeah.

Manuela:        "Yeah"?

Sam:              Yes. Sam. You do know me. 

Manuela:         I've known lots of humans. Humen. 

Sam:               You've come back.

Manuela:         No Sam.

Sam:              Yes - you're here. As you were. As it were.

Manuela:         You don't miss a trick do you?

Sam:              So - this is like a happy ending?    

Manuela:         Whatever gave you that idea?

Sam:              For me anyway?

Manuela:        No Stan.This is not a happy ending. There are no happy endings.

Sam:              Sam. But you're here.

Manuela:          Look, you know salmon? How they somehow go back to the place where they were born and 

                      spawn and die there? It's one of the miracles of creation? 

Sam:               Where are you going with this?

Manuela:        I'm not here to spawn.

Sam:              But you can't be. You're not. Come on. I mean. I don't know how old you are, but whatever age
                      you are you don't look it.

Manuela:         You gallant thing you. But listen. Listen to me. This  place is where I need to be now.

Sam:              What will you do here?

Manuela:          I'll sing my song.

Sam:              What happened to -

Manuela:         Boris? Nothing happened. He died.

Sam:              Oh. I'm - 

Manuela:         I killed him.

Sam:              Oh.

Manuela:         His whole life rushed before him. Then he went down for the third time.

Sam:               He drowned?

Manuela:         No - this was in a motel.

Sam:              No!

Manuela:         Oh Yes.

Sam:              What happened to (he struggles to remember) the big… enormous ...

Manuela:        Take your time.

Sam:              You know - huge… colossal…vast…gigantic…titan -  the big boat! What happened to the big boat?

Manuela:       The Jolly Olly? Lost at sea. Cousin Mirabelle, Eyes bigger than her belly that one. She lured the

                    whole crew...greedy bitch.

Sam (pointing):  What's that?

Manuela:         All these questions!

Sam:             That bag. Your bag.

Manuela:        Och this old thing? Nothing. It comes in handy. For m'wee bits and bobs.

(Sam reaches in and fishes out a hand-held compressed air siren, which he accidentally activates.)

Sam:              Is this how they lure now?

Manuela:         It's for when , for if I ever need help.

Sam:               You?

Manuela::       Yes me. I'm not as -

Sam:            You need help?

(They look at each other.)

Sam:           What's the matter?

Manuela:      Nothing. Nothing's the matter.

Sam:           Something's the matter.

Manuela:      Why did the lobster blush?

Sam:           Because the seaweed. What's the matter?

Manuela;     For the last time nothing. Nothing.

Sam:           You look . . ..

Manuela:        I don't feel well. You, you look -

Sam/Manuela:  Terrible. Old.

Sam:             Old.

Manuela:        Old.

Sam:             How old are you?

Manuela:       Older.

Sam:           But how -

Manuela:      OLDER, alright? Older than you, older than anyone you know and anything you can think of apart 

                from this rock.

Sam:           I'm seventy-something.

Manuela:      You don't say?

Sam:           No. Eighty-six. Seven. Eighty-seven. This year.

Manuela:      And your point is?

Sam:          I get the odd ache and pain but really I'm in quite remarkable health. 

Manuela:     Good for you.

Sam:          And you?

Manuela:     Still as tight as a clam, Sam.

Sam:          I'm past all that, my girl.

Manuela:     Och I never was a girl. A girl is a half-formed thing. I'm a fully-formed Merrow. 

Sam:          I'm well over all that. My God when I think -

Manuela:     Sam. Pay attention. The sea is dying and so are we.

Sam:          That's a comfort.

Manuela:     Don't be glib.

Sam:          Why all this?

Manuela:    The gulls have gone. And there's more trash, all the time. And the sea. It's gone wrong, all wrong.      

                It's all chemical. You can't stay clean in it.

Sam:           The fish seem to manage.

Manuela:      What would you know?

Sam:           I mean -

Manuela:      Nothing, is what you would know.

Sam:            Why wouldn't I -

Manuela:       Nothing.

Sam:            What's on your mind?

Manuela:       The sea, Sam.

Sam:            What of it?

Manuela:        You have to know it and know what it is  you have to look for. It's different.

Sam:             How?

Manuela:         It's  not what it was. It's not clean any more. It's unclean.

Sam:             But you're clean.

Manuela:         No Sam.

Sam:               You're not?

Manuela:         I'm not well.

Sam:               Not well. How? What is it?

Manuela:         I'm knackered, Sam.

Sam:               What happened to the. . .? (he gestures)

Manuela:         It's all knackered.

Sam:               Knackered?

Manuela:         Knackered. The tides, the waves, the swells, the currents, the streams. All knackered.

Sam:               But nothing's changed.

Manuela:         It has. All the ebb and flow. The wetness of the water if you like. It's changed.

Sam:              Water's not wet.

Manuela:        Isn't wet?

Sam:              That's right. Water is not wet in itself, but is a cause of wetness other things.

(Manuela, struck by this, is momentarily lost for words).

Sam:              So what is the problem?

Manuela:        I'm not clean. And I'm all washed up.

Sam:             You know what I really would like?

Manuela:       I'm listening.

Sam:            All these years I've lived on oysters and coconuts and coconut milk. And what I really miss -

Manuela:       Yes?

Sam:             The thing I miss most of all -

Manuela:       Yes?

Sam:             What I'd really like -

Manuela:       Yes?

Sam:             I can't remember.

Manuela:       You can't remember

Sam:             I remember so little.       

Manuela:       For instance?

Sam:             I can never go home.

Manuela:       I can only go home.

Sam:             Home is where you come from. I mean, where one comes from.

Manuela:       Where the heart is?

Sam:             There's no place like home.

Manuela:       It's what you go back to.

Sam:             No place like home.

Manuela:       Enough -

Sam:            East, West - home's best.

Manuela:       Man alive! Will you stop your bloody inane bloody wittering? Honestly!

Sam:             I remember so little…?

Manuela:       Manuela.

Sam:             Manuela.

Manuela:       You know what I'd really like?

Sam:             Don't tell me! Don't tell me! Is it - ?.

Manuela:       The thing I miss most of all?

Sam:             What?

Manuela:       You'll never guess.

Sam:             What? What?

Manuela:       A really good foot rub.

(They laugh and she embraces Sam, almost affectionately)

Sam:          Well now.

Manuela:     Are you coming on to me?

Sam:           What do you think? 

Manuela:     You are. You are coming on to me!

Sam:            I'll do anything you want, your wildest dreams. I'll be anything you want - friend, factotum. You 

                   want a butler? I can do that. I can buttle. I can catch fish, build shelters, crack coconuts, shuck

                   oysters. I'll be anything you like, whoever you want. All for you, nobody else. I can be anyone's but 

                   I only want you Manuela. Only you. I've waited for you all this time. (Pause) You just don't get it,   

                   Do you? Do you? Can't you see what's on offer here?  Don't you want me to take care of you?

Manuela:      We've only just met. I don't know anything about you. You don't know anything about me.

Sam:            I loved you. 

Manuela:      Where are you going with this?

Sam:           Years ago, many years ago, you lured me here, to my doom. You made me love you. I didn't want           
                  to do it. I didn't want to do it. But it happened. Then you left me alone, then you cam back for some                   reason I can't  remember and then I was alone. For the rest of my life. Living on oysters and    

                  coconuts and coconut milk and . . . cheese!

Manuela:      Cheese?

Sam:            It just came back to me. That's what I miss, what I crave. You wouldn't happen to have any?

(Manuela fumbles in her bag and produces a ball of Edam wrapped in red wax.)

Manuela:      Ta daaah!

Sam:            I was thinking more of maybe some Brie.    

Manuela:      Sorry.

Sam:            No. Maybe have it later, eh?

Manuela:      Well who's a picky boy then? 

Sam:            It's just -

Manuela:      Sam? All that stuff you said just now?

Sam:            Yes.

Manuela:      Did you mean it? 

Sam (nobly): I am the father of your children.

Manuela:      So? You want a medal?

Sam:            I have certain rights and responsibilities.

Manuela:      It's too late to see them through college.

Sam:            To you I mean. I have responsibilities towards you. I missed you.

Manuela:      Of course you did.That's how the whole thrall thing works.

Sam:            Did you miss me?

Manuela:      What do you think?

Sam:            I'm just fishing for compliments.

Manuela:      You've not lost your touch.

Sam:           Just casting around.

Manuela:      Stop it. 

Sam:           You and your jokes?

Manuela:     You still have one wish, you know.

Sam:           Eh?

Manuela:     You had a cigarette and a light -

Sam:           I gave up after that.

Manuela:     Then you wished me happiness?

Sam:           I did.

Manuela:     Doesn't count.

Sam:           Why? Or why not?

Manuela:     We're not self-medicating..

Sam:            What do you mean?

Manuela:      I mean we can't grant ourselves wishes. It would be anarchy.

Sam:            So I have another wish?

Manuela:      Just the one.

Sam:            Can I think about it?

Manuela:      Take your time.

Sam:            So what happens?

Manuela:      When?

Sam:            Now. What happens now?

Manuela:      We sit.

Sam:            And?

Manuela:      You comb my hair.

Sam:            And?

Manuela:      You comb my hair.

(He combs her hair as she recites)

                   Who would be

                 A mermaid fair,

                 Singing alone,

   Combing her hair

Under the sea,

 In a golden curl

                 With a comb of pearl,

                 On a throne?

                  Weialala leia.

                   Wallala leialala. 

(They sit silently together in the beach. A full moon shines over the night ocean. There are millions of stars.) 

FIN

Manuela and Sam act 4 © David Collard

Here's the next act of Manuela and Sam. In the theatre this would probably come after an interval. (A drink or two tends to help any show - ask any actor.) 

This play is a two-hander, with a single set. There's nothing especially tricky about the staging apart, I suppose, from the appearance at the opening of this act of a billionaire's yacht. This needn't be shown of course - a single foghorn would do, perhaps followed by that high-pitched whistle that accompanies (or used to accompany) the arrival of bigwigs on naval vessels. Manueala can simply step off a gangplank.



Manuela and Sam © David Collard

Act 4

(The same music, but a scratched recording played at a slightly slower speed. It is thirty years later. Before the lights go up (or the curtain rises) we hear the sound of a coconut falling and hitting a human skull. The island has over the years become more habitable, There is a simple shelter, a vegetable patch, basic driftwood furniture. Curtain rises to show that the palm tree has grown considerably. An older, bearded Sam is lying concussed at the foot of the tree from which a coconut has fallen.

A vast modern yacht, the Jolly Oligarch, is moored close to the island.

Manuela steps on to the rock and retrieves the coconut. She is in human form, wearing an immaculate white cruise ship captain's uniform complete with braided cap. Heavy expensive jewellery and a pair of Jimmy Choos, which she carries. She is otherwise unchanged and hasn't aged a day since she left. She looks around neutrally, cradling the coconut, admires the palm tree then sees Sam supine beneath it. She smiles and crouches over him.)

Manuela:    What's the difference between an epileptic oysterman and a tart with diarrhoea?

(Sam groans, and keeps his eyes closed.)

Manuela:   An epileptic oysterman and a tart with diarrhoea?

Sam:          Not again.

Manuela:   One shucks between fits . . .

Sam :         And a noisy noise annoys an oyster most.

Manuela:   You look a sight

Sam:          Thanks a bunch.

Manuela:   You've made a few changes I see.

(Sam opens his eyes and looks at Manuela)

Sam:          So have you.

Manuela:    Just something I threw on.

Sam:           But - you're human?

Manuela:    You don't miss a thing do you?

Sam:           You've got legs!

Manuela:     I've had my hair done.

Sam:           You've got legs!

Manuela:    Dropped a dress size.

Sam:           You've got legs!

Manuela:    Like the fishnets? Old habits die hard.

Sam:           YOU'VE GOT LEGS!

Manuela:    Wrong. I've got great legs.

(She sashays around, pleased with herself. Sam kneels and gazes at her)

Sam:           How?

Manuela:    Never mind the how. It's the why that counts.

Sam:           You did it for love?

Manuela:     No I did it for kicks. (Gesture) Yes for love. Of bloody course for love. 

Sam:           What happened?

Manuela:     It's the old story.

Sam:            Boy meets fish?

Manuela:     Don't be cheeky.

Sam:            I'm old now.

Manuela:     Enough about you. What about me?

Sam:            You haven't changed a bit. Well a lot I mean, but -

Manuela:     'Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds'

Sam:            Enough with the Tennyson.

Manuela:     Shakespeare?

Sam:            Enough with the fucking poetry. 

Manuela:     How have you been keeping?

Sam:            I survive.

Manuela:     Evidently.

(She looks around appraisingly)

Sam:            Shelter. It's a shelter. You though. You're not a day older.

Manuela:     Why thank you.

Sam:            Not a compliment. An observation. I'm older now.

Manuela:     You don't say.

Sam:            Are you - are you with anyone?

Manuela:     Does it look as though I'm with someone?

Sam:            Yes.

Manuela:     Well then yes.

Sam:            Who?

Manuela:     Never you mind.

Sam:           Are you happy?

Manuela:    Never you mind. Are you deaf as well?

Sam:           So - how does it feel?

Manuela:    Takes some getting used to. There's a phantom tail thing. I prefer baths to showers.

Sam:           What's the hardest part?

Manuela:     Shoes. Don't get me started.

Sam:            Those are nice.

Manuela:     Jimmy Choos. 

Sam:            Do you ever think of us?

Manuela:     There was no us. There is no us. We are not an us.

Sam:            When did you...?

Manuela:     Ten years ago. About the same time I had some other work done.

Sam:           Did it hurt?

Manuela:    It's a simple procedure. Keyhole. Yes.

Sam:           How did you get here?

Manuela:    It's behind you (she gestures to the yacht).

Sam:           You have a yacht?

Manuela:    His Nibs has several yachts. A fleet, if you will.

Sam:           Nibs?

Manuela:     Boris.

Sam:           Boris?

Manuela:    My other half.

Sam:           You're married?

Manuela:     Try to keep up.

Sam:            He's rich?

Manuela:      Fleet of yachts. Pay attention.

Sam:            Do you love him?

Manuela:     He understands me. He's really very simple.

Sam:           Does he love you?

Manuela:    What do you think?

Sam:           Do you love him?

Manuela:    Oh for Neptune's sake.

Sam:           Does he know about -

Manuela:    My - heritage?

Sam:           Is that what you call it?

Manuela:    He knows how to please me and I let him.

Sam:           And the crew?

Manuela:    I please myself.

Sam:           Did you love me? At all? For a time?

Manuela:    Darling Sam  - of course not.

Sam:           Oh. Do you love him?

Manuela:    He's a plutocrat. Or an oligarch. There is a difference, but it's like flotsam and jetsam. He's
                   worth more than all the  other olicrats put together, if that helps. He's building me a Caspian
                   archipelago - that's how rich he is. Very very very very rich  indeed. My husband. And
                   now I have to leave. We're having sushi. Then he's going to have me in the wet room.

Sam:           What about me?

Manuela:    Shall I send some over?

Sam:           No. Sod the sushi. It's you I want.

Manuela:    It's very good, the sushi. 

Sam:           There's a word for women like you.

Manuela:    Free spirit?

Sam:           That's not what I had in mind.

Manuela:     You feel - what? 'Betrayed'? Oh Sam do grow up.

Sam:       Why did you have to come back here?

Manuela:     I left something behind.

Sam:           You certainly did.

Manuela:     Not you and don't be silly. (She looks around). Ah! Here it is! (She takes the long blonde 
                    wig from the washing-line and shakes it.) You never know when it might come in handy.

Sam:           You came here for that?

Manuela:    Yes. And to see you of course. But mainly for this. yes.

Sam:          Thanks.

Mariela:     It's my cohuleen druith. Without it you can't go back.

Sam:          As a mermaid?

Mariela:     I self-identify as a Merrow.

Sam:          Merrow then. 

Mariela:     Thank you.

Sam:          The wig?

Manuela:    Pay attention. It's not a wig, it's my cohuleen druith. (Glasgow) Ma jaggy bunnett? If I lose
                   this cap I lose the power to return beneath the water. 

Sam:          You think you know someone . . ..

Manuela:    I'm complicated. Shall I tell you something else?

Sam:          I'm listening.

Manuela:   We - we Merrow - are also known to leave their outer skins behind, in order to transform
                  into other beings.. Beings even more magical and beautiful. 

Sam:          Magical?

Mariela:     I still owe you wishes three.

Sam:          But you said -

Mariela:     I lied.

Sam:          Can I have them now?

Mariela:     What do you think?

Sam:          Hold on. Let me think. Would you have cigarette?.

Manuela (rummages in handbag): No problem. Keep the pack.

Sam:          Have you got a light?

(Manuela produces a gold-plated lighter and lights Sam's cigarette. Sam smokes with bliss and starts to cough.)

Sam:          Three wishes eh?    

Manuela:    One left.

Sam:          What?

Manuela:    The cigarette.

Sam:           That wasn't a wish! That wasn't a wish! 

Manuela:    Counts as a wish.

Sam:           Alright then, one wish! Jesus. What was the second?

(Manuela waggles the lighter)

         Oh great.

Manuela:    Take your time.

Sam:           Anything I want?

Manuela:    Of course not.

Sam:           I can't think of anything.

Manuela:    As I say - take your time but I'm leaving in five minutes.

Sam:          Oh. Where are you going?

Manuela:    Somewhere with a marina.

(Long pause)

Sam:          How are our - the children?

Manuela:   How should I know?

Sam:          Aren't you just a wee bit curious?

Manuela:   One can't love them all. There are thousands.

Sam:          All girls? Some boys?

Manuela:   I expect so. We haven't stayed in touch.

Sam:          And you? How are you?

Manuela:   Och you know. "Straining up under the bears"

Sam:          You what?

Manuela:    "Straining up under the bears".

Sam:           Oh yes. Hah.

Manuela:    Bearing up. Under the strain.

Sam:           I do get it.

Manuela:    Eventually.

Sam:           I'm out of practice.

(The yacht's foghorn sounds)

Manuela:     I'm wanted.

Sam:           I wish -

Manuela:    Yes?

Sam:           I wish you every happiness.

(Manuela is briefly taken aback)

Manuela:    Well that's a first. Thank you.

Sam:           You're welcome.

Manuela:    You must never forget your roots. The time may come when I need to wreck the yacht and
                   swim away. Och what am I like?

Sam:           Goodbye Manuella.

Manuela:    Auf Wiedersehen . .  à bientôt  . .  adios . . .до свидания . . . 

(She leaves. The Jolly Oligarch moves off. Sam sits down outside his shelter. He sees the Jimmy Choos and picks one up. Raising it to his face he inhales deeply. He reaches into the box and takes out a can of Irn Bru, which he opens and swigs from while first singing to himself, and then addressing the audience directly.)

Sam:         When I was a lad in a fishing town

  My old man said to me:

"You can spend your life, your jolly life

Sailing on the sea.

You can search the world for pretty girls

  Til your eyes grow weak and dim,

But don't go fishing for a mermaid, son

  If you don't know how to swim"

     Sea shanties. There are three types, you know. There's your short haul shanties, for tasks  
             requiring quick pulls over a relatively short time. Then there's your halyard shanties, for heavier
             work requiring more setup time between pulls and finally you've got your capstan shanties and
             these are long and they're sung for long, repetitive tasks requiring a sustained rhythm, but not
             involving working the lines. This is one of those (sings): 

'Cause her hair was green as seaweed

Her skin was blue and pale

I loved that girl with all my heart

I only liked the upper part

I did not like the tail

So I signed aboard of a whaling ship

  And my first very day at sea

There I spied in the waves,

  Reaching out for me

"Come live with me in the sea said she,

  Down on the ocean floor

And I'll show you many's a wonderous thing

  That you've never seen before

(He pauses and repeats to himself "shucks between fits" and smiles)

So over I jumped and she pulled me down,

  Down to her seaweed bed

A pillow made of tortoise-shell

  She placed beneath my head

She fed me shrimp and caviar

  Upon a silver dish

From her head to her waist was just to my taste

  But the rest of her was a fish

Then one day, she swam away

  So I sang to the clams and the whales

"Oh, how I miss her seagreen hair

And the silvery shine of her scales

Then her sister, she swam by

  And set my heart awhirl

From her head to her waist was an ugly fish

  But the rest of her was a girl

'Cause her hair was green as seaweed

Her skin was blue and pale

I loved that girl with all my heart

I did not like the upper part

And that's how I get my ...

(He starts to heave with sobs)

End of Act 4