Bruce Junior, protagonist of Marisa and surveyor of English middle-class life, has everything a rising urbane professional college boy could ask for: a life happily circumscribed, a ready-to-wear career path, and a position in haute bourgeois society, courtesy of his father, who is also named Bruce. Yet something's missing, and not just the smile on his face, which Junior first notices in the collection of family photos his father had gathered together in extremis. This particular lack is an unconscious one, engendered by his upbringing, and is indicative of a determined source of absence.
It's not that Bruce isn't able to choose to go against his mother and father's will, in the sense that Edith Wharton reminds us in her novel, The Age of Innocence, where romantic loss can be an outcome of a good son's class loyalty. For Bruce, it isn't the will to make a decision that is missing. His problem is a lack of the associated underpinnings of passion, which solidify a romance into something more than just ephemeral upper-class dreaming, nightmare material or vainglorious gesture.
Marisa is a modernist romantic tragedy, which tips its hat to Wyndham Lewis, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Henri Bergson and others. Yet Cowlam's novel has more to offer than this. It explores a broad range of intellectual themes, such as the psychological dynamic of left-wing and right-wing politics and their relation to art, male and female conceptions of love, our intuitive conceptions of time and the tragic nature of humour.
Its rhetorically understated quality is developed on an unbridgeable gulf that is not defined by overt cultural boundaries or moral 'sin' – it is more peculiar, more esoterically haunting than that. After all, Marisa and Bruce share much of the same cultural context, even though their values appear to differ more widely as the drama
progresses.
There is a subtlety to Bruce's despair, since he longs for the intoxication of a powerful artistic effect, able to deliver the message he secretly longs for: that 'the social mores we take for granted every day' might give us less than the full serve demanded of our human desires in the world. This intoxication is not to be imbibed in the form of seemingly lowbrow student confections, however. Form is not only as important as function – it is the fundamental key for Bruce, aiding him in determining his class calling on the basis of certain straightforward and external social signs. Therefore, it must be via his own elitist social circle that the artistic message can reach him, one by which the 'whole cosy notion of what civilisation is, is undermined.'
Yet, the ironic tragedy is that the corporate class to whom he owes his loyalty cannot deliver the level of passion and truth he craves. The only one who can do that is Marisa, and she belongs to a tribe not of fact-based, hard-headed financiers, but of artists. Bruce appears to represent form in search of content, whereas Marisa, his love interest, ever eluding his knowledge and control, is unable to show him her substantial, if aesthetically and psychologically murky content (from Bruce's perspective at least).
The narrative of recollection is in the form of Bruce's reminiscence. Through his darkened lens, Marisa appears in various manifestations – a ghostly figure ministering to his needs, or a highly abstractive and impractical person, unable to convey her intended artistic and personal meanings. Whereas the reader suspects that Marisa's character is in itself deep and complex, we know what she aspires to only via Bruce's selective memories, his eye for her liberal left tendencies often patently and openly jaundiced.
On Bruce's part, such perceptual bias is the formula of failure to engage. This appears to lead (and it's only his perspective we know) to events of a sadistic or masochistic nature. As Bruce becomes the domineering inheritor, and manipulator, of patriarchal power and finances, Marisa engages in a masochistic act, not entirely distinguishable in form from the contemporary feminist statement of Annabel Chong. Furthermore, this might have been judged to spite Bruce, not just as an enactment of 'feminist' artistic statement. What can this and other feminist performance mean for women? This is one of the subtle questions indirectly raised in the novel.
There is subtlety in the plot, so that we're unsure of what exactly is taking place, psychologically, with Marisa and with Bruce. The dynamic that resonates most strikingly is that of British class social inflections of meaning and differing value systems. The plot's development is adeptly marked by Bruce's realisation of loss throughout the narrative's latter part.
Aesthetically, the novel is completed by Bruce's desperate effort to recall the detail of his life with Marisa a long time ago, to recapture and retain a vestige of living passion. Indeed, most of Bruce's ill-fated attempts to repossess the essence of Marisa is represented in his act of collecting: thus it is that Bruce peruses the memoirs he has stockpiled from Marisa's life, still perhaps not understanding some of the intentions underlying her artistic endeavours. The gender dichotomy is delicately represented: it is one of an objectifying male collector of Marisa-memoirs alongside an ephemeral and subjectively simplified potential 'collectee', reminiscent of John Fowles' intriguing and gender-archetypical depiction of Clegg and Miranda in his novel The Collector.
There is a dry sardonic tone to Cowlam's Marisa. A soft sense of mirth flows through the narrative, as we learn to see how the eye that seems to see all, also fails to see aspects of meaning relevant to his intimate interests. We are treated to an education concerning what it might be like to see the world through the eyes of an upper-middle-class Englishman. Readers will experience his repressed way of looking at the world, his reflexive dismissive propensities, his regularly intelligent but overdrawn artistic flourishes (a function of his self-appointed semi-aristocratic role as arbiter of taste) and yet often classically imbued turn of phrase, his interest in the material quality of good nourishment, preferably imbibed within tasteful interiors boasting thoughtfully chosen furnishings as well as his paradoxical interest in mysterious, elusive (because passionate) modern forms of art.
Bruce has everything a British rising middle-class individual could ask for. Yet something tragic happened to him at a crucial point at approximately the middle of the book, where his élan vital undergoes a transformation for the worst. Nobody knows it – except finally perhaps Bruce himself. Whereas mechanistic, linear time appears to go on as before, and his son, Bruce Three, is born, and so continues the line of Bruces, Bruce's own intuition of time has radically changed. Worse, he now knows something he didn't know before, which he wishes he hadn't apprehended: that ghosts and murky lures of the imagination can no longer simply pass for fanciful left-wing tropes, but are finally to be taken as…something all too real.
Cowlam, Peter, Marisa, CentreHouse Press, ISBN 978-1-902086-03-3.
