Man In The Holocene
It wouldn’t be hard to find yourself thinking that Max Frisch wrote Man In Holocene this year, not in the late 1970s. It feels contemporary, April 2009 contemporary, not only in style and mood, but in detail as well. Nothing jars, nothing seems dated. There is nothing anachronistic about the elderly man living alone at the edge of an alpine village, worrying about the rain and about the possibility of being cut off, stranded or crushed by a landslide. And nothing odd about his preoccupations, or his decision to go for a long walk late on in the book, or in the unravelling of his connections to what we might think of as sanity or caring. Add to that a couple of techniques which seem positively modish - the liberal use of encyclopaedia and reference book cut-outs, for all the world like Wikipedia cut-and-pastes, and the funny/poignant/trivial-in-isolation one-liners that scroll up the page like a good Twitter feed.
But the real shocker, the thing that made me check the publication date (1979) half a dozen times, is the continual undertone of nebulous catastrophe both ancient and imminent, personal and species wide, inevitable and impossible, dreaded and desired. (I really need to get a handle on my contradictory coupled adjective paradox problem. There’s a word for it isn’t there?) While it might not mention global warming, or asteroid strikes, or swine flu, or whatever is your current poison, Man In The Holocene nevertheless pokes its finger straight into that soft part of you that knows how mortal you are. It scratches that irritating patch of your imagination that has glimpsed the cold lonely truth of the brevity of your own existence, and the sure and certain fact that on nature’s scale, you might as well not have happened. And not just you. Us.
Scale is the key, really. It’s in the title, and it’s all over the pages that Geiser cuts from his books and pins to the wall of his living room to better remember what they tell him. We are currently in the geological epoch known as the Holocene, which has lasted for about 10,000 years, and human civilisation’s full history has occurred within it, though we’ve been around for longer, maybe as long as 200,000 years, in various forms. Before the Holocene was the Pleistocene, which started about 1.8 million years ago, and before that, the Pliocene, which began 5.5 million years ago. The dinosaurs lasted for about 160 million years, from the Triassic period to the end of the Cretaceous period, which is about 230 million years ago to about 65 million years ago. So they were here for about 800 times longer than we’ve been here. Now they’re gone. The mountains outside Geiser’s front door were formed in the early Cainozoic era, which started 65.5 million years ago. His daughter lives in Basel, his wife is dead, and sometimes the mail bus can’t get into the valley.
I’ve never read any Max Frisch before, and now I have read one of his books and will probably read others and later on I’ll die. He died in 1991. He was Swiss. He was an architect. Architects should make good novelists (though I can’t think of any other examples) because architecture and novel writing are similarly hilarious distractions from the problem of scale. Frisch was probably very clever, though Man In The Holocene is simple, and despite what you might think, it’s a warm and quite beautiful book, and often funny. Geiser is very likeable. His troubles are small and trivial, but they are all of his troubles, and so they’re as large as he is, and as we are. And the vaccine for the despair that Geiser’s meandering thoughts might provoke lies in the fact that you end the book feeling sorry not so much for yourself as for him.
Sadness is a proof against despair. Which is cause for rejoicing.
