Joanna Kavenna: "Inglorious"

Joanna Kavenna's 2008 Orange-Prize winning novel is a story of a nervous breakdown of a woman who all of a sudden quits her job in journalism only to learn that her long-time boyfriend has decided to break up their relationship in order to start a new life with her best friend. It turns out that her decision to withdraw from the race to climb the social ladder and from her comfortable and secure life might be a sign of a more serious crisis that she is only now beginning to understand, namely that Rosa Lane (the protagonist) has not yet adjusted to the fact that her mother died six months ago. Helpless and aimless, Rosa leaves the flat that she has shared with Liam for ten or so years and makes herself a nuisance to her friends, whose kindness she seems to abuse by staying in their apartments for too long. She cannot rent a flat of her own or share the expenses with her hosts because she is desperately short of money, and the bank refuses to prolong her loan.

The withdrawal from life gives Rosa a vantage point from which to view her past and analyze the disintegration of her relationship with Liam, who, after all, was [her] god for quite a few years. Kavenna employs Woolf's technique of internal monologue, which allows her to offer the reader insight into Rosa's cogitations: Her relationship with Liam, because it had endured for so long, allowed her to develop an illusion that they - alone of everyone - might transcend the absolutes of space and time. Because they returned daily to the same point - the two of them, waking in bed together, in their familiar bedroom with the same sounds for each morning - it seemed as if this pattern would recur forever, an eternal recurrence. Eventually she found this stifling, but for years it allowed her to evade reality, delude herself about the incessant passage of days. Because of this she failed to notice many signs. In the last months they stopped eating out. It was all too pursed and formal. In public they were uneasy, suddenly aware of themselves, of the lies they were spinning.

From the newly acquired perspective Rosa ponders not only over her dead relationship but also over fleetingness of things and illusory stability of life, jotting down the outcome of her cogitations on pieces of paper which she immediately tears up: We live in the conviction that we are masters of our lives, that life is given to us for our enjoyment. But this is obviously absurd. Surely we can be happy in the knowledge of our mortality? Surely we must be? This tendency to brood over things rather than take life in her hands, as everybody advises her to do, gives Rosa a strikingly Hamletic characteristic. Rosa's stepping out of life and assuming a posture of an observer and disillusioned commentator affects the structure of the novel, which lacks a conventional story or action, and Rosa herself can be labeled as an anti-hero who refuses to take action and chooses to remain outside the very few events presented in the novel. The book's title refers to a phrase which Rosa applies to herself, namely that she is an inglorious Milton. This reference to Milton explains how deftly Kavenna redefines the heroic epic genre, in which the Aristotelian notion of plot and swift action play a crucial role, tailoring it to fit the contemporary world.

Although the novel, which the writer herself called a mock-heroic quest for meaning, portrays emotional breakdown and the character's seemingly tragic freefall to the point of a virtual stasis, it does so in a very light-hearted and humorous way. There is something dangerously attractive and absorbing in Rosa's inertia. Beware.