Books

Francis Sheppard’s thoughts on Fran Lock’s Vulgar Errors / Feral Subjects and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves

Lock’s 2023 collection of lyrical essays is both polemic and poetic; Woolf’s novel is an early twentieth-century Modernist experiment in a story being told from different viewpoints, in distinct voices. The writers come from opposite backgrounds, that of Woolf being English metropolitan upper middle-class, Lock’s Irish working-class.

I found a copy of The Waves in an Airbnb where I stayed for a weekend, and was able to finish it in that short time. There was no help given to me by the annotations and highlightings of an A-level student and previous owner of the book. The marking suggested that the book embodied ‘themes’ and the students had been told to go hunt for them. A pity the young woman had not first read it for the sake of a good story, because that is certainly there.

I had started reading Fran Lock’s book a few days before, and had tried to take in this expanded notion of ‘feral’. Lock had visited Dudley early in 2024, and had given a memorable reading of her collection Hyena! at the monthly Saturday Books Poetry Breakfast. The Breakfast is an upbeat gathering of new and experienced poets, who write towards a different theme each month. They were delighted by Lock’s choice – Feral. The work produced was exciting and disturbing, in the manner of Lock’s. To me, this was a pointer to the space some artists may choose to inhabit. This space is far from the reach of conventional power.

The Waves is a story of six lives, of children-becoming-adults, whose lives merge through moments being lived simultaneously. At such moments their voices are indistinguishable. Always they come back to a fleeting episode, a powerful image, in a shared early childhood.

The lady sits between two long windows, writing. The gardeners sweep the lawn with giant brooms.

The other common element is their love for a seventh character, Percival, a child quite unlike them, having none of their redoubled sensitivity, a conventional figure who plans a future as an officer in colonial service.

When Woolf wrote this, in 1930, other novelists were seeing through the mental fog created by what they would have called Empire, to us colonialism, to me institutionalised inequality. EM Forster portrays this in microcosm in A Passage to India, George Orwell the distortions that result in Shooting an Elephant. For the six who voice this story, the notion of the world-at-large being theirs is inimical: the Australian boy who is never fully accepted by the ‘home’ society, the future novelist who realises the imitative nature of his work, the Cambridge don-in-the-making whose love for other men will not declare itself, so must substitute a little personal world of intellect and order. Then the girls. Each of the three retreats from the world in her own particular way. For one, eventually the sensual world in its entirety is the only world she can inhabit. Another rejects the global world represented by London in favour of rural roots, nature, her indigenous soil. A third invites the reader to speculate much further.

Rhoda, whose life, like that of the others, is shaped by boarding school and her relationship with the group, is unlike the others in that she seems to have no strategy for coping with the engulfing blind forces of this capitalist-imperialist world. The six share each others’ lives to the extent that their voices can be interchangeable; with Rhoda the process goes too far. She is at a loss and losing all throughout the trajectory of her life.

All six lives are failures. Like six planets around a star they are stabilised and held in gravitational motion by Percival. At ease with himself and others and the Empire beyond, he is their undeniable leader, who shares nothing of the complex inner world that each inhabits. Once he leaves (for India and, in a double sense, his death) they are bereft. It is as if, while he lives, the colonial roof that arches over them gives them shelter under which they can grow. Not one of them, thereafter, finds continuous love. Their career-pursuits end in revulsion for what they have done, despite their external success. They face old age weakened and battered; the controlling waves of already-determined destiny have rhythmically, inescapably, pounded them to destruction.

Sometimes it’s a mistake to read two books at the same time; inevitably they mix in your mind. In this case the themes cross-fertilised. It came to me that, while Neville, gay, could hide his outsider-ness in the cloisters of Cambridge, as did the others in different ways, no such recourse was available to Rhoda.

In her writing Fran Lock presents a behaviour that butts back against convention, control and entrenched power. Feral is necessarily present in the wild animal, the ‘other-ness’ of the quality depicted and mythologised all over the world and throughout the millennia. It is a response to that greater power that requires life in cold winds, suffering wounds inflicted by pursuers, to whom you will never give in. Lock uses feral in this way:

the notion of feral turns on both an excess of autonomy and an absolute lack of control. this feral is not amenable to rational argument, to emotional appeal, to persuasion or threat. its otherness can never be breached or surmounted, it is completely itself, resists all attempts at coercive recuperation.

Just how useful the term is becomes clear as the collection of lyrical essays progresses. We see it as a gesture of personal liberation and a call to collective action. It re-habituates the true poet. If Woolf had been born a century later she would have embraced it, I am sure. As it is, her characters seem to make a compromise with defeat. And in Rhoda, who of all of them seems most alive in spirit, the omission is tragedy.