Scan barcode
nini23's review against another edition
reflective
4.0
OK, Mr Field is an astonishingly accomplished experimental debut by Katharine Kilalea. I alighted on this short novel from another (Is Mother Dead) that was bleeding emotion from out the pages and it was cool relief. As this Guardian review (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/19/ok-mr-field-katharine-kilalea-review) points out, it's rare for a debut female writer not to include some autofiction or self-identifying elements into the fictional characters. As it was, I spent part of the time feeling a little quizzical about the author's intention. For example, there is a bizarre section where the male protagonist is at the beach with his wife who has taken off her top and he imagines the areola to be eyes. Suddenly everywhere he looks, the women's breasts are winking at him. Is Kilalea toying with the idea of male gaze or is this a surreal hallucination betraying his mental state? The same goes for even the title. Depending on the inflection and tone, is it meant to be read as exasperation or condescension in the vein of 'Ok, boomer' or in a concerned manner as the protagonist keeps being asked by a hallucinatory voice of his landlady whether he is ok.
Mr Field is decidedly not ok. He is a concert pianist who after a somewhat disastrous performance in London, England gets into a train accident requiring surgery on his hand due to fractures. With the compensation money, he decides to rent a villa in Durban, South Africa with his wife Mim. At some point in the narrative, Mim leaves him.
Without looking at the author's bio, it is evident that she is a poet. The choice of words and sentence structure is very deliberate with wordplay and recurrent motifs. As the protagonist is a classical musician, he is sensitive to the rhythm of his surroundings such as the sounds of nearby construction and raindrops. Certain scenes such as that of the room of the landlady he stalks are presented as if beholding a still life painting. Architecture, classical music with particular emphasis on Chopin's works, art and the plumbing of loneliness blend to present an intriguing intellectual puzzle for the reader.
One of the more memorable passages was the one where he is attempting to play Chopin's Raindrop Prelude after his surgery. Due to the particular requirements of the piece requiring the striking of the same note with varying degrees of strength, his post-surgery hand is unable to accomplish the effect. The non-injured hand becomes independent, decouples from the other hand and seemingly Mr Field's control, and proceeds to musically concernedly seduce the injured hand. Another surreal scene includes a rider on a horse with the author prepping us beforehand about the similarity in sound between writer and rider. Whole swaths of time appear to pass by even with important events cloaking the novel in a dreamlike state.
In some ways, OK, Mr Field is opaque in contrast to contemporary novels which are quite upfront about their themes and foci. After reading some reviews like https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/katharine-kilalea-ok-mr-field-review-brilliantly-funny-debut-novel-1.3550957 and https://www.thisissplice.co.uk/2018/06/04/a-room-for-fantasy-katharine-kilaleas-ok-mr-field/, I went back to reread the first section, in particular paying more attention to the architectural description of the house he rented and noting the motif of doppelgänger, not only with buildings but later on with another character. I also asked myself why I wasn't reacting more strongly to some elements of the story that I would normally find objectionable. Being a piano player myself (though not at concert performance level), I enjoyed the descriptions of classical music and digressions such as speculation of the emotion that Chopin had waiting for George Sand in the piece. Are there Bernhardian influences with repetition and an obsessed male character displaying little self-insight? Two books that come to my mind which may be comparables are Saint Sebastian's Abyss and Peaces: A Novel.
All in all, this is a thought-provoking cleverly constructed novel that has gone under the radar.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Stalking
Moderate: Injury/Injury detail and Mental illness
Minor: Animal death
bookishbun's review
emotional
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
0.5
Content Warnings
Minor: Animal cruelty, Sexual content, and Stalking
More...