The Man Who Saw Everything – Deborah Levy (2019) 200 pages

I really love Deborah Levy’s work. Her writing is so clear and direct – both in fiction and non-fiction – but never feels simplistic or superficial. She’s incisive and thoughtful, managing to convey the complexities of human beings with such precision.

In The Man Who Wasn’t There, she explores the interplay between personal and political histories and how these are constantly being rewritten entirely subjectively.

The titular man is Saul Adler, a self-obsessed historian. At the start of the novel Saul is 23 years old and his lover Jennifer Moreau wants to take his picture on the Abbey Road crossing à la The Beatles and millions of subsequent Beatles fans. He is knocked down but only superficially injured. However, there are certain anachronistic details that don’t add up for an event taking place in 1988…

Saul returns home with Jennifer, they sleep together and then break up. He then visits the GDR as part of his PhD research into male tyranny, and becomes romantically entangled with a brother and sister.

“I told him that my mother’s fatal accident and my minor accident had become blurred in my mind and how I was still insatiably angry with the driver who had run her over. I regarded him as her assassin. Time passing had not made my mother’s death less vivid. All the same I had not really been paying attention when I crossed the road.”

The destabilising sense of time collapsing in on itself continues, as Saul knows things about his own future and East Germany’s future that he couldn’t possibly know:

“He did not believe me and neither did I totally believe myself. I had planted three types of tomato in another time. Someone had planted the tomatoes with me in the future soil of East Anglia. His hair is silver and he wears it in a bun on top of his head. His fingernails are bitten down. We are kneeling on the earth, his fingers on my back, massaging my spine while he tells me we should plant the apple trees before it rains and the fields flood.”

In the second half of the novel, Saul is knocked over again on Abbey Road, this time in 2016, and is hospitalised. As he drifts in and out of consciousness he tries to piece together his life from half-remembered events and the people that surround his bedside. There are recurring images and references linking the two timelines but these destabilise as much as they anchor.

“A wind from another time. It broke with it the salt sentence seaweed and oysters. And wolf. A child’s knitted blanket. Folded over the back of a cheerful stop time and place all mixed up. Now. Then. There. Here.”

The Man Who Wasn’t There is a political novel, raising questions about tyranny, patriarchy, state surveillance, internalised surveillance… but never at the expense of its characters. It shows how we cannot live outside of history and how the big issues end up intrinsically bound up in all our lives.

Levy captures with wit and compassion the drive to construct a coherent narrative in order to understand our lives and the world we live in, while showing how impossible such an undertaking is.

“It was true my wings were wounded. It was true I had no idea how to endure being alive and everything that comes with it. Responsibility. Love. Death. Sex. Loneliness. History. I knew he did not hold my tears against me. That was a big thing to know.”

To end, the glorious Nina Simone singing a track from Abbey Road: