Book Report: Afternoon of a Faun

21. James Lasdun, Afternoon of a Faun (2019) (10/12/19)

This brief novel belongs to the #MeToo movement, despite being written by a man. It is at heart a subtle, conflicted exploration of allegations of a rape perpetrated some forty or more years before, by a man, Marco Rosedale, who was in the process of rising to a level of some prominence as a journalist—and who also happens to be the son of a powerful British lawyer, so from privilege. The male narrator, who goes unnamed, is an old friend of Marco's, and happens also to know the accuser, Julia Gault, from much earlier days in England, where she was mentored by his mother and where he had an adolescent crush on her, though he hasn't seen her in many years. The two men are  now ex-pats living in New York, and they see each other with some regularity.

The accusation comes in a memoir-manuscript penned by Julia, who has slipped into obscurity but at the time of the event was a junior assistant to Marco. He is contacted by a magazine saying that they wish to publish an excerpt. He fights back, saying (a) that it was certainly not rape (although both parties were intoxicated and he doesn't remember exactly what happened) and (b) that Julia has a skeleton or two in her own closet.

All of this is . . . true. But it's up to the narrator to juggle unprovable facts with loyalties, power structures, memories, our human need to make sense of things by telling stories (and to win). As he listens first to Marco, then to Julia, he finds himself doubting, trying to rectify both sides, weaving and then unweaving webs of justification and understanding—but always with the (unreasonable) expectation that an "unalterable truth" will win out.

The book's title comes from Mallarmé's poem L'après-midi d'un faune, referencing not the lecherous and worldly satyrs of Greek mythology, but the more innocent, playful fauns, just out to have some fun—a designation assigned to Marco when he was a university student, by a tutor with whom he had a brief affair. It is, perhaps, a characterization he chose to internalize, according him eternal innocence.

The story's dénouement (which plays out with a twist or two) takes place against the Clinton-Trump debates of 2016. The book ends as follows, which I take as a metaphorical truth framing the preceding story:

 "We're going to win. Trust me. We're going to win big," [said Marco].
 "I know," I said.
 That at least was something we still had in common. I was as confident as he was in the Democratic candidate's imminent victory. She'd just reminded the audience of de Tocqueville's old maxim, "America is great because she is good," and it seemed to me still just about valid. Her opponent had faltered visibly in the interim. He was no longer swaggering so much as blustering—flailing even. Swaying on his thick legs, he gave the impression of some elephantine statue lassoed in ropes and about to come crashing down. The nightmarish possibility of his presidency was slipping, mercifully, into the realm of bullets dodged, disasters averted. Some day no doubt novelists would write dystopian alternate histories in which he won, but it was becoming clear, if one had any doubts, that in the real world rationality and basic decency were going to prevail, as they usually did, and that the arc of actual history was going to continue bending, in its imperfect way, toward justice.
 It was some consolation, I supposed.

And as we all know, things did not work out quite in that fashion. Stories can twist and turn, power fields can warp the truth. Strange things can happen, even while we're looking right at what we take to be "reality."

This is a beautiful exploration of what we assume to be true, of our negotiations with ourselves and others, of the social construction of reality, of power relations. 

(There is more to the background of this book in a 2013 memoir and 2002 novel by Lasdun, as described for example in this New Republic article. )