A Review, SEREN, by PETER GOOCH

And Who Is The Elusive Seren

One of my sadnesses is that I shall not be able to read this book again for the first time. But being a pragmatic reader, I’ve already dropped it onto my calendar a year out to revisit this 350 pages of pleasure. The potential buyer of this book can look elsewhere than this review for plot points – look to this review to be a commentary on the art of the word.

Gooch has brought the perfect fictional life to light in Fairchild Moss. A man who is so different from most readers that he interests us, has virtues and kinks that we can relate to or adopt vicariously, possesses obsession that will either save him or kill him. Moss’s unabridged voice is unique, his initial boredom killing, his sexual urgency a constant tumescent twitch, his observations and thoughts a little foreign to most of us. I mean, this is a guy who drinks Chartreuse on ice and smokes Chesterfields. There is a fine auxiliary cast, especially Claudine, a black maybe-lesbian bartender, that drive him forward, and check his excesses.

Gooch has also created an enigma in his counter-character Seren, someone who sows art and illusion, destruction and bathos as she goes. With a foul Welsh gutter voice, she never gives any reply the reader expects. Her definition on the page is ambiguous and when we get clues, they are largely oblique or inessential to her mystery. Is she a witch that can give and take deep memory, or just into psychotropics on unsuspecting artists? Seren is a parallel universe that intersects us, sometimes at the death points. We experience her like watching an arresting woman across a square, only to have her disappear (maybe after setting fire to our house).

And Gooch has created a book that is — a redemption story, a love story, a mystery, an artistic closure, a haunting supernatural, and a huge catalogue of objects to desire (even the linen suits got me, and I live in long-sleeve T-shirts).