Love, death and redemption a winning combination

WHEN, in 2009, Simon Van Booy’s highly acclaimed second collection, Love Begins In Winter, won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, a major new talent was announced to the world. Once you become attuned to the wistful elegance of his prose, there can be no escape. A creator of masterful set pieces, he concerns himself not only with the vagaries and metaphysics of love, but also with the leftover lives of those people who live beyond the edges and the small, good things which help them endure. Few writers of the current generation weave such snares with words.

Now, for the first time, Mr Van Booy has expanded his grand humanistic vision to novel length. Everything Beautiful Began After, tackles the big themes of love, death and redemption, and mines beauty and truth where neither might rightfully seem to exist.

The story, which unfurls itself slowly, in a scorched, crumbling and gorgeously rendered Athens, centres on three disparate souls young in age, but old in every other way imaginable. Rebecca is a French painter determinedly collating work for a possible Parisian exhibition. George, an American expert in ancient languages, is lustily cultivating a seriously self-destructive alcoholic tendency. They meet and he falls headlong into one-sided adoration. Then a British archaeologist named Henry appears and the miraculous and ultimately tragic ménage à trois is set in place.

But to everything there is a reason: for this author, life is a kind of magic, and all coincidences are fateful. Each of these characters is lost, and running from past burdens too cumbrous to bear. Their lives intertwine with sinuous grace, and there is solace to be found in friendship, in love, in whatever morsels of delight a city as eternal as this can offer. It is an idyll defined by its imperfections and insecurities, but perhaps more than anything else by need, and it swells and builds as the novel’s first act reaches a stately crescendo, then ruptures suddenly, to devastating effect.

The novel is given complexity by the fully achieved nature of its characters. Wallowing in Greece’s scarred but illustrious past, they are products of what has gone before.

Also worthy of mention is the ambition and bravery of Mr Van Booy’s prose style. Delicate and empathetic, arguably beyond contemporary compare, shadowed by its own romance and carrying with it all the textures of fine lyric poetry, it feels nothing less than the language of love. Then, an explosion of pain launches us into the novel’s second part, and everything changes. The seamlessly shifting third-person narrative leaps to a daring second-person point of view. This a risk that could, in less gifted hands, jar and lose its way to gimmickry, but here it seems somehow perfect for the story needing to be told. If there is manipulation here, then it serves the good cause of art, perhaps even enlightenment.

This is surely the most moving and heartfelt debut novel of the year. Romantics everywhere will treasure this lingering glimpse of a talent nearing fullest bloom.