Damage

(of those we love, of those we hurt)

The book:

Damage by Josephine Hart, published in 1991. Made into an iconic movie by Louis Malle starring Jeremy Irons and Juliette Binoche. A lesser series called  Obsession, based on the book, was released this year on Netflix.

Why it is essential reading:

Damage is a massively controversial book, because of its theme of a man having an affair with his son’s fiancée. But beyond its notoriety is its gorgeousnesses. In 154 pages of spare prose, there is an intense distillation of love, lust and obsession. Hart is surgical in her examination of what it means to love furtively, and asks a basic question - is filling a hole in a soul good enough reason to face the inevitable and damning consequences?

The Longer Read: (1349 words. 5 minutes reading.)

Obsessive love has rarely found a more gnarled home. Damage. A story subsumed within it’s heartbreaking moral questions, it’s ethical drift, and it’s tale of how love not only changes us, but makes us transgressive because of who we love.

Here’s the one-sentence trauma at the heart of Damage -

A crusty political heavyweight falls in love with his son’s fiancée, and they embark into a delirious affair - and there are consequences .

The boundaries of the story just cannot reveal how the novel pushes the boundaries. For what the theme does is to free author Josephine Hart to examine love from its almost ecclesiastic heights right down to its hairiest version. Hart writes about love with the hand of a surgeon, but one who cares for the organ and not necessarily the patient.

Early on in the novel, she sets the tone of what is to follow -

“There is an internal landscape, a geography of the soul; we search for its outlines all our lives.

Those who are lucky enough to find it, ease like water over a stone, on to its fluid contours, and are home.

Some find it in the place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert. There are those born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city.

For some, the search is for the imprint of another; a child or a mother, a grandfather or a brother, a lover, a husband, a wife, or a foe.

We may go through our lives happy or unhappy, successful or unfulfilled, loved or unloved, without ever standing cold with the shock of recognition, without ever feeling the agony as the twisted iron in our soul unlocks itself, and we slip at last into place.”

Stephen then is a man acutely conscious of the hole in his soul, with no hope of ever getting it filled.  Till someone does appear. It is a perversion of the universe’s design that it happens to be his son Martyn’s lover - Anna. And like kindred souls Stephen and Anna recognise each other the way damaged people so often do. And in an instant, they know their lives would be changed irrevocably. “She was the split-second experience that changes everything; the car smash; the letter we shouldn’t have opened; the lump in the breast or groin; the blinding flash. On my well-ordered stage-set the lights were up, and maybe at last I was waiting in the wings.”

All photographs from the film ‘Damage’

The concomitant tragedy of this ancient earthly recognition was that all defences and pretences and fetters of civilisation fall by the wayside. And what emerges is the primordial recognition of need and the urgent need to fulfil it. “I had opened a door to a secret vault. Its treasures were immense. Its price would be terrible. I knew that all the defences I had built so carefully — wife, children, home, vocation — were ramparts built on sand. With no knowledge of any other path I had made my journey through the years, seeking and clinging to landmarks of normality.”

Hart is a dour writer. Her prose is singularly unadorned. But in its bareness she examines the nature of obsession, lust and love with unerring acuity. In paragraph after paragraph, in page after another, she delineates the affair and its effect on the lovers and how the circumstances spin out - when they can control it, and when they can’t. The effect - time and again - is of someone walking into the room as one stands naked in front of the mirror with one’s blemishes fully exposed.

Whilst the continuance of an affair can be compulsive, it’s effects on everybody around is a matter of heartbreaking fact. It has the repercussion of destroying worlds, of rendering irredeemable damage. But maybe it’s most deleterious consequence is on the smashing of trust, possibly as a lifelong fact.

Does obsession wither with time? Is lust its own entity or is it love masquerading as manifestation? Does love’s redemptive power have the ability to paper over its compulsion to be blinded to everything else?

The anchor of any love affair is it’s need.

Hart says the start points of these is often a recognition of the yawning yearning lying at the heart of our ordinary existence and our desperate attempt to get out of its soul-sapping ordinariness and to make something meaningful out of our very existence on earth, to be recognised and understood, with bestial clarity and unapologetic acceptance, to be not judged and accepted with all the breakage and ruin inside. Even though one is fully aware that affairs WILL find exposure, that they WILL find revelation, that they WILL hurt people we care for.

Anna once tells Stephen ‘Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.’’ The concomitant tragedy is that the equation does not take into account the damage it does to the ones whose lives are intimately intertwined aligned with theirs. The story then is often who survives an affair - the perpetrators or the affected. For Stephen the choice was clear -

‘What lies are impossible? What trust is so precious? What responsibility is so great that it could deny this single chance in eternity to exist? Alas for me, and for all who knew me, the answer was … none.

To be brought into being by another, as I was by Anna, leads to strange, unthought-of needs. Breathing became more difficult without her. I literally felt I was being born. And because birth is always violent, I never looked for, nor ever found, gentleness.’

Hart is ruthless in delineating the inherent hypocrisy at the heart of an affair, as the parallel lives continue their trajectories.

‘And so we lay in bed. A man whose eyes could deceive a wife of nearly thirty years, and a wife who after nearly thirty years could be so deceived. Our practised movements were as pleasant as an old remembered song of long ago. But even as I surrendered to those final shudders that are all and nothing, it was, I knew, a final defeat for Ingrid in a battle she did not know she waged. And it was a triumph for Anna, who had not even fought.

I cannot and will not do this again. That was my last thought as Ingrid drifted dreamily to sleep in my arms.’ With the same clarity, Stephen says “To my shame, Ingrid’s concern for me constantly triumphed over her desire to punish me.”

Hart makes the reader shudder. She writes for the skeleton in him. She time and again pulls his attention out towards the mirror, as if to say - look there, look. So you love her? Well, what about this?  This is the stark you. Think again - are you loveable at all? Don’t lie to yourself.  At one point, Hart says ‘A concealed truth, that’s all a lie is.’ Truer words were not said.

In a strange way, Damage reminded me of another classic - Albert Camus’ The Fall - which left me equally enervated and drained. Truths often do. Both books excavated the heart, mind and soul of our choices and the inherent centripetal forces embedded in them. Both books will confront the reader doggedly until he will have to face the truths of what he is truly made of.

And that is the reason why this book becomes the one you have to read, and the very reason you might decide not to.

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