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What is the connection between David Icke and Christopher Meredith? They both think they are God. In Sidereal Time God is a boring author, and Meredith aspires to fictive godhead. The fact that he succeeds in putting off the miracle of making such a boring story so interesting is testament to his considerable literary skill. Sarah, the central female character, reflects that, ‘God doesn’t know how to select the significant detail. You just get the lot. All the crap. The hairgel and the beany aftersmell of school dinners and the pinkish, white-turning light that fails to signify anything.’ In his third novel, he attempts to nick God’s narrative technique. Leaving the reader, as in life, to sift the grain from the chaff, to extract the significant moments from the ooze of the hairgel and beans, the mire of extraneous detail so minutely and perceptively observed by Meredith.
Sidereal Time charts a working week in the life (and indeed a life in the week) of a harassed English teacher, Sarah, and lax sixth-former, Steve. There is no plot to speak of. In post-industrial South Wales God’s novel (and hence Meredith’s) is not a cocaine-fuelled thriller peopled with high-flying lawyers and Hollywood glamour-pusses. If you want that sort of thing, buy an airport blockbuster. Nothing much happens. Which is, of course, the point. The phone rings in the staffroom, interrupting a conversation between Sarah and Peter, her head of department. The person to whom the caller wishes to speak is not there. Sarah reflects, ‘If this was a well made scene the phone would have meant something, but it didn’t.’ Ironically, a fictional character makes the distinction between life and art (this relationship being one of the major concerns of the novel). Similarly, Sarah muses on a coincidence of ages: ‘Seventeen. Thirty five. Seventy. Ought to mean something, but it doesn’t. A pattern instead. A shape made in time, like a piece of music.’ Like Meredith’s novel. In a way, the whole novel is its own manifesto.
In a typically self-reflexive manner, whilst browsing, Steve’s eye fixes on two titles whose subjects encompass the double milieux of the novel, a combination of the respective contemporary and medieval worlds of Meredith’s previous novels, Shifts and Griffri: ‘And there, next to an unpromising volume about industrial decline in South Wales, was a thin book by Fred Hoyle called Nicolaus Copernicus.’ Steve is fascinated by Copernicus, implicitly identifying with the misunderstood genius who could see the bigger picture (hence the title, which refers to the measurement of time according to the passage of the stars – I confess, I had to look it up). Meredith gives us a series of interleaving narratives, juxtaposing Copernicus’s sixteenth-century world with Steve’s more prosaic existence. It becomes apparent that Copernicus’s tale is Steve’s creation (the narrative flow is interrupted by such interjections as ‘Two surmiseds. Oo, bad’ and ‘Yes. He grasped the. The. Something. Initiative. Delivered the. Was, if you like, a kind of midwife at the birth of. Bum. He wielded the forceps of destiny. Fuck. It’s gone all Terry Pratchett.’): thus, we have a story within a story. A novel about writing which questions conceptions of time and history. Very postmodern. Which makes a change in Wales. Sideral Time is an acutely observed philosophical novel which, despite being purposely mundane in terms of plot, manages to be both vital and compelling.
Claire Powell
It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgement should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.
Gellir defnyddio’r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com, trwy ganiatâd Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru.
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