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Summary
Summary
Toward the end of the World War II, young British artist Kenneth Brill is arrested for painting landscapes near Heathrow Village; the authorities suspect his paintings contain coded information about a new military airfield. Brill protests that he is merely recording a landscape that will soon disappear. Under interrogation a more complicated picture emerges as Brill tells the story of his life--of growing up among the market gardens of The Heath and of his life on the London art scene of the 1930s. But a darker picture also comes to light: dealings with prostitutes and pimps of the Soho underworld, a break-in at a royal residence, and connections with well-known fascist sympathizers at home and abroad. So who is the real Kenneth Brill? The hero of El Alamein who, as a camouflage officer, helped pull off one of the greatest acts of military deception in the history of warfare, or the lover of Italian futurist painter and fascist sympathizer Arturo Somarco? Why was he expelled from the Slade School of Fine Art? And what was he doing at Hillmead, the rural community run by Rufus Quayle, a friend of Hitler himself? Vanishing sees the world through the eyes of one of the forgotten geniuses of modern art, a man whose artistic vision is so piercing he has trouble seeing what is right in front of him.
Author Notes
Gerard Woodward is the author of a number of novels, including Nourishment and an acclaimed trilogy comprising of August (shortlisted for the 2001 Whitbread First Novel Award), I'll Go to Bed at Noon (shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize) and A Curious Earth. He was born in London in 1961 and published several prize-winning collections of poetry before turning to fiction. His collection of poetry, We Were Pedestrians, was shortlisted for the 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.
Reviews (4)
Guardian Review
"God," reflects army camouflage expert Kenneth Brill during the course of this fragmented, antic novel, "is nakedness." It is an unusually simple, direct observation from a figure whose actions and interactions, interior life and dealings with his audiences - the military officer shepherding him through his trial for covert surveillance, his abandoned wife and us, his readers - are characterised by concealment. It carries with it not the force of religious revelation but the yearning for some form of transcendence, for a release from covering up. And from Brill's ambiguous and frequently fraught relationship with disguise, Gerard Woodward has constructed an elaborately teasing novel that ranges from the importance of camouflage in North Africa in the second world war to the land clearances that paved, literally, the way for the construction of Heathrow airport, and from fascist ideology to a hidden homosexual life. The narrative is - unsurprisingly, given its scope of operation - complex and wrong-footing. As the novel opens, Brill has been incarcerated after his painting of landscapes has been interpreted as an act of espionage. He claims to have been documenting the fields and hedgerows of his childhood before they disappear; his accusers suspect him of incorporating into his artworks information about the military airfield under construction. Gradually, it will become apparent that the airfield itself is a kind of lie: what is really being built, to the cost of the families of market gardeners who have lived in the area and worked the land for centuries, is Heathrow airport. The true purpose of Brill's paintings remains a tantalisingly moot subject. Brill embarks on a sort of confession, a setting straight of his whole life, although to Davies, his minder, and to us, rather than to the court. Reprising the theme of nudity that runs through the novel, he thinks of his formal appearance there, and in general, as a tortured piece of self-masking: "When I summoned up the resolve to dress, it was an agonising process. Never before had the act of putting on a set of clothes felt so akin to stepping into someone else's body . . . The very act of getting dressed, it seemed to me, was becoming a task of towering difficulty: more and more I felt the naked self was the true self, and that clothes were a kind of parasite that clung desperately and pathetically to the body, sucking the life out of it." In his informal memoir, he can be more frank. He conjures the world of his boyhood, a comically eccentric saga of a community in which the most valuable form of currency is the manure necessary to enrich the land, whose members double-deal and backstab in order to add to their dung-heaps, and where the countryside is productive rather than picturesque. Through his setting, Woodward establishes a profound link between land and politics. Years later, as a camoufleur travelling through the ransacked territories of Libya and Egypt, Brill is moved beyond words by the Mediterranean gardens left behind by the retreating Italian forces, by the commitment to time and nature that "this Afro-Italian Garden of Eden" suggests. Brill's adventures in North Africa involve him in two decoy operations of extraordinary improbability - both, it turns out, matters of historical fact. He helps to build six miles of dummy railtrack, using empty petrol cans as fake rails in Operation Crusader, and he is part of the team that builds a dummy tank regiment in the buildup to El Alamein. "What seemed to be the most useful role for camouflage in the desert," he remarks, "was not so much the concealment of what existed, but the display of that which didn't exist." Elsewhere, we learn about his life as an art student in prewar London, a period that allows his homosexuality freer expression, but also provokes fear and even revulsion in him. Seeing a naked male form in the life drawing class causes him to lose consciousness or vomit uncontrollably; he heads instead for Soho, where he and his confreres engage prostitutes to sit for them. "She looked terrifying," he says of one, "a concoction of cheap furs and glaring lipstick, a ridiculous pillbox hat and veil perched crookedly on her stiff black hair." Vanishing broadens this idea of costume and concealment to encompass the land. One fabulously outlandish episode sees Brill, his art professor and thoroughly unknown quantity Arturo Somarco break into Buckingham Palace in order to transplant "foreign" grass to its lawn. Somarco has a crackpot theory that by mixing plantlife, world war can be averted, which turns out to be more sinister than it sounds. Another brief detour takes us into an alternative community in the English countryside and gives Nazi theories of the purity of the earth a sideways airing. The novel's breadth occasionally leads to a touch too much narrative anarchy; where, we wonder, can this new strand possibly be leading us, not least because we suspect that Brill - with his endless scrapes and escapes - is a deeply unreliable narrator. But are his evasions a matter of deliberate concealment or a kind of hiding from himself? By the end of the novel, do we actually know a thing about him? Most of the time, we are quite probably being led up the garden path - but it is a very lush garden and an entertainingly wonky path. To order Vanishing for pounds 12.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk. - Alex Clark Caption: Captions: The battle of El Alamein, June 1942 "God," reflects army camouflage expert Kenneth Brill during the course of this fragmented, antic novel, "is nakedness." It is an unusually simple, direct observation from a figure whose actions and interactions, interior life and dealings with his audiences - the military officer shepherding him through his trial for covert surveillance, his abandoned wife and us, his readers - are characterised by concealment. It carries with it not the force of religious revelation but the yearning for some form of transcendence, for a release from covering up. And from Brill's ambiguous and frequently fraught relationship with disguise, Gerard Woodward has constructed an elaborately teasing novel that ranges from the importance of camouflage in North Africa in the second world war to the land clearances that paved, literally, the way for the construction of Heathrow airport, and from fascist ideology to a hidden homosexual life. Brill's adventures in North Africa involve him in two decoy operations of extraordinary improbability - both, it turns out, matters of historical fact. He helps to build six miles of dummy railtrack, using empty petrol cans as fake rails in Operation Crusader, and he is part of the team that builds a dummy tank regiment in the buildup to El Alamein. "What seemed to be the most useful role for camouflage in the desert," he remarks, "was not so much the concealment of what existed, but the display of that which didn't exist." - Alex Clark.
Kirkus Review
Woodward (A Curious Earth, 2008, etc.) extracts black comedy from the bumbling life of Kenneth Brill, a young artist of confused sexuality.All English wit and writerly turn of phrase"a brow ploughed with parallel wrinkles," "little coy nymphs rising from fairy pools"Woodward's first-person narrative begins late in World War II as protagonist Brill relates his life to a military attorney, Davies, an archetypal upper-class twit. Groin-shot and invalided home after a misconstrued homosexual seduction"his spittle was sweetness in my mouth"Lt. Brill's being court-martialed not for that, but for painting landscapes around his family home, Swan's Rest; he's charged with encoding his paintings to inform the Nazis about a planned airfield. Brill's father, a former vaudevillian, grew prosperous selling human waste sludge as fertilizer, but the government now "will brush us aside like human dust." Brill offers childhood memories, then moves on to his studies at the Slade School of Art. There, he ironically faints at the sight of a nude male model"All my artistic life I had wanted nothing more than to tackle the human form"and then is expelled for hiring prostitutes to pose. A Slade instructor, half-Italian, half-Spanish Arturo Somarcoa flamboyant, duplicitous characterattempts seduction. Somarco later helps a drunken and politically ignorant Brill dry out at Hillmead Farm, a Fascist hotbed. Meanwhile, April Card, once Brill's fellow instructor at prestigious Berryman's Academy, "by some semi-conscious manipulation of my deeper internal divisions " ends up pregnant, a state reached after farce-filled sexual misadventures that begin with birdwatching in flagrante delicto. Woodward's settingstime and placeare artfully rendered in England and during Brill's Camouflage Corp North African desert service. An erudite yet melancholy meditation on an artist's life, Woodward's tale, often a comedy of the absurd, is peopled by an abundance of colorful characters. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* As this psychologically astute, WWII-set historical novel opens, Kenneth Brill narrates his story from jail, having been arrested for espionage while painting the heath where he grew up a place that's soon to be a military airfield. The list of Kenneth's errors in judgment, his presence in the wrong place at the wrong time, his suspicious associations, and his questionable motives may eventually convince readers he's the ultimate unreliable narrator. Brill's testimony certainly reveals his sexual confusion, lack of self-confidence, and poor decision making. But is he, as he tells it, a patriot whose camouflage work in North Africa was nothing short of brilliant, or is he a Fascist spy sending the enemy coded messages in paintings? Was his interest in patronizing prostitutes with his art professor debased or artistically genuine? In a style similar tothat of John Irving, poet and novelist Woodward presents a deliciously elegant, leisurely paced, and thought-provoking story that alternately has readers chuckling under their breath and weeping with pity. Reminiscent of Billy Abbott (from Irving's In One Person, 2012) and Calliope Stephanides (from Eugenides' Middlesex, 2002), Kenneth Brill may be a sly chameleon, but he's a fascinating one. Puzzling and absolutely absorbing, this literary character study keeps you guessing.--Baker, Jen Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
FORGET A "LIKABLE" CHARACTER. Forget even mildly appealing. "Vanishing" is a book that sets out to destroy your sympathies for its narrator. This shape-shifting man is a baby and a bully, a liar and a lay-about, a tease and a tormentor. He might even be a spy - unless, of course, he's just woefully, dramatically misunderstood. This is the central tension of Gerard Woodward's complicated and compelling novel about an enigmatic and eccentric artist who serves, during World War II, as part of the camouflage corps - a group of aesthetes employed by the British Army to construct decoy encampments and armaments in North Africa. Who, exactly, is Kenneth Brill? Does he warrant the decidedly poor opinion the world seems to hold of him? Or has he just been maligned and misinterpreted his whole life? Matters of perception underlie many psychological novels - Whom are we to trust? What's the difference between an interior narrative and the external view of things? - but here such questions also operate on a practical level, providing the engine for the question at the center of the plot: Did Lieutenant Brill betray his country? When the book opens, Brill is being held prisoner in a heavily guarded cell, accused of embedding hidden messages within a series of landscape paintings. Rather than an endorsement, his service in the camouflage corps seems to be a mark against him. "What leads a man into a profession like that," asks Davies, the suspicious officer tasked with Brill's defense, "to be so dedicated to the arts of deception?" In a way, the entire book is set up as an exploration of that question. It's far too slippery a work to fit neatly into any genre, but its closest friendly form is the bildungsroman. "Vanishing" is a portrait of an artist as a young man, with a very unreliable artist constructing the narrative. As Brill tries to explain himself to Davies and then to a courtroom, the focus shifts to his childhood in the muddy, flat farmland west of London - distant enough from the metropolis that the city remains something of an Oz to the country children. (A playmate dreams of stowing away in the vegetable carts making their way to London, just to catch a glimpse of the fabled city.) Brill escapes - or is exiled - from this landscape, expelled from his local school after meting out malicious retribution on a playmate turned foe. Several years later, when he winds up at art school in London, an extracurricular dalliance with a group of prostitutes - he was simply using them as models, he insists - gets him kicked out of that institution as well. The book proceeds along this kind of frustrating sine curve: Just as Brill seems on the up and up, he makes a series of poor decisions that send him tumbling down again. It's hard to feel too warmly toward a character who seems so hellbent on his own destruction and yet so reluctant to take any kind of responsibility. But it would be wrong to read this novel for warm fuzzies or redemption. It's an experiment in storytelling, a mystery that unfolds by impressively alternating between three time frames: Along with the "present" drama of Brill's trial and the long flashbacks to his childhood and young adulthood, the story also takes place in the deserts of Egypt and Libya, where we learn a little more about our narrator's contribution to (or betrayal of) the war effort. And it's an amalgam of genres - Romantic poetry, Gothic romance and World War II adventure all inflect the writing - stitched together by the singularity of its narrator's voice. Even if you don't particularly like the tenor of that voice, as the thread that ties up the elements of this ambitious, rangy and unusual novel, it's something to admire. CHLOË SCHAMA, a story editor at The New Republic, is the author of a nonfiction book on a Victorian-era marriage scandal, "Wild Romance."
