To the Wedding

"Of his novels, it’s probably my favourite. I find bits of Pig Earth and A Fortunate Man very moving, but I find To The Wedding moved me the most, which isn’t something you can always account for in particularly critical terms. To explain it, it’s an Aids novel. It’s from 1994. I get the impression that it grows out of his engagement with Susan Sontag . They had been in correspondence a lot and shaped each others’ writing on photography. She published AIDS and Its Metaphors in 1989. At that time it was a particularly pressing subject. Berger began writing it, and as he was writing a member of his family was diagnosed as HIV-positive and he ended up caring for them, so he gained a different perspective. It’s a development of this almost Joyce-like shadow-self that’s in a lot of Berger’s novels, called “Jean”. In his first novel, A Painter of our Time , there’s an art-critic character called John, who both is and isn’t Berger. He develops into Jean in this novel. Jean in To the Wedding rides a motorbike, as John does. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s about central Europe, and also about tamata : Greek charms which correspond to an ailment in a particular part of the body. With Aids, what kind of charm would work? It’s so unplaceable. It becomes a very powerful way of expressing that. It brings out this materiality that’s important in a lot of Berger’s work. The first novel A Painter of our Time is abut discovering a diary, a more recent book Bento’s Sketchbook is about discovering a sketchbook. I think it’s part of having a history as an art-critic, or as a painter, this interest in the material object and how it relates to the literary object. Two of the shorter things that aren’t in Portraits that I think are important are the Booker speech, and something he wrote about Joyce, for Bloomsday more recently. He says one of the things he learnt from Joyce is that to separate fact from fiction is to stay on dry land and never put out to sea. In all of his work he is actively trying to resist those separations. I think it is often like A Fortunate Man . There is a factual raw material that goes in, but it gets treated in this fictional way that brings it closer to the truth, something that’s closer to the experience."