John Berger, "G." (1972)

The 1972 Booker Prize winner is hardly as accessible as more recent recipients, such as Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang (based on the Jerilderie Letter) and DBC Pierre’s Vernon God Little. This raises questions over a possible commercialisation of the award since the year of Whitlam’s election, when Berger experimented with form and content to produce a work that is as provocative as it is frustrating.

The story’s ‘central protagonist’ is not given a name, just ‘G.’ for ‘convenience’: evocative of Kafka’s ‘K.’? It’s true that neither character is, for unique reasons, at home in the world he must inhabit, though I doubt the link is any less fragile than that.

We are introduced to G. before he is born, and we bear witness to particular, seemingly random, episodes in his life. His story is not merely told (in the absent third-person); it is told by someone, to us. Berger here is cognisant of the falsity in assuming an apparently objective position in telling a story, though whether the narrator’s voice is his own, or another unnamed, unknown character, is unclear. It is at once immaterial and important.

Born as the nineteenth century was beginning to consider drawing to a close, G. is the bastard son of an Italian merchant and an English divorcee. His illegitimacy doesn’t seem to affect his social standing, but perhaps in some way informs his increasingly bizarre emphases on sexual conquest, which he may or may not mistake for love. Whether he’s a great lover or an ammoral deviant (you’ll no doubt fall somewhere between the two extremes, if you choose to judge at all) will depend on your own prejudices, and on which of Berger’s hints you choose to privilege.

The backdrop to G.’s life is a period of excessive radicalism in Italian society, whose revolutionary sentiments drew blood more than once. We visit the Boers in South Africa, and are presented with contextual analyses of the conflicts in the Balkans and the events that triggered the so-called Great War.

Interspersed with the narrative are constant, interruptive asides from Berger’s narrator, who imparts on us his perceptive knowledge of the world. These asides read something like excerpts from a hundred humanities papers, and will please as many readers as they repel.

Surely original, Berger’s G. is a complex masterpiece, written by an art critic motivated by a desire to understand his world.