Leigh Kennedy

Some novels spend a very long time on my shelves before suddenly the moment is exactly right for me to read them: they're novels I know are going to offer me a marvelous experience, and I don't want to run the risk of missing out on a single scintilla of that experience through launching myself upon the voyage when the tides aren't quite right, or something. Choose your own cliche: you know what I mean. So for years the books sit there, and on occasion I gaze at them with a loving eye -- sometimes I even pull them down off the shelf and fondle them before putting them back again -- until finally, one day . . .

I bought Saint Hiroshima in the late 1980s, quite probably (shamefaced confession) as a remainder; I see that Leigh kindly signed it to me in '97, but the book was a longstanding possession by then. The other day, soon after I'd finished reading Brian Hall's The Saskiad and was wondering what next to read, I caught sight of the green spine and the old Bloomsbury logo out of the corner of my eye and, bang!, the book was in my hand. After waiting two decades, I read it in a day.

That last sentence tells you quite a lot about how good a book Saint Hiroshima is. It gains its title from an opening sequence, a childhood experience of small-town Katie Doheney: the same day that she's the close-up witness of a horrific traffic accident she hears (yes, hears, because the installer's having difficulty getting the picture to stabilize) a tv programme about the Hiroshima bombing, and the two events become conflated in her mind. Thereafter she has a phobia about The Bomb; the woman who died in the traffic accident, and whose smashed-up body came crashing down right in front of Katie's aghast eyes, becomes a personal archetype, Saint Hiroshima.

The other main protagonist is Phil Benson, a phenomenally talented musician. The two of them are pulled together as if by a force of nature during their adolescence and become teen sweethearts; for the rest of the book they succeed, through happenstance, through lack of self-faith and/or ambition, through folly and through a sort of reverse serendipity, in drifting inexorably further and further apart -- this even when a horrifically cruel trick played on them crams them together for a couple of weeks in a cramped bomb shelter, believing the nuclear holocaust has come. For a long time, though not lovers, they remain each the most important person in the other's life, but by the novel's close I was reminded of that merciless Leonard Cohen throwaway line at the end of his account of a doomed love affair: "I remember you well in the Chelsea Hotel. That's all. I don't even think of you that often." Katie and Phil have become, as it were, "oh, just someone I used to know".

The book has a lot more plot than I'm indicating above; but really it's a novel that's almost less concerned with plot than it is about tale-telling -- and the tale-telling is an absolute joy. Saint Hiroshima was well worth the wait.
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