J. M. Ledgard's "Submergence'

J. M. Ledgard is a Scots writer in his mid-40s with a Hemingwayesque taste for adventure. He has worked, both as a journalist and an expert consultant, in some of the world's nastier places, including East Africa and Afghanistan. He's known jihadists up close, and seen famine at work. He also has an intense fascination with the sea, our original home and perhaps— depending on the fate of the continents, or human folly— our final destination.

All of this has gone into his second novel, Submergence, a work that unfolds not so much in terms of plot as metaphor, and that offers not resolution but crystallization, like a slowly exposed photograph that yields an unexpected image.

What's a novel these days, anyway? None too easy to say. In traditional terms, it's an extended fiction that involves characters who interact in a story that proceeds in a temporal sequence that begins somewhere and ends with something. Good luck finding that, except in the romance or mystery section.

W. G. Sebald, the German author to whom Ledgard has been compared, rejected the term "novel" entirely, calling his works simply prose fictions. That doesn't commit you to much. In Sebald's case, "prose" is as far as you can go, since much of his work is based on actual persons, with or without their real names.

"'Stuff happens'

This development was inevitable. What the age of Dickens understood as character was a bundle of more or less stable psychic and behavioral qualities imputed to a particular individual. Dostoevsky fatally undermined that idea, and Freud blew it sky-high. In the modern novel, as Donald Rumsfeld would put it, stuff happens. Why and to whom are don't-ask questions.

Ledgard offers us two protagonists who might best be described as nodes of consciousness. They have names— James More, Danielle Flinders— they have occupations and backgrounds (More is described as a descendant of Sir Thomas More, the author of Utopia and the martyr of Henry VIII), and work that intensely engages them. They are also lovers, although for most of the book they're separated by thousand miles and even more by circumstance.

Danielle— Danny— is a brilliant biomathematician and oceanographer, whose interest, Ledgard tells us, is "to understand the pullulating life in the dark [i.e., undersea] parts of the planet at a time when, up above, mankind was itself becoming a swarm." The year is 2012— that is, our present one, but in fact the slightly distant future from the standpoint of Ledgard's book, which was published in 2011 and presumably written in the few years before that.

Captive spy

What does it mean to situate oneself in a near but not-yet lived time? The odds are that tomorrow will be very much like today, but the odds are not perfect: Tomorrow one could have a stroke, or be seated in a plane with a bomb aboard, or be confronted with a general apocalypse. Somehow, Ledgard lets us know, the odds have grown worse— perhaps only fractionally but, as with climate change, approaching the unseen tipping point where disaster begins.

Disaster has certainly come for James. Notionally, he works as a water engineer for a development agency, assisting thirsty Third World countries. In fact, he's a counter-intelligence agent, or in less fancy parlance a spy. The thirstiest countries, as it seems, export the most abundant quantities of terror, and James's job— his real one— is to keep that particular commodity off market.

As the book begins, he's the prisoner of a Somali gang that has kidnapped him without knowing his real identity (which would mean instant death) and is holding him as a kind of asset, although what value he might have and for whom they do not know. His captors don't speak his languages, nor he theirs. He isn't anything as definite as a hostage, but simply a stored parcel.

There's no way for him to tell if anyone is looking for him or, apart from Danny, has even noticed him missing. People do disappear; people are, or become, expendable.

Tipping point

Under certain circumstances, it's better all around if someone like James is dead. His captors would no longer have to feed him. His superiors would no longer have to account for him. His lover would no longer need to remember him.

James hasn't reached quite reached that point yet (Danny does think of him, but they are modern lovers, each always jetting off somewhere else), but there is no telling where this particular tipping point lies. James may really be dead already, in the sense that there is no plausible scenario in which he can emerge from his Limbo alive.

Ledgard is very good at the sheer helplessness of a captivity for nothing. James tries to keep his mind focused, to use the few inscrutable coordinates available to him, to read his captors' moods and, without sacrificing more of his dignity than he can afford, to humanize himself for them. It's in every way a losing proposition, even if the only one available to him.

Talking and killing

James's point of view is not, however, the only one. Among the ranks of illiterate and even psychotic fighters is an Afghan commander, Yusuf, who spares James's life without quite knowing why, even though he understands it's valueless to him and even, vaguely, an impediment to his cause. A doctor, Aziz, himself a victim of torture, tends James's wounds with delicate hands.

In another world, dialogue and perhaps even mutual acknowledgment might be possible with these men, but not here in the interzone of jihad, where justice is pitiless and men are abstract. Here, you can talk to a man one moment and kill him the next, for good reason or bad or, more likely, none at all.

And yet James himself is no innocent, no tourist or aid worker caught unawares, but a man who represents certain state interests and is presumably prepared to carry out certain actions. He is the descendant of Thomas More, a martyr to conscience and a saint of the Catholic Church, but a man who in his day executed heretics too.

Beneath the Atlantic

As James is dragged deeper into the country by his captors, themselves increasingly desperate (and therefore dangerous), Danny prepares for a dive to the abyssal deep of the Atlantic off Greenland, where she will inspect the teeming life around thermal vents— or, if her bathysphere fails her, die in an instant as her lungs collapse. The life forms here are the oldest and hardiest on earth, and it is time, she reckons, for humans to learn survival arts as they destroy their own biological environment.

Danny's interest, too, is abstract in its way, for knowledge, like justice, has an essential impersonality.

Both she and James, then, approach their own heart of darkness as the novel moves to its sudden climax— a resolution less of story than of metaphor, like a loosely knit pattern drawn taut by a sudden twist. To submerge is, perhaps, to learn; but it is also to face a stark choice: to rise or die.

Submergence is not a very long book, but it is one that rewards, not to say compels, slow reading. It is like watching a diamond assemble itself, unhurriedly but under steady pressure, until its facets all shine at once.