Miss Herbert, by Adam Thirlwell
Jonathan Cape, £25
Miss Herbert, Adam Thirlwell’s second book, announces itself as a very particular kind of non-fiction: “a collage of novels and romances in ten languages, on four continents, with maps, portraits, illustrations and a variety of helpful indexes.” If that’s no help, it adds that it is “an inside-out novel—with novelists as characters.” And if that’s no help, well, that’s partly the point. Because Miss Herbert is a wilfully, profoundly idiosyncratic book about the slippery edges of language, and what happens when someone tries to do something new with the novel.
As its self-presentations suggest, Miss Herbert is also chillingly whimsical. Like Thirlwell’s 2003 debut novel, Politics, its leaps of fancy are as precisely calibrated as party conference ovations, and its asides armour-plated by pre-emptive confession (”No, I should not be too lyrical”). Thirlwell is not an author to be bested, or second-guessed, by his readers. As he patiently explains, his title is itself an emblem, being the name of the English governess to Gustave Flaubert’s niece. While Flaubert was finishing writing Madame Bovary, Miss Herbert translated it into English, only for her translation to vanish for ever. Here, then, is Thirlwell’s rhapsody upon a Platonic examplar of “the vital art of translation: the art by which its twin art of the novel is preserved, but which itself is often lost, or ignored”—a three-course meal of unconsidered trifles.
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