Customer Reviews

To Heaven By Water

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I should confess to being a bit of a fan of Cartwright's and particularly of his last novel, the Song Before it is Sung. But while that was an audacious historical novel set around 30s Oxford and the Stauffenberg plot, a glance at the back cover of his new book showed a far less ambitious novel fixated on domestic London life. I wasn't sure what to expect...

But in a way, it's the everyday setting that makes it all the greater an achievement. A smaller canvas, maybe, but there are no tricks and conceits to carry the writing along - it has to survive line by line without dramatic historical events to help it on its way. And Cartwright is masterful at it. He is one of those writers whom one reads while constantly thinking aloud to oneself: how can he know this about people - about relationships - about life? How can he be so perceptive? There's a wisdom to the writing, often manifested in a beautiful and sometimes deceptively simple turn of phrase, that gets to immediately to the point: be it describing Gordon Brown perfectly in three words, or explaining the guilt one might feel after the death of a loved one. It seems to me the most emotionally charged of his novels and it also includes, which i wasn't expecting, some jaw-droppingly dramatic moments which really keep the pages turning.

In summary, a wonderful book that I will treasure.

Set in inner London this marvelously erudite contemporary novel is about the upper-middle class Cross family and how they manage to tackle life with its infinite numbers of expressions, beliefs and delusions. Set against the backdrop of a newly appointed Prime Minister Gordon Brown, "who seems to be like something discovered when a glacier moves," Cartwright's new and dynamic London is pulsating with energy and a sort of fluid and hip sexuality. Certainly retired television presenter David Cross is in thrall to it, just as comfortable wandering the streets of Soho as he is living in the family home in Camden. Ed, David's son thinks his father is encumbered with his past, "a Bactrian camel, staggering along laden with all sorts of goods nobody needs or wants anymore." For David, however this is a time of renewal. His wife Nancy, only recently passed on from cancer, has enabled David to begin a new lease of life. Fanatically training at the local gym, he's become super thin and now sports trendy African bangles his brother has sent him from Africa. In his own mind he is more himself than he has been for nearly forty years. One night at the Royal ballet with Ed and his daughter-in-law Rosalie, he sees the gorgeous vision of Darcey Bussell in her farewell performance, the ballerina turning David trance-like. It is this vision that frames David`s emotional state and unfurls many of the assumptions that he has made about his marriage to Nancy and about his children.

In alternative chapters Cartwright unfurls the desires, needs and insecurities of David, Ed, Rosalie and David's daughter the twenty-six year old Lucy who a specialist in roman coinage who currently feels wary and abandoned and worries about being alone and isolated after breaking up her boyfriend Josh, with his penchant towards abusive behaviour. Rosalie, an ex-ballet dancer, almost "Darcy Bussell en pointe" in her looks is a woman who is gravity defying, desperate to become pregnant. Most shockingly, Ed refuses to accept the reality of his situation. While Rosalie has a very clear idea of how her life should proceed, constricting the poor Ed feels constricted, falling into a sexy affair with Alice, a girl from his office. Alice meet for quick drink. Buoyed by all of the sexual possibilities, sex with Alice is uncomplicated and fun, while sex with Rosalie has become a sort of marital rite, even an obligation.

Meanwhile, David experiences a familiar comfort, desperate to spend his remaining years in some way free of the material. He gives both his son and daughter a declaration of unequivocal love. Thus far in his life, he has successfully been comforted with his past, although his wife Nancy had an affair, she was more than willing to give him and her children support, to protect them all from the evils of the world. The generational wheel turns very quickly, even as the author includes a back-story of David's recollection of life in 1966 where he was never as happy as that summer in Rome and his friendship with Richard Burton "his eyes glistening with anguish." Along with his best friend Adam, this was the summer that formed their lives, where he too would be a professional actor and live in a vivid charged world. But everything gets tangled up in his doomed affair with a young blonde-headed Jenni who "attaches to him with the sensuous, slightly sinister insistence of a python."

But life is never as ordered as we would like. Certainly to David, the vortex effect of mortality all seems arbitrary and unfathomable. Meanwhile, the poor Rosalie suffers in silence, her childlessness almost biblical to her, with Ed aching to free himself the shackles of IVF, "this little place with its excruciatingly limited horizons and its banality." Then there's Lucy who is concerned that her father is going to sell their family home in Camden which she still thinks of the house as home. Lucy feels she should have been consulted before it was sold and sees this as a betrayal by her father. All have a manic edge an manic edge to their lives and a hint of desperation and all are craving the human texture, and are all part of its rich tapestry.

Then the revelations and the small, intimate betrayals come thick and fast and their lives are at once accelerated into chaos, but Cartwright handles it all with literary panache and in a characteristically British way, demonstrating a retributive cost. Full of meaningless provocations and loaded exchanges, these people are smart and educated and are quick to judge others. Besides there differences, there's this constant sense the Cross family are of one flesh with a shared understanding. The petty judgments and surprising treacheries thrust this novel forward to its conclusion and the family inevitably close rank against the mendacity of the outside world. The author's beloved London plays it's own part, a city layered in a kind of savvy and irony and tradition, and also that of a changing England with its immigration, multiculturalism and its blurred class distinctions. This novel abounds with power and zest, the Cross family's life and David's own choices deeply reflective of Cartwright's own rigorously intellectual debate on the struggles of modern life and the search for some sort of spiritual enlightenment in the contemporary age. Mike Leonard September 09.

This book was interesting for it's family dynamics and friendship relationships. There was a lot of swearing and "bad" language that seemed unnecessary in the context of the story. The part that takes place in Africa is interesting, but a bit disjointed. Altogether, I really didn't enjoy this book very much.

Justin Cartwright isn't what you might call a limited writer stylistically, or an author with nothing to say. Two of his books have been shortlisted (IN EVERY FACE I MEETfor the Booker Prize, WHITE LIGHTNING for the Whitbread Novel Award), and one, LEADING THE CHEERS, won the Whitbread in 1999. But his latest novel, TO HEAVEN BY WATER, is a bit of a slow read --- not because it's poorly written or uninteresting, but because Cartwright has taken a fairly meditative subject matter (the death of a spouse) and has, well, meditated on it...for 300 pages.

TO HEAVEN BY WATER's premise is a simple one. David Cross is a retired news anchor for London's Global Television's Sunrise Report. His wife, Nancy, has just recently passed away (offstage) after a losing battle with cancer, and his kids --- Ed, a lawyer whose marriage is crumbling because he and his wife, Rosalie, can't get pregnant, and Lucy, an adrift 26-year-old cataloguer of ancient coins who's still flitting around with the wrong men --- think he's not dealing with it properly. As for David? That's a different story: "To his own mind he is more himself than he has been for nearly forty years...He is not unhappy." Thus, the majority of the book consists of scenes where Ed and Lucy debate whether or not their father is in denial or coping correctly, while David merely goes on with his life as if something is a bit different but he can't quite summon up enough energy to care.

So nothing really happens, per se. There's no flashy writing, no dramatic moments where characters rant and rage, no twists and turns where the reader is left deliciously mystified. But there's certainly a lot to think about as the characters meander through their fairly routine routines. For one, Cartwright allows his characters --- mostly David and his chums (although Ed dips into the nostalgia tank as well) --- to wax on about what it means to get older. There's a lot of talk about "old times" and "the way things were," and how things could've been different if only other choices were made. Perhaps it's a true reflection of what happens as we age, but Cartwright's characters seem to wallow in it.

There's also a certain resigned fatalism to Cartwright's characters' take on courtship and marriage --- that a partnership is a worthwhile venture to enter into, but trust, love and loyalty are suspiciously absent from the deal. Lucy's petering relationship with her obsessive, deadbeat boyfriend is unmistakably toxic ("She tries to forget that he is fantastically stupid despite his misleading good looks, and that he is sexually disturbed, chronically promiscuous and vicious when drunk."), and Ed's perception of marriage is but a poor substitute for what it should be ("Ed thinks --- he has intimations already --- that marriage can impose a sort of heaviness that never lifts, a sort of muting of the senses..."). He acts like a wounded child, temporarily placated by his affair with Alice (a trainee at his law firm who he's "shagging"), but caught off guard by Rosalie's silence (she never admits to him that she knows about his infidelity, but instead sleeps with his father [gasp!]). As for David, he never got over the affair his wife had years earlier, and instead of confronting her about it, he merely distanced himself until there was nothing really left.

But beyond relationships, marriage, loss, freedom from obligations, and all the rest, Cartwright paints a picture of a fairly ordinary family --- one with its intricacies and banalities that, in the end, are no different from any other family's. (What's that you say, Tolstoy?) "That's what families are for, to remind you of what you really are," Ed says to David in one of their heart-to-hearts. Sure, that's one way to see it. Or, from David: "I think that the real you, the one the family sees, is actually the you that suits them. But there's no point in fighting it because it's unavoidable." These ideas are either side of the same coin --- both true, depending on how you look at it.

In the end, "people's lives, when you get to know them well, are infinitely more complex than you could ever have imagined." Yes. But as illustrated in TO HEAVEN BY WATER, they're also incredibly simple.

--- Reviewed by Alexis Burling

From my perspective at age 75, this effort is pretty good enough. He writes well, and the thoughts, observations and dialog of the characters seems quite appropriate and well stated. However, I had to read a few reviews online to help me figure out the cast of characters and the settings to give me enough context, history and identification of characters to continue on through the book.

Justin Cartwright is an unusually self-assured writer. In many respects his book, To Heaven By Water, is rather high-brow, the title lifted from James Joyce's Ulysses. Rather old-fashioned too with a rant in the closing pages from one of the characters explaining that we, the readers, are now like monks in the dark ages, keeping alive our culture while we are "squeezed in the embrace of triviality and infantilism". But from page one Cartwright does laugh-out-loud humour too. And his plot centred around David Cross, a much-respected, seasoned and disenchanted John Simpson-style television reporter, and his grown-up children (inhabitants of the more prosperous environs of Camden) has the easy raciness of a piece of chic-lit. Cartwright bridges the two with apparent ease, juggling plots lines about "trying for a baby" with bits of stoical philosophising by those nearing the end of plank. The "Noodle Club" scenes of grumpy old men meeting in a Chinese restaurant in Soho are an especial treat. If you read what we once called the literary pages in the nationals and want a beach book, look no further.

I was new to the writing of Justin Cartwright when I came across "To Heaven by Water". Something about the book blurb caught my eye- perhaps it was the fact that he was born in South Africa - a place I lived for many years and that this novel had connections with Africa; whatever it was, the book proved worth the price of its purchase and the effort expended in exploring it. This is not a thriller, it is not a book in which there is page-turning excitement or edge-of -your-seat drama, but in its elegiac evocation of the simple and the complex in the daily lives of its protagonists, it is beautifully and evocatively written. At its heart it is a story about David Cross, for forty years a corporate BBC figure in British households, a "face" whom people thought they knew as he read the news on their TV screens, night by night. Long-standing member of the "Noodle Club", an association of old comrades, drifting together into the shallows and shoals of old age, confronting their mortality in the light of their life experiences, individual and shared.
With his recent retirement and the loss of his wife of many years,Nancy, David suddenly finds that he is not the man he thought he was. He takes time out to visit with and re-establish contact with an almost-estranged brother in the Kalahari desert and relives the bright memories of some of his great moments in TV journalism, such as spending time in Rome with Richard Burton. But all of this is a sideshow to the self-realization that comes from his relationship with his aging friends, his married children, Ed, his son, who, together with his wife,the beautiful Rosalie, is trying, increasingly desperately, to start a family; his daughter Lucy, who is involved with an unsuitable boyfriend and as these relationships are developed, David Cross comes to learn more about himself, to grasp and indeed accept the significance of his own life, within it's setting of time and place.
Justin Cartwright has written a beautiful book which tells of lives, outwardly so simple and yet inwardly so complex. It is indeed a small canvas, but exquisitely crafted, subtly nuanced and altogether, a delight to read. If you enjoy the books of Douglas KennedyTemptation, you may well enjoy Justin Cartwright's writing. I shall certainly be looking for more by this author.