The Famished Lover [Paperback]

It takes courage to write about the First World War. Not that there isn’t an audience for such stories-note the success of Three Day Road, Birdsong, and the Pat Barker trilogy. However, so many words have already been spent on the trenches of mud and blood that nowadays a writer who feels compelled to add to the body of literature about the Great War must wonder what he or she can possibly say that is new. You don’t want a reader to have that been-there-read-that experience. Unfortunately, as I read Alan Cumyn’s The Famished Lover, the latest literary exhumation of WWI, I was in a near constant state of ‘déjà lu’.
The Famished Lover is the story of Ramsay Crome, an artist/soldier who comes home after spending years in a German prison camp. His imprisonment has left him emaciated and faithless. Upon returning to Quebec, he marries a young farm girl, Lillian, with whom he’s unable to share the horrors he has lived through. He is also unwilling to show her his secret canvasses on which he painted his pre-war sweetheart, his cousin Margaret. And so we have set up for us a marriage of the experienced man of the world and a naïve Canadian girl with her simple faith in love and a just and merciful God. She wants to penetrate her husband’s mind and heart, but he will not let her.
The narrative jumps back and forth between Ramsay’s past experiences in the prison camp and his present struggles as an artist in Depression-era Montreal and within an icy marriage to Lillian. The war and prison camp scenes are hampered most by that quality of derivation. Even someone who has read little of Great War fiction comes to it with preconceived images. Anyone who has read Findley’s The Wars has already felt themselves nearly frozen and buried alive in mud. The cold, the mud, the disease, the sleeplessness, and all the other horrors of the trench are now conventional images of that war, and there is little left to shock a reader who is immersed in the daily horrors broadcast live on CNN. To his credit, Findley still managed to shock with his descriptions of soldiers urinating into their shirts and holding the wet fabric to their mouths to save themselves from gas, and of the horses being burned.
By comparison, there is nothing that startles in Cumyn’s narrative. He too describes the mud, but it seems a half-hearted gesture at best: “The rain has stopped but the mud continues to grow, to take over everything . . . ” In the prison camp, the German guards are caricatured Nazis who do nothing but preach about the glories of das Vaterland while beating the prisoners or forcing them to stand outside in the cold for hours.
There are some comic details that intrigue and add freshness to the narrative. For instance, the prisoners’ work at this particular camp consists of shoveling manure into a cart and transporting it to another field, and there is an entertaining scene in which the prisoners amuse themselves by gambling on a louse race. The part with which Cumyn may have actually intended to horrify readers occurs just after this. Crome’s louse wins and one of the losers, Witherspoon, becomes enraged and starts calling Crome a dago. The ensuing fight is broken up brutally by the German guards and the two men are carried off and thrown into separate holes in the ground covered only by a square piece of metal. There they are left to freeze for days with only a thin, greasy soup for sustenance. To survive, Ramsay summons a fantasy of Margaret, his love. This scene is one of the least convincing in the book. Here is a bit that follows Crome’s invitation to Margaret to “lie down” with him:

But we’re not married!” she says, only half-joking. Her voice has grown faint and her face seems dangerously pale.
“You shouldn’t be here,” I whisper.
“I can’t lie down with you if we aren’t married,” she says again.
So I say, “Margaret Crome, marry me.”
“But we’re cousins, dear Ramsay.” She kisses my face, so coldly. I feel the weight of enormous sadness, knowing what I’ve done in bringing her here.
“Marry me anyway.”
“It wouldn’t be right,” she replies, but in a teasing, falsely argumentative way.

Cumyn no doubt intended to create a phantasmagoria, the wistful, desperate imaginings of a man who is half-starved and near-frozen. But this reads like a conversation between a couple of precocious Edwardian teens. Whatever physical pain and terror Crome experiences in the hole are made trivial by this thin fantasy which continues for many pages.
Occasionally, we’re treated to some clever irony in the juxtaposition of various scenes. At one point in the story, we see Ramsay in Montreal, struggling to find work as an artist (or any work at all for that matter). He can barely support his wife and baby son in their decrepit, grey, wind-blown apartment.
The narrative switches to the prison camp. Here we see Ramsay drawing pictures of the prisoners’ “girlfriends”. His work is in high demand among the lonely, sexually deprived men who offer him cigarettes, chocolate, money, or anything else they possess. Ramsay becomes the wealthiest prisoner there. Anyone who has ever struggled as an artist will surely laugh (or at least smile wryly) at the fact that Ramsay has an easier time selling his work in a prison camp than a North American metropolis in peacetime.
The second half of the novel is largely about Crome’s post-war struggles in Montreal and the Eastern Townships. The post-war sections are not always convincing either. This part starts well, with Ramsay and Lillian’s honeymoon. The two take a sleigh ride north of Montreal to what is supposed to be a romantic country cabin, but the cabin turns out to be a derelict old shack without provisions. It is an amusing scene that pokes fun at the idea of a romantic Canadian getaway, but it is also a subtle foreshadowing of the conjugal disappointments to come. Ramsay marries Lillian on a whim because she is beautiful, but he quickly discovers, even before their awkward consummation in the rickety, frozen loft of the cabin, that Lillian is not the person with whom he should be spending the rest of his life. This part is fine. Later, however, some of the domestic scenes lose their authenticity due to the dialogue, which is often stiff and melodramatic. Here is a typical conversation between Lillian and Ramsay. It occurs after the breech birth of their son has nearly killed Lillian:

“I thought I was dying,” she said to me, and felt my face with her chilled hand. “I thought I was going to be all alone.”
“No. You were never alone.”
She touched my cheek where she’d struck me. “You said you would never hurt me. Do you remember, on our honeymoon?”

Similarly, earlier in the book, when Lillian confronts Ramsay about his atheism, he says:

“What the war has taught me . . . is that God is not the church. Or the church is not a building, not the fancy robes and mumbo-jumbo. You go to your church and I’ll walk in mine and look at the snow on the branches and the shadows of the clouds on the hills and the patterns of the ice on the windows. That will be my church. You go and sing your hymns and say your prayers and I’ll walk around and feel the blood in my muscles, and when we come home here we’ll eat and I’ll carry you onto the bed and we’ll celebrate the god-fire in us all afternoon and into the evening if we want . . . ”

Celebrate the god-fire? Why does Crome sound like Robert Bly all of a sudden? And therein lies the whole problem. Crome never sounds like a real person experiencing a real loss of faith because of real trauma. In large part, this is because Cumyn hasn’t made the war scenes authentic or jarring enough to cause a reader to feel the trauma along with Crome.
In the long history of misleading book covers, The Famished Lover takes a special place. It looks like a piece of erotica with its cross section of a woman’s breasts barely covered by a frilly, transparent negligée. Mmm, goody, a reader might think. This is going to be juicy. But it turns out that there’s little that is raw or exciting in this novel. Yes, Ramsay Crome becomes a painter of scantily clad calendar girls, and yes he has what we are told is a torrid affair, and yes all of this represents a search for some of the beauty he craves to calm his war-ravaged psyche. Yet even these parts of the book feel emotionally and sexually frigid, as if they were written by a vaguely disillusioned and sexually restless Presbyterian minister. The reader wishes, like Ramsay Crome’s emotionally famished wife Lillian, that Ramsay would open up at some point. But he never really does. Not to his wife. Not to Margaret. Not to his lover. And ultimately, not to the reader. As a result, The Famished Lover is only for the most dedicated collector of Great War literature.
Tim McGrenere (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada

In this much anticipated follow-up to The Sojourn, Alan Cumyn continues the story of Ramsay Crome, an artist who never quite came home from the First World War. The horrors of his years in a German prisoner of war camp continue to haunt him, as does the idealized memory of his long-lost sweetheart, his beautiful Margaret. It is those memories that literally save his life and keep him from a cold grave in a foreign land. Upon his return home to Montreal, Crome seeks the nourishment of body and soul, sometimes impulsively, after years of torture and deprivation. He meets Lillian, a farm girl from the Eastern Townships and is drawn to her youthful vigour, her innocence, and yes, her beauty. These prove to be a potent elixir and they marry quickly. By the time she is pregnant with their son, she wants nothing more than to escape the dreary poverty of their Depression-era existence and flee back to the farm with her husband and child. She wants him to love only her, to open up about his war experiences, explain the paintings she found of a nude Margaret. To her they are obscenities and provoke the bitter taste of jealousy. The Famished Lover is Alan Cumyn’s most mature and accomplished novel to date. It explores one man’s hunger for love and meaning in a harsh, unforgiving world and the beautiful, yet corrosive, nature of longing. (20120504)