Reviewed by Brooke Brunckhorst

One of the first things I noticed from the bio information inside the cover of The Twin, was that the author had a previous life as a subtitler for nature films. In this, Gerbrand Bakker's first serious adult novel, that experience shows. Reading this book is rather like watching the leisurely sweep of Dutch countryside pass by the windows of a slow train, with most of the action coming from its twenty cows, two donkeys, some miscellaneous chickens, and twenty-three sheep—whose numbers are reduced by sale to twenty because the protagonist thinks it's a much neater number to care for.

The story is told from the perspective of Helmer, the twin brother of a man who dies young while engaged to be married to a girl that no-one in the family quite likes. Helmer returns somewhat unwillingly from university to look after his dying father and halfheartedly manage the family’s small farm in the plattetland outside Amsterdam. His dead brother’s former fiancée, Riet, calls to ask if her moody teenage son can come to work on the farm for his keep. Helmer agrees, but if he appears to be resigned in taking over his dead brother’s role on the farm, he fights (perhaps too strong a word for this novel—becomes abstractedly unwilling might be better) the unspoken suggestion that he might take over the job of looking after Riet as well.

If this scenario appears to have the potential for the author to dig deeply into the inherent tensions between the old and the new, the dying out of small farming, lost loves and the possibilities of fresh starts, then think again. Bakker has, in my view, completely missed his chance to produce that beautiful examination of wistful tenderness, personal mourning, and empathy for metaphor in the landscape, that other writers like Annie Proulx and Cormac McCarthy have mastered.

Now don’t get me wrong, there is a certain amount of excitement in the story. Why, only a few pages in and there is a frisson of expectation as Helmer gives us a classic line designed to keep the reader turning the pages: “now I’m in the kitchen, waiting for the paint to dry” (5). From this point on, there seems to be no holding Bakker in his quest to investigate the underlying pressure that comes with running a small farm in a countryside that is waterlogged and teeming with quiescent “wild-life” (I use that term strictly in the zoological sense). Later—and it seems much, much, later when you read it—there is more excitement on the tiny plot of land when the donkeys get loose and have to be herded back through a gate by Helmer and two small boys from the farm next-door.

I was, perhaps, more impressed with the potentialities of the plot when Helmer gave his doddery father a sponge-bath and discovers that the old man’s penis is becoming erect. Hello, I thought, we’re in for a grand discursive treat about virility, ageing, and the failure of the son to measure up to either the father or the dead twin—but no, we’re disappointed again as Helmer’s father says nothing while “slowly his penis sinks down between his legs”. Helmer himself can’t think of anything more earth-shattering to consider but to ruminate, “I wonder whether I need to wash his hair” (36).

When reading this story, the mind is not so much struck by the author's lack of a true sense of place, as by a sense of purposelessness about it all. One can only say that, like Helmer, the view from this slowly-fading world is “the stuff of postcards” (282)—a calm, lonely, almost somnolent, still life.


The Twin
(2008)

by Gerbrand Bakker
Scribe Publications
ISBN (13): 9781921372254
283pp AUD$29.95