Voyage in the Dark: Jean Rhys (Penguin Modern Classics)

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When I remember living whit her it was like looking at an old photograph of myself and thinking 'What on earth's that got to do with me?'."

In some ways, it's a very moral tale (the superficial glamour is not presented as something to aspire to), but it feels honest, rather than preachy, and the ending is left open. Like her more famous Wide Sargasso Sea, this is another merciless exposé of what happens to women who are marginalised, who have very few economic options other than marriage or its disreputable cousin, and who are at the mercy of men, unscrupulous landladies who may be just a rung or so above in the social and financial hierarchy, and their own barely held in despair. Most of the time, Anna describes events in such short, sparse sentences that it's almost like an early reading primer. I know she's naive and not very educated, but her voice annoyed me: "I pulled my hand away. I thought, 'No, I don't like you.' We stopped at Germaine's flat." Tum-te tum-te tum-te-tum. Many other books set in this period feature chorus girls, but usually in a peripheral way that makes their lives seem exotic and exciting, until they settle down to conventional respectability, quietly disappear, or, less often, meet a tragic end. The storyline here is more nuanced and complex - and still relevant today.

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Anna starts living in a much nicer boardinghouse. During this period, Walter introduces Anna to his cousin, Vincent, who is eager to put her in touch with people he knows in the theater. Both Walter and Vincent are excited about the idea of helping Anna become successful, and Walter even starts paying for Anna to have singing lessons. On her 19th birthday, Anna spends the day with Maudie because Walter is out of town. Maudie is impressed with her new living arrangements and her stylish new haircut, but she hints that it doesn’t bode well that Walter seems like the “cautious” type—that is, the type of man who always wants Anna to come over to his house at night but never visits her at her apartment. Maudie’s former lover, Viv, used to do the same thing. But Maudie doesn’t press the issue, instead simply telling Anna to get as much money out of Walter as she can. Anna is very free-thinking for the time: non-religious ("I believe there's something horrible about any sort of praying"!), amoral and independent, albeit more through necessity than choice. Had the book been published in the nineteen-tens (rather than 1934), it might have been very controversial. As it is, its modernity means it's still pertinent today. Jean Rhys, rediscovered treasure, gives us depression in all its gruesome splendor in "Voyage in the Dark." Anna receives a letter from Vincent saying that Walter is sorry, but he is no longer in love with her. They both still want to assist her as much as possible.

Anna is represented as being caught between worlds: finding herself isolated socially and emotionally from those around her, she is unable to comfortably reconcile her West Indian and her British heritage. The novel employs modernist techniques to represent this, merging fragments of Anna's past with the action in England by means of a dreamlike stream of interior monologue, which destabilizes and ruptures the narrative, and emphasizes Anna's detachment from English society. Anna is like a dress rehearsal for Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea: adrift in cold London with her troubled memories of her upbringing in the Caribbean, just eighteen when the book opens, and a victim of her own naivety and innocence. Languorous, emotionally exhausted, unable to tell the difference between coercion and a fantasised (is it?) love affair, she has been abandoned by her stepmother who appropriates her inheritance, floats into and out of a job as a touring chorus girl and slips into a hazy position where she is not quite a prostitute but where her lovers slip money covertly into her handbag. She doesn't even have the dignity of controlling the transaction. I am not sure why reading Jean Rhys’ “Voyage in the Dark” reminded me of one of my favourite novels, Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage. Maybe because both main characters – Philip in “Of Human Bondage” and Anna in “Voyage in the Dark” – are somehow outsiders who struggle to find meaning in their lives. But whereas Philip understands that life is meaningless and eventually finds consolation in it, mainly through his love of art and literature, Anna remains clueless and can only find comfort in memories of her childhood.

I dressed very carefully, I didn't think of anything while I dressed … rather more rouge than usual and when I looked in the glass I thought, 'He won't be able to, he won't be able to.' There was a lump in my throat. – 'My dear girl, nonsense, nonsense.' – In the dining room there were the Cries of London on the walls … – 'And I've met a lot of I grew to rely on the out of body life. If you could step outside yourself and put your hands to fit with your other hand on the glass like in one of those movies of a prison visit. The living your life in memories after and not ever during. The tingles and the shivers of the skin that's all ghost like. Hold your breath and wait until you can live it, later. It's so sad, that young Anna is in England in one of those stories that always made me relieved to be alive now and not when I'd have been an appendage to a family itching for an amputation. Or the dark vaginal hole pulling in more empty darkness of perfunctory rich guy sex. Is life always going to be poor, poorer and poorest? Thread bare knees and thread bare carpet burn patterns circling the abyss. Gratitude beatitudes out of you. It's the sad for later, and not bearing to fully exist the present, that pulled me in so hard, in an outside of myself way. Whiplash and I don't know I have it until its too late to sue the bastard who ran me over. That's probably this book. I know it has a reputation of being all too sad and here I am feeling that it was a sad like it is hidden at the bottom of a well. I don't know how long it'll take for it to sound. I didn't even want to dive into the book and save Anna like I usually do. I wanted to sit beside her sitting beside herself as her heart needs some kind of life support. Anna's mind is there taking in the sneering smiles and maybe they all don't mean any of it. Is this really how it all works? You could see the pictures of happiness and see the mouths moving and everything could stop and move so slowly. You want to be able to go there too, with the girls who could reach their fingers and touch the best, if they felt moved to move a little more. God, some unknown happiness. What is it even called? Not England. Not home. Not here.

Her eloquence in the language of human sexual transactions is chilling, cynical, and surprisingly moving' In a nightmarish turn of events, Anna's abortion goes terribly wrong and her life is threatened. Anna hallucinates about her old life in the tropics. The novel ends with Anna's private thoughts on her situation in life. Update this section!While a first love can be a period of intensely effervescent emotion and passion, the decline and death of the ill-fated romance is often a harrowing and hellish plunge into the darkness of pain and sorrow. Jean Rhys impeccable Voyage in the Dark chronicles such a descent, or tragic voyage, through the rise and fall of Anna Morgan’s love affair with a wealthy Englishman. Anna, coming from the West Indies and working as a chorus girl across England—much like Rhys herself, whose own experiences illuminate this emotionally charged novel—has her beautiful and youthful innocents trampled upon by the misogynistic society of men who willfully takes advantage of her to fulfill their carnal lusts. She must stay strong and keep her head above water by accepting the money her late-night lovers pass her way, as the often-married men mistake financial support as a morally acceptable compensation for the responsibility they have no intentions of shouldering. Through her elegantly executed juxtaposition of England and the West Indies, as well as gender relations, Rhys creates a cutting compounded metaphor of English imperialism and misogyny that exposes the hardships a poor, young woman must face in a society that views them as nothing but material goods to be plundered and discarded while they struggle to etch out their own identity. Oh Jean, I’m hooked on you and your gin soaked life. I know you’re telling me YOUR story. Not Julia’s, not Anna’s, not Sasha’s, yours. I’ve read that this one was written first despite being published later. And that makes more sense to me. Begin at the beginning I say. I’ve also read that this was your favorite. We all have our favorites, don’t we Jean? I can see why this would be your favorite and I can see why you would hide it away for 10 years in a suitcase. A little too much truth in this one, eh Jean? In contrast, scenes which could actually be sensual, are generally described in cold, detached terms - even when there is some warmth in the relationship concerned.