Never Anyone But You by Rupert Thomson - review

Between the novelist Rupert Thomson and the subject of his latest fiction, the French artist Claude Cahun, a single degree of separation exists. The pair are linked by David Bowie, who created a multi-media exhibition of Cahun’s work as part of the 2007 Highline Festival in New York and included Thomson’s novel, The Insult, on his list of 100 must-read books in 2013.

Some six decades after her death in 1954, Cahun is a resonant figure for our time. Androgynous, enigmatic, gender-fluid before the term existed (“Neuter is the only gender that always suits me,” she wrote), she and her partner Suzanne Malherbe were involved with the Surrealist movement, which turned rebellion into an art form. During the Second World War they were imprisoned and condemned to death for resisting the Nazi occupiers in Jersey, their adopted home.

Besides the Bowie exhibition, Cahun inspired Gillian Wearing’s 2017 exhibition Behind the Mask, which featured Cahun’s original photographs alongside Wearing’s reinterpretations. “Under this mask,” Cahun wrote, “another mask. I will never finish removing all these faces.” But Thomson strips away the accretion of new-found modishness to seek out the woman behind the multifarious identities.

His narrator is Malherbe, perhaps the only person to see the authentic face beneath the masks. Prefaced by an ominous flash-forward to the war, the novel opens in 1909 with the beginning of Claude and Suzanne’s relationship. Cahun was born Lucy Schwob in 1894, in Nantes, western France, where her family and Suzanne’s were friends. Suzanne’s father was a physician; Lucy’s a newspaper editor. Her mother, Toinette, suffered from schizophrenia and was institutionalised when Lucy was young.

As adolescents the girls discovered an intense sexual and creative complicity, devising ambiguous new names for themselves — Claude Cahun for Lucy, Marcel Moore for Suzanne — and “testing the border between that which could be expressed and that which had to be concealed”. Claude, the younger, was the more reckless, half in love with death, flirting compulsively with altered states of mind. But Suzanne’s steadiness was an essential element of their joint project of self-invention: “I don’t feel I exist unless you look at me,” Claude tells her.

With the marriage of Claude’s divorced father to Suzanne’s widowed mother, the couple — now step-sisters as well as lovers — moved to Paris. Freedom is perhaps harder to write about than constraint — at any rate, this is the least successful section of the novel, heavy with expository character sketches of the picturesque denizens of high Bohemia: “Andre Breton wore a green suit and a pair of spectacles and he carried his famous cane on which were carved vaginas, erect penises and slugs.”

A retreat in 1937 from the frantic factionalism of Surrealist Paris to a house in Jersey, christened by Claude La Ferme Sans Nom — the nameless farm — offered a new beginning: “a blank slate, on which we could write our own history”. Too soon, the blank slate was overwritten by events — the Nazi occupation and the resistance that culminated in the couple’s denunciation and imprisonment.

Thomson has remarked that he is “perceived as writing a different book each time”, and his 11th novel might seem to confirm that. But this exquisite account of a duo for whom life and art were indistinguishable echoes to a recurring leitmotif of Thomson’s fiction: “the constantly shifting construct” of the self.

The novel ends with a wordless coda: two haunting portraits of very young women. Lucy sombre in a sailor suit; Suzanne smiling in a garden, about to begin the task of writing their own history.

Never Anyone But You by Rupert Thomson (Corsair, £18.99), buy it here.