The Alpine Casanovas by Toni Davidson

Originally published in Gutter

Davidson’s previous book, My Gun is as Tall as Me, dealt directly with war. This time he focuses on those born in the aftermath of conflict. Beat Rockwell, half-Vietnamese half-American, was orphaned by the Vietnam war and adopted by a couple who run a surf bar. Quyn was born in Switzerland, the illegitimate child of a local bootlegger and a Vietnamese refugee.

Years later when Beat, now a movie star, walks out of a film shoot and fakes his own death, hiding away in the exclusive Alpine resort where Quyn works, their stories become entwined.

While the search for the missing celebrity gives the novel its spine, the mirroring of these men is at its heart. Each is severed from his heritage by the war, raised by people he later loses - Beat through choice, cutting himself off as he achieves greater success, Quyn as first his mother, then his father die. This is Modernism in the twenty-first century, bending language and structure to explore identity in a globalised world.

Beat’s disappearance is a clever narrative device, allowing both him and the reader to observe his life played out in the media. As presenters speculate about his motives, talking heads from his past condemn and commend. But rather than being a tale of secrets resurfacing with karmic irony, it is the fact that all details about his true origins are lost forever that defines Beat. Rootless and isolated, he recalls his roles with more nostalgia than he remembers his adoptive family and the friends of his youth. The image of the actor as an empty vessel into whom character can be poured has never been so relevant.

Quyn has also lost all chance for closure. Lacking the drive for adulation that animates Beat, he drifts into the background, his job as caretaker at an elite resort perfect for a man who lives in a treehouse near the site of his burnt down childhood home. Neither a part of the refugee Vietnamese community nor Swiss society, rejected by his father’s wife and legitimate son, he moves like a ghost through the chalets, restocking fridges and unblocking toilets, a shadow at the edge of the rich guests’ awareness.

Their world is defined by dislocation. Most of the character names are expressive of personality but not ethnicity nor background, essentially stateless – Beat, Clay, Halcyon. Physical descriptions are given only when necessary, locations fixed by sensual details rather than geographical. Everything is fluid, open to change and reinterpretation.

Memory plays a central role for each character and Davidson’s manipulation of time and memory is masterful. Beat and Quyn are assaulted by waves of nostalgia and regret, like a wiped out surfer in the breakers, two or three memories churning within a paragraph and slamming into the present, building into a swell of internal conflict that is almost Joycean in its execution.

By the nature of the story there is more introspection than action – what there is taking place as flashbacks – but this is not a novel about what happens next. Rather this is a book to wallow in, rolling in the luxurious prose. From ‘battle-flagellated soldiers’ to a ‘skeleton, with bones like a laid fire,’ it is full of phrases that sear. The Alpine Casanovas is less about where we get to than how we get there. And we get there in exquisite style.