Philadelphia City Paper // Bornholn Night-Ferry by Aidan Higgins

http://www.citypaper.net/articles/2006-06-22/cover5.shtml

Bornholm Night-Ferry
By Aidan Higgins
Dalkey Archive Press, 175 pp., $12.95

Aidan Higgins has to date published a dozen volumes of fiction and non, including this letter bomb of a book, Bornholm Night-Ferry, which first appeared in the U.K. over 20 years ago and has finally now washed up on our shores. Admirers of the fictions of James Joyce and his most immediate descendents, Samuel Beckett and Flann O'Brien, will want to take notice of this steadily growing oeuvre because in terms of language Higgins' best fiction definitely converses with those giants of Irish literature. In some ways a traditional epistolary novel, Bornholm Night-Ferry unravels through a series of letters back and forth between Finn "Fitzy" FitzGerald, and his Danish lover, Elin Marstrander. Their correspondence takes on a life of its own, seemingly independent of the mundane realities of their separate, shacked-up-with-other-people lives.

Higgins masterfully uses subtle and, I admit, sometimes not-so-subtle shifts in tone and syntax to convey carefully nuanced changes in the lovers' emotional dispositions. He is by all reasonable accounts an amazingly cunning linguist. The unabashed eroticism of their early letters only slowly gives way to the understanding that Finn and Elin's affection is so ephemeral that it may not survive the occasional, yearned-for reunion. The idea of their affair means more to them than the affair itself. "I love the language," Elin writes early on to Finn, "my own and others, the language as tool, the language which is keeping or effacing, the language you can come to the truth with or be lying with. I needed the words to entertain you, to amuse you, put my seal into your heart so you can never forget me." Their loving correspondence is ultimately about language itself, and it's the language itself that makes this melancholy novel so enjoyable.