For Paul Scraton, a British writer who has lived in Berlin for over 20 years, place is what you carry around in your imagination. The acknowledgments to his second novel inform us that on Holy Island/Ynys Gybi in north Wales there is a rock face called A Dream of White Horses. The novel transposes this name to the Baltic Sea, which surrounds an unnamed island – evidently Hiddensee on the German coast – where an itinerant photographer, Pascal, once spent his childhood summers. His grandfather was originally from German Swinemünde, which became Polish Świnoujście, and his parents lived in the GDR before moving to Lancashire when he was nine.
They are all exiles from Germanys that, in a memorable phrase, have been “separated from their dead” by the redrawing of European frontiers. All three generations restlessly seek escape and rest from escape, and all return to a beloved island where none of them was born. The desire for homeland is not an atavistic birthright but a voluntary sense of belonging to Europe’s “continent of refugees”.
Pascal is too unwell to pick up a photography award in London: it is the narrator Ben, his British friend from university days, who goes in his stead. Just as Pascal feels detached from Germany, so Ben, long a resident of Berlin, writes of his native England as an increasingly foreign country. It is with a sense of urgency that Pascal has asked his friend to bring the award to the island and to act as his ghostwriter by transcribing a sequence of autobiographical voice notes. In one, Pascal remembers meeting a fellow walker in the sunless depths of a spectacular gorge in Japan. When asked where he is from, the man points at his feet: “here”. Pascal contrasts that certainty to his own transience, though it could be that the walker feels rooted to the “here” of the present.
The novel has begun with descriptions of Pascal’s photographs: a fragmented headstone; a single-track railway line disappearing into mist; a sandy trail through the woods. This is his prize-winning work, some of which we later recognise in the voice notes. The narrative is interspersed with paragraphs that describe ordinary photographs of the rooms that Pascal has stayed in: rooms that have confined the spirit of the rucksack-carrying wanderer. The nondescript word-pictures assert the photograph’s stubborn materiality in a selfie-saturated age. But Pascal also asks whether these photographs of empty rooms are redundant prompts, which misleadingly prioritise certain memories over others.
In a novel that wishes to stage a debate between image, word and story, the absence of photographs themselves represents a missed opportunity. The reader is denied the intermedial complexity of WG Sebald’s fiction, to cite an obvious example. There is little of that affective penetration Roland Barthes refers to as the punctum of a photograph: what “pricks” us with mortality.
Pascal has tried to remake a “personal geography” of his native country. He familiarises himself with the Berlin he does not remember from early childhood, and he takes a crash course in the German history he was not taught. Making the classic tourist trip down the Rhine, he learns that Heinrich Heine’s Die Lorelei, which captured the mood of the nation, was later attributed by the Nazis to an “Unknown German Author” (Heine was Jewish). Pascal’s melancholic desire to fill a cultural and linguistic void is a dream of white horses, which cannot ward off an increasing psychological insularity. In this novel, rooms and islands, whether cells or refuges, are metaphors of containment that recursively frame and surround each other. By the time Ben has reached Pascal’s “island of the imagination”, his final task is to take a photograph of his friend’s old bedroom from those childhood summers spent on the Baltic. He captures a last view of the room with the view.
• A Dream of White Horses by Paul Scraton is published by Bluemoose (£9.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
