The dead shall not be ignored

A seasoned author of 25 books -- as art critic and novelist -- whose laurels include the prestigious Booker Prize (in 1972 for the novel “G.”), John Berger might be expected to dash off a new volume with a degree of facile self-assurance. But facility, or glib phrase-making, has never been Berger’s approach. And self-assurance -- that empowered state so dangerously close to deafness -- is not what moves his characters, or makes them so moving.

On a hot summer’s day in Lisbon, a visitor with a writer’s habit of noticing things remarks on an old woman “sitting very still on one of the park benches. She had the kind of stillness that draws attention to itself ... she was determined to be noticed.” By whom, he idly wonders. When the old woman stands up and approaches him, he recognizes her walk even before her face: She is his mother, who had died 15 years earlier.

Thus the conventional curtain that both shelters and beggars the living, the fourth wall between them (who once were) and us (who still are) is flicked away. Thus begin the border crossings between past and present, the narrator’s evocations of loved ones both living and dead that make up Berger’s new novel, “Here Is Where We Meet.” Once the separating curtain is gone, “here” may be anywhere, because, as the mother in Lisbon chides her son, “There’s something, John, you shouldn’t forget .... [T]he dead don’t stay where they are buried.”

She is no will-o’-the-wisp, this woman. She eats raw shrimp in the market, laughs till she cries, reverts to the tone of an impudent 17-year-old. John can clasp her hand, which is as familiarly cold as when she was alive. As she guides him around the streets and aqueducts of the old city, his poignant recollections of her hard youth contrast with her observations on the present. She offers the sort of pithy wisdom one would secretly hope for from such a visitor. When the son confesses that after all the years writing remains hard, that these days he risks writing “nonsense,” she replies: “All you have to know is whether you’re lying or whether you’re trying to tell the truth, you can’t afford to make a mistake about that distinction any longer.”

He risks a guess: “So time doesn’t count, and place does?” After the seminal encounter of Lisbon come chapters titled “Geneve,” “Krakow,” “Islington” and “Madrid.” In Geneva to meet his daughter, the narrator runs into Jorge Luis Borges, the writer who spent his adolescence stranded in that city by war. Motor biking to a wedding in Poland, he is overtaken on the road by a female driver who “during her life ... adored broken laws,” an aristocrat who abhorred suntans and self-pity and was, we infer, perhaps the great romantic passion of the narrator’s past.

Then, in the lobby of a chi-chi hotel in Madrid where the padded seclusion prompts in him recollections of “shanty towns and the everlasting racket in prisons,” he watches the interaction between a trio of guests and Tyler, the classy yet once desperately poor tutor who “ate free in my mother’s cafe in exchange for his improving my English and making it possible to pass me off as a gentleman boy.” But the most aching love and longing resurrects a later teacher, Ken, who opened worlds through books and art and theater, who seduced him with all the world offers, and then disappeared.

The supernatural happens every day, while everyday things are magic. Places have characters, like people. Appetites matter, even beyond the grave. Food matters, and food binds: the dead offer delightful recipes for swordfish, borscht and sorrel soup. Ingredients are held close enough to inhale: “shake the parched earth out of their white roots. The leeks smell of violets and nickel.”

Clearly, “Here Is Where We Meet” is not fiction according to the usual rules. “John” doesn’t deny Berger. But John Berger has never wasted words composing by the rules. He offers all he has. This time out, adroitly and honestly, he lets certain facts illumine each other. All to honor the parting injunction of the old woman in Lisbon: “Write down what you find, and do us the honor of noticing us.” *