Review: Outline by Rachel Cusk

The British female writer is flying from London to Athens to teach at a summer-school there. She and a Greek male passenger, of a family of ship-owners, converse at length.

Her neighbour recounts much of his life story, including his fall from family grace and dismal marital history. Thus is the pattern set for the rest of this minimalist novel, mainly set in Athens.

This highly personalised work by Rachel Cusk, whose Saving Agnes won a Whitbread First Novel Award, concerns mostly comfortably off people with whom the writer, nameless except for one reference, meets and socialises. We learn about them through the writer relating their conversations with her. She, too, gradually emerges, but only a little.

Thoughts, remembrances, views, ideas, feelings and happenings are revealed to the writer, who perhaps can be seen as a mother-confessor to her interlocutors.

In Athens one evening, the writer meets her Greek publisher friend Paniotis at a restaurant. In melancholic mood he declares Greece "is a country that is on its knees and dying a slow and agonising death". Although presumably a reference to Greece's current plight, Cusk's book is not about social and economic problems, despite reflections of them briefly surfacing later.

We also meet Irishman Ryan, another teacher at the school; Elena, a motorbike-riding publishing editor; Elena's friend Melete, a pre-eminent lesbian poet, who is being stalked by a former student; and the writer's students. We even learn much about the absent Clelia, in whose loaned apartment the writer is staying, as the writer takes us on a highly descriptive tour of the premises.

Although this quiet work is a series of vignettes or "outlines", Cusk creates a pleasing narrative whole from them, the writer the binding thread. You look forward to her next meeting: who will it be? What will be told?

Another thread is her fellow plane-passenger who re-emerges to take the writer boating, during which he makes amorous advances. He is only ever referred to as "my neighbour" or "he", which lends him a mysterious air.

Late to appear is Anne, a playwright just arrived from England to teach at the school. She tells the writer of conversing with a man sitting next to her on the plane out .... So, full circle for an impressive and rewarding book.