Christopher Bernard’s 
A Spy in the Ruins: 
More Postings From the Beast 

Review by Matt Damsker 

Novelistic ambitions being what they are these days, it’s no wonder that long works of fiction from America’s best and brightest tend to slide toward marketable flights of genre fantasy (Caleb Carr, Elizabeth Kostova) or barbed middle-class dissection (Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace) as opposed to the sprawling, mind-clenching post-modernism of Pynchon, or the cross-cultural post-realism of Rushdie, or (still) Garcia Marquez. In America, the pressure for the movie-saleable commodity, however well-wrought (think Philip Roth, even) seems to pervade our multimedia perspectives.  
Which makes Christopher Bernard’s A Spy in the Ruins (Regent Press, 2005) a rarity, perhaps, but also a return to form – to the notion of the novel as that wide-open, thorny canvas of consciousness that Joyce and Woolf envisioned and enacted: not a novel of “ideas” so much as the novel as pure ideation – breathing, spawning, crystallizing, and coalescing, ultimately, into something akin to Eliot’s conceit about squeezing the universe into a ball. A novel, in other words, that is ambitious enough to defy adaptation. 
Bernard’s magnum opus, at more than 500 pages, is certainly shadowed by modernism’s Big Books and Big Ideas, and its brash, page-one homage to the world-wrecking jolt that opens Finnegans Wake announces that it too will wrestle with the apocalyptic gesture that, when you think about it, only the novel can aspire to, free of the fixation on visual expression that continues to circumscribe all efforts at ultimatism in a hyper-visual society. 
In its way, Bernard’s ambitiousness is Homeric – Iliadic and Odyssyean – in suggesting that only prose-poetry can fuse immediacy of mind to the structures of narrative, and so Bernard goes all out, with liberated prose that slithers and shape-shifts on the page like the staff of Moses set down to snake before Pharoah. Sentences writhe, unrestricted, yet the organic center holds, and the result is frequently radiant, resolving in metaphor and tragic epiphany that dare the reader not to share the rue (“He glows for days over the copy in curlicues of her phone number lying like an abandoned leaf on his desk.” ). 
A Spy in the Ruins is all plot and no plot: a sleeper wakes to the world’s seeming end, and touchstones of modern life (“the phone scattering over the rug CDs slipping from shelves as the kitchen rang with breakage”) ground us in an interior journey that affirms the simul-taneity of childhood, adolescence, old age, the before- and afterlife.  
Bernard’s protagonist is Prufrockian, twisted with regret, lust, defined by unrequitedness, yet heroically surviving – if only in those chambers of the sea – while the worldly ruins that are everything and everywhere mock and conspire, blameless and indifferent. It’s hard to imagine Bernard writing another novel, having crafted something of a Platonic ideal with this one, a mid-life manifesto that reinforces classical stances on its own 21st-century terms – that death and decay are indeed the mothers of beauty, that love/sex is the lingua franca of human experience, that loss and longing are what spur our will to live.  

Bernard’s alter ego, the wandering Everyman who journeys farther within, always, than without, is the perfect anti-hero for this anti-novel: scarred by parentage, initiated into worldly cruelty by the unworldly cruelties of the schoolyard, keen to the tyrannies and rejections of female beauty, set spinning by literature’s promises of revelation and foiled by its subjectivity, renewing his determination in aphoristic meditation (“the absolute impotence of absolute awareness,” “…a rebellious voice in the back of his own mind rose in revolt exacting its own obedience demanding that he take reality into his own hands insisting that reality was not to be accepted but changed that reality was the clay with which one built a life…”).  Around him, the world in spasms stages its wars, its revolutions, and so he enters it as an “agent of chaos,” thrilling to the anarchic freedom yet circumscribed by the civilizing impulse long since drilled into him. 
At a certain point, the raging subjectivity of ex-perience gives way, as if after a cleansing rain, to the objectivity of a screenplay (“Exterior. Day. Sun. Autumn. Sound of trees in a mild wind.”). The characters, a He and a She on some university campus, verbally spar – politics, love: it’s all the same, a straining for connection that the world resists. The “unhinged romantic” keeps setting forth, while the friends, acquaintances, lovers that mark his generational passage find and lose themselves in art, religion, more politics, or not at all. The novel concludes with a tenth chapter and epilogue, evoking, perhaps, Molly Bloom’s final soliloquy, with a hint of affirmation that asks the reader to carry the existential banner through, and perhaps from, the ruins.   
The obvious temptation, of course (and this review has hardly avoided it) is to keep marrying Bernard’s achievement to the modernist vocabulary that made it possible and that remains, to varying degrees, the aesthetic context for any attempt at literate experimentalism. But it’s just as possible to connect a work as conceptually and verbally potent as A Spy in the Ruins to the quintessence of 19th-century American realism – specifically, to the meditative watershed that is Henry James’ “The Beast in the Jungle.” Notwithstanding the paralleling titles of the two works, what links them is a more fundamental notion, that of a consciousness straining to define itself as pure and self-validating amidst the structures of convention. 
In James’ short story, the protagonist has lived with an intimation that an apocalyptic, life-altering event awaits him, coiled to spring like a jungle beast, though he has no idea when or what form it may take. Allied with a woman who agrees to “watch” with him, he does not live so much as marks time toward the great moment he believes sets him apart from the rest of society’s somnam-bulists, and, of course – there’s an obviousness to this that we, as jaundiced 21st-century readers, can’t fail to pick up on – his existential realization comes too late. 
Bernard’s novel likewise chides the civilized soul who struggles with a deterministic self-consciousness in a universe that is always, teasingly, beyond ultimate comprehension, as the small pleasures and big-picture clarity of life elude an overstuffed, overwrought perception of the inner and outer mysteries.  
The beauty and wonder of it all is that these Great Themes of social existence —  whether sounded by a magisterial, hidebound James, or a postmodern, media-glutted, hyperabsorbent mind such as Bernard’s – don’t fail to reach us, garbed in styles that change and recapitulate themselves. Happily, there is still room for an enveloping novel like this one – an immersion, a conspiracy of voicings, a great and dread canvas that assembles itself from the staring-back abyss of a small blank page –  to lead us to the places we have always been, and to help us know them for the first time.

Editor’s Note: To learn more about or purchase a copy of A Spy in the Ruins, go to www.regentpress.net or visit Amazon.com.