Beating for Light: The Story of Isaac Rosenberg - Softcover

Akers, Geoff

Softcover

ISBN 10: 095474280X ISBN 13: 9780954742805

Publisher: Juniper Books, 2006

Synopsis

Rare Book

About this title

Review

"A great theme and taut story telling: I much enjoyed it." Andrew Marr -- Andrew Marr: Chief Political Correspondent for the BBC

From the Publisher

Beating for Light

Geoff Akers
Juniper Books, £9.99

RUPERT Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen: they all sit proudly in the pantheon of War Poets. But what about Isaac Rosenberg? Well - he does too, sort of.

Conventional wisdom has it that Rosenberg's deeply humble background - all the other poets were officers, Rosenberg was a private - and his untimely death have conspired to deny him his superior place in that pantheon. Geoff Akers' Beating for Light sets out to put this right.

The book is a historical novel; a fiction. Akers uses a number of sources and datum points and joins the dots skilfully with his own prose. The dialogue, the characterisation, the action, the sex: these are all fleshed out by the imagination of the author.

The story is almost a cliché. A son of poor Jewish immigrants in Victorian/Edwardian London, Rosenberg receives an artistic education. He paints with some success and moves to the colonies for his health and to escape unrequited love. Lecturing, painting, and seduced by a rich woman, he finds material success, but perversely turns his back on it all for the sake of his art. He returns to Britain and enlists as a private in the army in October 1915.

His refusal of promotion, his eschewing of the chance to be a war artist, the turbulent relationship with his patron, his grindingly basic life at the lowest level in the army, his death on active service in the last few months of the war; all seem inevitable. Even the fact that he has no known grave somehow resonates with the picture of this gloomy, inarticulate, self-absorbed young man.

Akers performs a double service. Historical novels, if they are to be of any greater merit than The Archers, must tell us something of a person or period we don't know already. Akers paints a vivid picture of Rosenberg the person. One is struck with a sense of unrelieved, drab melo-misery, but this is probably not far from the truth. It's a good story well told. He also helps us to interpret Rosenberg's poetry, which is not the easiest to penetrate. Rosenberg was not an easy man, and neither is he an easy poet. Careful study, imagination and perseverance will reward the poetry student with a precious find in Rosenberg. A read of Beating for Light will also help, but Sassoon, and those who are more accessible on first read, always have the advantage.

Akers and Rosenberg in one sense face a similar challenge. They are both trying to describe something which ultimately we cannot share; something indescribable. Rosenberg is trying to express the horror of war to those who haven't experienced it. While some write or paint, many resort to silence; Rosenberg tries with poetry.

Akers is seeking to enlighten us about an introspective, lowly, gloomy, inaccessible, brilliant Jewish poet who was killed in the depths of his misery, yet at the height of his powers.

Some use the lecture hall; others use biography; Akers' medium is historical fiction. Notwithstanding the impossibility of their tasks, all succeed in advancing our understanding and we are the richer for their efforts.
Ian Gardiner - Scotland on Sunday

Edition details

• Publisher: Juniper Books
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 095474280X
• ISBN 13: 9780954742805
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 311