Changes

The novel isn't without it's problems. Duffy's triumph in recreating Mme Rimbaud is some senses swamps our vision of her son, just as his detailed account of Rimbaud's second Nemesis, the poet Verlaine, dominates this section of the novel. Young Rimbaud himself is a cipher compared with the she-dragon and the dissolute and rapidly dissolving older poet decaying into madness. It is not until we see Rimbaud the African trader in total bourgeois contrast to the Parisienne radical that the detail of Arthur, the insights into his mind and torments really comes to the fore. But even then Duffy does not really attempt to deal with the mystery of the great poet abandoning poetry before the age of twenty, and never writing again.

But it would be wrong to characterise this novel as a failure. Duffy has achieved what I am sure he set out to do, to recreate the emotional circumstances and climate of Rimbaud's life; not to offer us easy solutions but to place us in the turmoil created by the clash of forces that beset the young man throughout his life (he died at only 37). And while that might not address the central issue of how Rimbaud become at 16 the outstanding poetic genius of his generation, and why just 4 years later he ceased writing forever, the novel doesn't ignore the poetry itself. Indeed if the test of a literary biography is that it makes you go back to the literary works themselves, then Duffy more than passes that test. He has a good understanding of the poetry scene of fin-de-siecle Paris, and more than that he has a great enthusiasm for Rimbaud's work which is infectious.