G. is the illegitimate son of an American divorcee and an Italian candy manufacturer who grows up in England. That makes him, in some sense, both no one and everyone, an heir to the international turbulence of the late 19th century that, as we know and he does not yet, will blow up into the conflagration of World War I. Most of his life is marked not by politics, but sex, beginning with his seduction by his own aunt in that English country house and continuing on through a series of reckless affairs with everyone from chambermaids to Austrian noblewomen. But love for G. is represented by the face of a Roman woman who protected him when, as a child, he escaped a visit to his father and ended up in the barricades of a nationalist uprising. So perhaps sex and revolution are tied together from the very beginning, something that G. will have to relearn when, after years of tomcatting around, he casually accepts a reckless request to do a little light spycraft in the city of Trieste, where Serbian nationalists are beginning to become suspicious not only of their Austro-Hungarian overlords, but Italians like G.--if that's what he is--as well.
John Berger was better known as an art critic whose Ways of Seeing (which I have not read) has been overwhelmingly influential. From time to time, G. reads like a novel by an essayist, who frequently interrupts the narrative to expound on the various emotional and visual dynamics that occur between G. and his several lovers. (One of Berger's most enduring ideas is the male gaze, which says something like "men watch women while women watch themselves being watched," and that idea is all over G. as well.) Berger isn't hiding his hand; the "I" here is so strong that Berger will often compare the events of the novel to things that (presumably) happen in his own life, or baldly declare the struggles of composing the text: "I cannot continue this account of the eleven-year-old boy in Milan on 6 May 1898. From this point on everything I write will either converge upon a final full stop or else disperse so widely that it will become incoherent." The dryness of Berger's essayistic style contrast in an effective and interesting way with the heedlessness of G., who follows his passions at every turn. The reader identifies more strongly with that "I" than it does G., a man who we suspect would probably be incapable of thinking very articulately about what he's doing, or why, or how he fits into the larger context of European history as it passes from the age of revolution to the age of total war.
For all that, there is a novel here, and an interesting one. More or less, it can be split into three segments, the first being G.'s conception and childhood and the second being a long middle set in the town of Domodossola, where a friend and fellow pilot is attempting to be the first to cross the Alps in an airplane. In a way I won't overexplain he both succeeds and fails, and this perhaps sets the tone for the third part, with G. in Trieste. G. enlists a Bosnian peasant woman as his plus-one to a ball where he intends to seduce the aforementioned Austrian noblewoman, causing a terrific scandal. Is G.'s act political, or not? Is he acting merely out of lust for the Bosnian woman, or is he intending to indict the Austrians by shoving the political iniquities and instabilities of their rule in their faces? Are political and revolutionary deeds acts of will or are they something closer to lust, rising from someplace deeper within? These are the questions that make G., I thought, a strange and provocative work.
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