Three by Ann Quin

cw: sexual assault

Three is a harrowing, unsettling, sinister and deeply engrossing experimental novel from the late 1960s and Ann Quin, one of the best British writers of that post-war period.

Similar to Quartet by Jean Rhys (which I read a week earlier) but 40 years later, this is much more experimental in terms of form, though also a text about expansion and limits of human relationships. A married couple and their… friend… a younger woman who lives with them in their multiple homes…

Unlike the Jean Rhys, the extramarital fucking here remains ambiguous, but the emotional and confused attachments remain significantly more explicit..

There is more frank discussion of sex and sexuality than is found in Quartet, but whether or not these things are actively happening to the three protagonists is much less clear – everyone is thinking about sex all the time, but how much is fantasy and how much is real is kept – because this is [pre-post-]modernism, baby – unclear.

There is more violence here, too, with the only in-narrative sexual acts described being a pair of increasingly violent sexual assaults perpetrated by the husband on his wife.

The potential of murder, and the implied but unconfirmed suicide of the third person in the marriage, hangs over the novel from the start. The young woman is gone, probably dead, lost at sea… But she’s all they ever talk about…

The text moves between chapters comprised of stream of consciousness omniscient narration that bounces between perspectives of the couple, transcripts of stream of consciousness tape recordings made by both of them and their younger “friend”, and also less experimentally written diaries from the wife and the second woman.

The novel is collage-like… cacophonous… filled with multiple voices all of whom are sad, are angry, are unhappy and are haunted by sex and sexuality in a way that only the British tend to be…

It is the coast… It is the city… It is a marriage on the outs, but it is also one where there is shared play, which does seem to be sinister…

Is everyone fucking the younger woman before her death and/or disappearance … is anyone fucking her???  is no one??? Are the husband and wife both also fucking other people? We never find out… And Quin’s ambiguity is power.

In spite of Three delving much deeper into the presumed consciousnesses and inner lives of its protagonists than Quarter, there is much less clarity of both act and motive…

The three are essentially the only people who appear in the novel in any meaningful way… There are other people, but they aren’t meaningfully described…

What has changed, then, since Jean Rhys wrote a similar narrative 40 years earlier is Quin’s wiser and wider understanding of human psychology and the real reason why these non-traditional nuclear relationships tend to fail… it is not sex itself that is the danger, rather it is repression (the English disease that plagues so many of us still) and the fucked up internalised responses to the sex where all the problems come from…

–///–

Quin’s writing, with its polyphonic voices and frequent shifts in form and perspective, ensures meaning and distinction evaporates during the majority of the passages of the novel … there are no clear indications between dialogue and thought, between speaker and listener, and between who, what, and when is being considered.

This being said, there is never any ambiguity as to the significant topics that are being discussed.

–///–

There is violence, and not just the sexual violence perpetrated by the man against his wife, but randomised violence (or not, we do not know what has been done to potentially provoke people the couple believes are strangers?)…

Crucially, too, there is the violence of the death, of the potential suicide at sea… yet there is no clear note (if arguably hints in her diary), and this is complicated further by the revelation towards the end of the book that a murdered body has been found in the location where the married couple talk about the young woman having killed herself…

Did they kill her together like the Wests? Did they kill her separately? Did neither of them kill her and is this dead body a non-sequiteur?

Was there a suicide and that merely a suicide in the most straightforward possible way, i.e. a person who lost their life to the themselves due to depression and unhappiness and not having anywhere better to be???  or did she end up dead solely as a consequence of being wrapped up in the lives of this older married couple, living with them, playing with them and possibly having sex with them…

(the reader doesn’t definitively know, though maybe one was meant to, maybe that is definitively (if ambiguously) stated in the text and I just missed this for my own English repression is brought to bear on my reading… Did I miss a significant plot point that was included in Three? I honestly don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.)

–///–

Three is a brutal novel about loneliness, about not having anybody you actually love or who actually loves you, about not having people, about being lonely when in a crowd…

It’s about the risks of friendlessness and self-isolation… about the dangers that can be found within domestic settings… about the fact that one can live with a person and never truly be safe or at home with them…

it’s about the dangers of English domesticity, about the risks that can be found when people don’t express themselves to other people and not to themselves…

It’s a timeless tale of England, a timeless timeless timeless tale.

It’s brilliant.

Order now from And Other Stories.