Maria Hyland
The depleted prose of this novel drags you inexorably into its universe. At the beginning you are aware of absences – the lack of a certain vitality, a missing layer of self-consciousness, the functional way other people behave. But after a hundred pages, this novel has the disconcerting power to narrow down the complexity of the world. You are focussed on the now, you accept the categorical claim this is how.
Patrick moves into a boarding house to start a new job in a small seaside town. It is England in the late 60’s. The year can only be deduced indirectly – in his daily life Patrick does not encounter the familiar landmarks of the era. When he plays pop music on the car radio it is simply that, popular music. He works as a mechanic in the local garage and struggles to get on well with the two other lads in the boarding house. They are college-educated, but Patrick’s difficulty in getting on with them is only partially a difference of class. Patrick lacks insight into other people. Other humans are like an alien species to him. This doesn’t come across as endearing. Yet those others seem to like him. The reader guesses that Patrick’s account (it’s a first person novel) doesn’t adequately convey how he appears to others.
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We get the background on Patrick before he moved into the boarding house. He left his home town because of a failed relationship with his girlfriend. When his mother comes to visit she is full of chat and gets on well with the landlady and boarders. But Patrick resents every second of her presence. He hides in his room to have a few minutes away from her. The reader is suspended in ambiguity and searches in vain for some hint that Patrick’s resentment is justified. By all appearances she seems an ordinary mother.
And so it goes: we witness even Patrick’s own actions without knowing what emotion underlies them. Most likely none. He kills his fellow boarder in an impulsive action and afterwards feels sure that others will recognise the act as an accident. An accident in the way one might absent-mindedly pick at a scab and suddenly realise there’s blood.
But we are deeply embedded in Patrick’s world, and it is possible that this is the real one, and that motives and guilt are just a load of talk. Patrick has no explanation for what happened, and doesn’t dwell on it apart from thinking how stupid he has been. But he seems to comprehend with his whole body the significance of the killing: he gets short of breath and vomits. He loses weight. And as is typical for this narrative, it is not clear whether this stems from unexpressed guilt or whether it is dread of the future.
Like Hume’s project of introspection which failed to discover any necessary connection between cause and effect, the whole novel is a close observation which fails to find a necessary connection between motive and act. The motivation is constructed after the act. This is a pared-down world. On a critical note, it is consistent that the narrative conforms to Patrick’s narrowed-down awareness of the world about him. But occasionally other characters speak in a limited way, lacking light-heartedness or spontaneity. It could be argued that Patrick’s account omits any such vividness/irony/insight on the part of others because he simply would fail to notice it. For me however these were moments when I felt in an artificial world.
Patrick certainly is not at home in his body or comfortable with touch. He comes across as malformed. His instincts are askew. The usual concepts of psychology cannot be easily applied to him. Yet he is human for all that.
The novel is breath-taking in its consistency as a project. It’s hard to discern authorial motive – the author’s purpose in subjecting the reader to this experience. Though the narrative forces the reader to keep turning the pages, this is far from entertainment.
The novel seems to be destined to trail off as a day-by-day account of prison life, but then opens out to new perspectives at the end.
Valancourt The Viaduct reissue
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Irish Times Q+A