"Let Go My Hand" by Edward Docx

Wow.

The title comes from King Lear; it is the moment in Act 4 Scene 6 when the blinded Gloucester has been led by his son Edgar to what he thinks is the cliff-top at Dover, when he tells Edgar to "let go my hand" because he intends to jump.

The first chapter is set in Dover, at the ferry terminal. Lou is driving his Dad in their beaten up, much-used, family camper van, into Europe. Then, fifteen pages in, after a bit of banter, you discover that their destination is the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland where Dad, who is suffering with Motor Neuron Disease,  intends to end his life. And that is one hell of a hook.

As they travel across France Lou's half brothers, twins Ralph (extrovert ex-actor puppeteer, living a single life, crusiing from woman to woman) and Jack (ex journalist, now an insurance agent married to Roman Catholic Siobhan with twin boys of his own and a daughter) join the caravan. They are opposed to Dad's suicide while Lou, the debt-ridden primary carer (and thus with two selfish interests) Is in favour. As they travel family resentments come boiling to the surface, in particular Dad's abandonment of Ralph and Jack's mother to marry Lou's. This is a family at war, shackled together by love.

The story is told by Lou and in the present tense which makes the urgency of whether Dad will or will not go through with it all the more exciting.

There is a great deal of irony in this carefully structured work. For example, they visit the caves in France where there is primitive art. This chapter, entitled Underworld, in which they almost literally encounter the shades of the dead, is the most life-affirming moment of the book; Dad refers to this visit at the end of the book when he says: “All that a human being leaves behind is what he or she has created. Life is all about creation. The only meaning is creation." (P4 Requiem) 

There is a great deal of conflict between the carefully created characters. The twins even talk differently: Ralph is a free spirit with flowing sentences, ready to develop any idea to its absurd end, full of humour and joy. Jack is more practical, a details, man, and his sentences are more controlled and more tightly structured. They both love Lou, even though he is a symbol of their own mother's betrayal; in one memorable scene the boys, acting as baby-sitters, take Lou on from the restaurant to see their mother; she is angry and flies at Lou, they defend him with 'he's only a boy, mum'. 

This book is so well written that the author was able to insert fairly long discussions on the meaning of life without losing my attention. In some of them, one is distracted from the 'author's message' input by clever devices. In the discussion between the twins at the restaurant above, for example, Lou who has asked for lobster because he hasn't had it before, repeatedly asks his brother's how he should tackle it but is ignored. There are many such moments of humour in this book which (a) alleviates the depressing plot (b) allows greater contrast with the sad bits (c) allows savage irony; Dad is having the time of his life in his last few days.

Spoiler alert

I can't really discuss the twist at the end without at least hinting what it is so this is a spoiler alert. The last chapter is shocking and so surprising that I had to read it three times to make sure I understood what it said (and what it didn't say). Aristotle (in his Poetics) tells us that the reversal in tragic drama (which I take to be equivalent to the twist in a modern novel) has to be surprising - and this one surely was - but also that the audience must see the outcome as inevitable with hindsight, that given the characters and the plot the reversal was at least one of a possible set of outcomes. I assume that in the final chapter Lou swims to his death, or at least intends to. I certainly didn't see that coming. I can't think of anything in the book that foreshadowed it. Lou does talk about being in debt, and he is clearly fed up with his carer role, but his girlfriend Eva is waiting for him in a hotel room on the far side of the lake. At least he says she is. It is possible that Eva is simply a figment of Lou's imagination but I can't think of any clue that enabled me to see that. So for me the ending was yes a surprise but no not inevitable, in fact I would say it was wrong. I would be grateful if another reader (or Mr Docx) could show me what I have missed but at the moment Lou's death at the end is so wrong that it spoiled for me what was otherwise an absolute classic.

Docx is a brilliant describer of things and people:

• “Looking at him over there ... it's as though I can feel my heart's fist uncurling and reaching out towards him like those Michelangelo fingers he took me to see one time in the Vatican when I was too young to care or notice.” (P1, Everything affects everyone)
• “Carol’s building was the colour of exhausted white underwear” (P1 Then try for understanding)
• “Above us, the sun is thrown and split by the vast stained-glass windows. Higher than seems possible, the vaulted ceiling appears alive with the play of lapis-lazuli blues, emeralds, ambers, burgundy reds. Great shafts of light fall here and there on the dwarfed human chairs” (P2, The earth’s bright edge)
• “Some kind of pasta with truffles, which has my father more or less singing, but smells to me like socks and tastes like sodden mushrooms.” (P4, Feinschmecker Hochgenuss)

But his true genius is to express the existential angst of life:

• “The lessons that the son takes too heart turn out to be those the father never realised he was teaching.” (P1, Ralph)
• “In headaches and in worry life vaguely leaks away.” (P1, L’autoroute des anglais)
• “I'm on the way to killing my father; and that is making me dislike people who are inattentively alive.” (P1, On the escarpments)
• “Life is about coming to terms with an ever-lengthening list of our losses.” (P1, On the escarpments)
• “We will have become what creation first meant to say when it whispered itself into existence from that bitter bitter nothing all those billions of years ago.” (P2, The earth’s bright edge)
• “Every gene in every life form is going absolutely mental trying to attract someone, something, anything in order to make as much love as physically possible. In order not to be lonely, in order to pass itself on ... Every gene in the world wants to fuck like there's no tomorrow. and you want to know why? Because there isn't any tomorrow. As soon as the fucking stops, we're all dead for eternity.” (P3, Denial)
• “Maybe what sort of person you are comes down to how much truth you can table and how much truth you can take.” (P4 For Whom the Bell Tolls)
• “Most people are going quietly mad inside themselves. And they're all self-medicating ... They're all trying to block out the missed opportunities and the wrong turns.” (P4 For Whom the Bell Tolls)
• “Of course everybody is doolally because that is the nature of being a human on a planet that has no interest in humans. Has to be.” (P4 For Whom the Bell Tolls)
• “The way out of the mid-life crisis turns out to be the realization that life is one long crisis. For everyone.” (P4 For Whom the Bell Tolls)
• “Just as the money worries recede, your body starts packing up. And so then you realize yet another thing ... That you were an animal all along. A mammal. Blood and tissue. Organs and limbs. With an embarrassing and pathetic best-before date.” (P4 For Whom the Bell Tolls)
• “Find a world ... and rise varying to greatness.” (P4, Feinschmecker Hochgenuss)
• “When it comes down to it, we’re a very judgmental species living in a life and death world. Have to be. Has to be. Always were.” (P4 Requiem)
• “What I want to say is this: that we are what we give. We are what we leave behind.” (P4 Requiem)

He can be wickedly, cruelly, brilliantly funny:

• “Just so you know: you’re the opposite of an aphrodisiac. Every time you talk, you push orgasm further down the agenda for the rest of humanity.” (P1, Ralph)
• “ I love my thoughts. ... They are the only thing that it's the slightest bit interesting to me. Imagine if I had to rely on yours.” (P3, Denial)
• “Jack likes his smoking like he likes his aggression ... passive.” (P3 Shooting the rapids)

Other great lines:

• “I was just taking in the words like one of those whales that swallows the entire sea and then spits it all out again and hopes that something nutritious got stuck in the baleen.” (P 1, Dover)
• “You put thick people in uniform and that's what you get ... the revenge of the conceitedly thick.” (P 1, Dover)
• “He's never been able to see that his slice of the world is not the whole cake. Nowhere near. And yet, still ... still he wants urgently to share it because he thinks that everyone else must therefore be starving hungry.” (P1 Then try for understanding)
• “The enlightenment seems to have passed a great number of people by.” (P2, Peage)
• “And there is eternity's other name - Death - everywhere - in the tombs, in the statues, in the flicker of the candles, in the dying bloodstained body hanging in near-naked agony from the great crucifix ahead of us.” (P2, The earth’s bright edge)
• “To stay in the theatre you have to understand and believe two separate and contradictory things ... that what you are watching is not true but also that it is true.” (P2, Puppets and prophets)
• “They're like two of his pupils who have become famous but whose essays he never bothered to read the time.” (P3, Denial)
• “The right to an opinion does not extend to the right to having your opinion taking seriously.” (P4 For Whom the Bell Tolls)
• “Maybe the only reason I don't run and keep running is that I know I'll have to come back - because the world is round and your father is always your father.” (P4 Requiem)

An outstanding book that makes me realise how shallow my own output is.

July 2019; 417 pages