This was wonderful. A father travels from Northern Ireland and drives across a snow-bound Scotland and Northern England to pick up his son, ill and stranded, for Christmas. On the way, the father must navigate the painful memories surrounding his other son. The story is heart-wrenching and, told drip by drip, it keeps you guessing, and hoping, and dreading, and praying, until the end. And there are passages of description, fresh and original and deadly with their pinpoint accuracy, that are among the best that I have ever read. (He is particularly up-to-date in his references to modern technology such as drones and satnav.)
Selected quotes (page references from the Bloomsbury paperback edition 2018)
- "I look behind me but hear only the wind as it seethes through the trees, smoking spindrift and making the whole world shiver." (2)
- "the skittering night tracks of some creature in a confused pursuit of food." (3) Predictive pathetic fallacy.
- "When I open the car door, the lock grinds in a semi-frozen complaint." (4)
- "There have been days recently when I've thought I'm not much more than some little pinhole hoping for the world's image to finally form into permanence." (5)
- "She's wearing it over her pyjamas and the pink bottoms froth over the top of her boots." (7) Froth!
- "All the normal sounds of student life collapsed into silence as if the falls of snow have smothered them and in their place only the building's assertion of ownership, with its inexplicable stretches and strains, of the snow pressing down on the roof. Pressing down like the cold weight of loneliness." (17)
- "A son so full of shit that it leaches to the surface of his skin and finds expression in pitted blemishes like some piece of bruised fruit." (38) Anger, and love, and breadcrumbs within the most incredible image.
- "I've started to wonder if there's always a truth that is given to us so we never discover other, more inconvenient ones." (38)
- "Washed up in the wake of our history your story doesn't even belong to you any more - someone else can claim ownership of it, make it part of theirs." (39)
- "a particular shape of tree that looks like it's wearing a wind-shivered wedding dress." (40) Wow!
- "It's one of the paradoxes of parenting that most of the time things work best when space is offered." (41)
- "There are things I haven't told her and which I think I can't without risking everything I want and need." (57)
- "The women swarm together in a tight phalanx of smiles" (59)
- "Most of the weddings I get to see ... seem steeped in some sugary concoction of candyfloss and tinsel and look as if they might combust at the first spark of reality." (59)
- "A theme park with a tourist shop and fifty-seven varieties of shortbread and kilted kitsch." (60)
- "Things are more complicated than choosing between what I think is right and what I don't know is wrong." (60)
- "He takes just long enough to answer his phone to allow me to torture myself with a flail of dark imaginings" (82) !!!!
- "Mary becomes the heroine, the holy object of veneration, and Joseph fades into the shadows forever." (102)
- "She never ran out of patience and you can't ask more than that from a teacher." (110)
- "the feel of an A&E department with its plastic chairs, bruised surfaces with a preponderance of black scuff marks from trainers, and posters that exhort us to report various crimes such as domestic abuse and remind us of a range of civic responsibilities." (114)
- "a mirrored couple who are equally badly overweight and wearing matching grey tracksuits where even the stains seem synchronised." (115)
- "the city itself is a palimpsest." (136)
- "all of us are frightened because as we stand at the graveside we encounter full face the shuddering dominion of death." (149)
- "Young men and women sleeping in the city's crevices." (161)
- "I press delete and let him go." (162)
Probably the best book I have read this year.
May 2022; 165 pages
Other books by Irish authors reviewed in this blog can be found here.
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