Dave's Book Blog: "Upperdown" by David Brennan

The first thing you notice is the enormously distinctive narrative voice, characterised by expressions such as “I knows I ...” and “I wonders I” in which the first person appears both before and after the verb, and as represented in the first few lines: “I gets up and cranks the whistling tune to the kettle and the bell of a broken belly. Job is physicist. Calculating the curvature of butterfly wings and the amount of resolution needed to determine the thickness of nothing. I knows the flow. At times I can see it, smell it, hear it whispering little trickies in me ears, almost lick the tongue with it, but I can’t capture it.” (Ch 1) The first person present tense narrator is a Professor of Physics on an extended sabbatical, endeavouring to prove the Riemann hypothesis (about a mathematical function that links to the distribution of prime numbers) from the perspective of quantum physics. He doesn’t seem to do much maths (although prime numbers haunt him and there is a hint of the Konigsberg Bridge problem in the geography of the town). Instead, he eats eggs (buying 24, discarding one and cooking a job lot of 23), and rambles around Upperdown in the company of Rex, his three-legged dog, meeting Dickensian characters such as Butcher Morley.

Music is important, and not just for the talented Piano Man. There’s also Petronius O’Grady, the supremely cacophonous busker, and C-flat Rebecca who strums a guitar. The Professor has perfect pitch and identifies the key signature of every sound he hears, from birdsong to busker. His favourite expression is “Fiddle dai fiddle day fiddle day di oh.” But he has secrets, including his brother, his sister and his mother.

The inciting incident is his meeting with the Piano Man, a ragamuffin musician dressed in a robe covered in strange mystical and mathematical symbols. The reader swiftly identifies this character as the pied Piper, more so when he rids the town of its rats. The children start to disappear.

The Professor is immediately convinced the Piano Man is a bad ‘un, a feeling intensified when Danny the homeless town drunk informs the professor that the Piano Man has been having sex with Beatrice Nolan whom the Professor is in love with (but he is too cowardly to declare himself). Seeking evidence, the Professor picks up a photograph that has dropped from the Piano Man’s pocket. This becomes the focus of one of the demands of the Piano Man after the children have started to go missing.

The plot then becomes a murder mystery, the suspects including the Piano Man, the beer-swilling red-faced, heading-for-a-heart-attack Butcher of Upperdown, the Professor himself, his brother Ned, Noddy the village idiot, and, perhaps, the Doll Man. Following the genre, we now discover more about the background of the Piano Man and the Professor.

Encountering Danny’s dead body on the riverside, the Professor loses control and smashes the corpses face in with a rock. He then reports the body to the police, which makes detective ‘Mad’ Mulligan (whose investigative strategy reminded me of Porfiry Petrovich from Crime and Punishment) suspect him.

The missing children send the town into a self-destructive frenzy which centres on two town meetings, the second followed by a pagan sacrifice and a full-scale riot. Paranoia rules. Mirroring the breakdown of order in the town is the increasing chaos in the Professor's mind, which leads to violence and a dramatic conclusion.

It's a book about the descent into the madness which lurks in each of us, in our society. Getting rid of the rats seems to trigger the release of this suppressed madness. The characters, all of whom have wonderful names (Bat Hayes the barber, Rashers Iscariot the hardware store owner, Mayor Bullwhip, Peeler Quirk the banker...) are magnificent grotesques, some of whom have intriguing complexities. The plot is perfectly paced with key turning points, the mystery is intriguing and there are hugely original and yet precise descriptions:

“Me left hand tremors slightly, rippled by the waves and weight of existence. An ancient drumbeat resonates in the tap dripping.” (Ch 1)
“The heat is already rising like a thick blanket of wet hell.” (Ch 1)
“I sees row of houses after rows of houses like cabbages planted in a field for giants.” (Ch 1)
“Morley, the mouth of a moon the belly of a hippopotamus” (Ch 1)
“The day is hot like I’m a microbe on the hot wet tongue of a cow.” (Ch 2)
“Someone else screams, and then another, like a train of misery leaving the station.” (Ch 3)
“Giant mechanical beasts lumbering awkwardly like drunk insects. They’re dismantling in intricate dance patterns, gnawing away at the bones, hungry for the marrow within. Machines to rip and pull. Machines to grind, crush and squash.” (Ch 4)

This is a really well written book in so many ways, but the star is the prose.

Selected quotes:

“Been in since yesterday. Stranger in a stranger’s land with money big and talk small. Don’t know what way he’ s cut. ... The get up on him, like he’s the very Jack O Diamonds walked right off the card and into the café. ... A man with a devil inside him. Bouncing to get out. Dancing to get up and howling to get even.” (Ch 1)
“The whole of mankind is in the cusp of my hands and I touches the ivory keys and tempts them into their own sins and salvations and I deliver them to the gates of their own shortcomings, the banks of their own drowning, if you will.” (Ch 1)
“As we walk I talks to me mind of the past. All the years seem to be culminating and pressing down upon me. Atlas grew to love his burden. What was he without his burden or I mine?” (Ch 1)
“Where but are the answers you seeks but in the very places you fears to look.” (Ch 1)
“If thine eye offends thee pluck it out, yes, pluck it out like you’s pulling onions out of the soil.” (Ch 1)
“I explores. I goes into room after room and some is dark and some is bright but I have no way of turning on the light. Each room has its own smell its own taste and its own secrets. Each room is connected to every other room but some rooms is more connected. Each room has its own manipulation its own irregular number of windows and sometimes the curtains is closed and sometimes they’s open. I moves from room to room. Press to press. Cupboard to cupboard and corner to corner. I lies down and tries to pull meself along like a serpent to see things from a different perspective. I moves up the stairs. Crawling sometimes hopping at others. When I enters the room I goes under the beds. I licks the walls. I beat my head off them. I put me fists through the windows. I liquefy and pour meself into the sink and travel through the pipes looking for a colour to cling to. I goes into the electric cables and travel light-speed round the house and out the flashbulbs and still me cannot find the essence of it. The truth of it. The taste of it. The flower of it. The faith of it.” (Ch 1) A real foreshadowing of the madness to come.
“Some things are just unknowable. And even if you know them then you cannot find words to express them. You cannot find notes to play them. They’s in between the white and black keys, down in the dust filled spaces of black matter.” (Ch 1)
“At night the smells intensify and I pass from one sphere of odor into another; from chips boiling in vats of fat, to the smell of the brewery wafting out malty yeast, to the vomit particles of a footpath drunk” (Ch 1)
“You might think that a bell has just a single note but hidden in layers are five distinct notes. The Nominal, an octave higher and normally assigned as the pitch of the bell, the Hum, an octave lower, the Tierce, a minor third which gives a church bell its plaintive sound and the Quint, a perfect fifth. In every bell all five notes must be in accurate tune with the five notes of every other bell.” (Ch 1)
“The women’s all floating round him like butterflies in heat” (Ch 2)
“I thinks I she the most beautiful creature ever to walk the long squawky road of existence.” (Ch 2) Isn't that amazing? It starts off as a ho-hum cliche and then you hit "squawky road"!
“It’s when we wake in the middle of the night that the truth lays itself bare before our very eyes. What we choose to do with it is then up to us.” (Ch 2)
“I focuses on me breathing like a lantern swinging in the arch of π.” (Ch 3)
“I not like noise. No, never have. The key is destroyed” (Ch 3)
“There seems to be in existences such a law, and I’ve seen it confirmed by my own eyes, and the law of which I speak is this. If the help I gives is not returned then bad things happens” (Ch 3)
“We’s like snowflakes whistling in the wind waiting to melt into nothingness.” (Ch 4)
“She’s an awful woman for the talking. She can’t stop. If she stops she’ll drop dead on the floor. She’s bursting with an energy so full that indeed some have remarked that to keep herself going she usurps the energy of those around her.” (Ch 4)
“Ned the kind a man who think everybody owe him something and him never give nothing but trouble in return.” (Ch 4)
“E flat major speaks the morning, mingled in the rays of sun and the rakey wind which drives across this land and brings down upon Upperdown the brunt of its fury.” (Ch 4)
“I looks down at me ill-fitting trousers, stained in patterns random, and I looks at me worn shoes and I thinks I should be mounted on a wooden cross and hung out in a field of turnips to scare away the crows.” (Ch 4)
“Be I the ass pulling the cart with the carrot dangling in front of him? Still, I is happy with the sight of the carrot and the smell of it. Does it not make the journeys a little more bearable?” (Ch 5)
“Tonight I hears the evening creak.” (Ch 5)