Lone wolf
Gerard
Donovan is one of those writers who’s been on my secondary
radar since his debut novel Schopenhauer’s Telescope
was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2003. As mental tags go,
one could do worse; and it probably has done no harm either that
I keep conflating him in my mind with the wonderful Gerard Woodward.
Anyway, he has published two novels since then (though his second,
Doctor Salt, he has rewritten for American publication
as Sunless, saying “the sense I was after just
wasn’t in the novel” first time around), and the newest,
Julius Winsome, has just been published in paperback.
A word about the title. If you’re going to
name the novel after your main character, you’d better get
it right, and for me Julius Winsome - the name, not the book -
is only half-right. Julius yes, for a solemn reflective man brought
up by his father on Shakespeare; but Winsome, meaning attractive
or appealing in appearance or character, and with its echoes of
whimsical? Well, I’m not so sure. Yes and no. He sounds
more like a character from children’s fiction to me. Win
some, lose some.
But nomenclature notwithstanding, Julius Winsome
is precisely the sort of character who can head up a novel all
on his own. Donovan has steeped himself in off-the-shelf atmospherics:
the cold Maine winters, the isolated log cabin, the lonely man
and his dog; but he doesn’t milk it. Where others given
this setting (and it might be that Donovan, as an Irish emigrant
to the US, is more detached from the landscape) could make a dense
mess of language that the characters - and reader - can’t
escape from, Donovan keeps it low-key, unfussy, and the tone becomes
gradually devastating without him ever needing to turn up the
volume.
If I were to write my life in one sentence
up till now, I would say that at one point I lived in a cabin
for fifty-one years.
Anyway the dog doesn’t last long; indeed he
dies offstage as chapter one opens with a line that would have
delighted Kingsley Amis, who claimed toward the end of his life
that he could only read books now that began, “A shot rang
out.” Here we have, “I think I heard the shot.”
Close enough.
Julius, “surrounded by 3,282 books”
(sounds like heaven) is about to have his uneventful existence
shattered. It’s been shattered once before, when a woman,
Claire, found him and moved in for a time, and he tells us of
their meeting from several different angles. We also get multiple
tellings of the story of how Claire helped him find another companion
- preparing Julius for her departure, perhaps - in his beloved
terrier Hobbes. For Julius, bereavement is becoming a regular
occurrence, but this time when he is left alone, there is no one
or nothing there to help him cope, and he determines to exact
revenge on whoever shot his dog.
Julius Winsome then becomes a tale of the
dangers of isolation, and how far we can go when we have no one
at our side to temper our responses. “To look for evidence
meant sharpening the details of what was already known,”
which really means reshaping the facts to fit your fears.
What the book does so well is reflect the stasis
of Julius’s life - “I waited for nothing. And nothing
came” - without becoming dull itself. In Julius’s
remote landscape, “distances collapse, time is thrown out,”
and the book achieves a similar trickery by being both spare and
immersive, short but engrossing right up to the breathless closing
chapters.
Julius experiences life in the perpetual present,
with nothing ahead and so little behind him that his days are
occupied memorising lists of Shakespeare’s neologisms which
his father taught him in the cabin as a child.
I feared suddenly that I had reached a time
where life had taught me all it was going to or wanted to. From
this point on it would be a circle for me, always the same again,
and harder to bear at each turn of the wheel when it came round.
It is a call to action, and reflection about our
own lives, and deals with the biggest ideas in asking us to consider
how best to live. …Which I shall do right away, immediately,
just as soon as I finish another book.
John Self
To read more of John Self's book reviews, check
out his blog at
The Asylum.
