Curious incidents

Admirers of Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love will remember the moment when the science writer Joe Rose realises that his lovestruck stalker, Jed Parry, is not randomly mad, but suffering from a particular psychological disorder, de Clérambault’s syndrome. Joe is relieved, as any of us would be: “There was research to follow through now and I knew exactly where to start. A syndrome was a framework of prediction and it offered a kind of comfort.”

Now, frameworks of prediction are wonderful things, and God knows Joe, by this stage, needs all the comfort he can lay his hands on. But Enduring Love never quite recovers from the hanging of this sign around Jed’s neck. The tensions that McEwan is trying to explore – between science and religion, and art, and love – suddenly start to look clunky and contrived. What, we begin to wonder, is the novel for, if everything can be nailed down quite so easily? (The terrifyingly nihilistic Atonement prompts a similar question: what is the novel for, if storytelling is mere self-serving fabulation?)

In his desire to force a face-off between the Two Cultures, McEwan often seems to be writing himself out of a job. M J Hyland, in her subtle and richly exploratory new novel, adopts the opposite approach, announcing her intention with an epigraph from Nietzsche: “Everything unconditional belongs in pathology.” If action is a function of pathology, all inquiry into motive is pointless, because motive has already been stablished. Yet this is what novels do so well – inquire into motive. You could even argue that it is all they do, or all they should do.

Patrick Oxtoby is a young, working-class man who has quit his university course and travelled to an unidentified seaside town to pursue his childhood ambition to become a car mechanic. To this end, he has brought with him his toolbox, the item he most values in the world. He finds a room at a boarding house where one of the other lodgers, a cocky, alcoholic Cambridge graduate called Welkin, is involved with the landlady in what may just be an innocent flirtation; it’s hard to tell. Actually, it is hard to tell anything much because Oxtoby is such a blank, unfocused narrator; not affectless, exactly – he is capable of showing emotion – but inattentive to all but the most mundane details. (Hyland’s prose here has no descriptive flesh on its bones. Only a conversation about Bond films betrays the year in which the action takes place: 1963.)

Welkin enjoys winding up Oxtoby. He and the other lodger, Flindall, belittle him (“Tell us about life as a mechanic”) and feed him stories we suspect are not true but which Oxtoby believes – for example, that the landlady’s husband was killed when his car became stuck on a railway line. He deliberately leaves the tap running so there is no hot water left for Oxtoby’s bath. He sneaks into his room and steals his alarm clock. He makes winking, ambiguous sexual advances. One day, mutely enraged because he thinks Welkin has stolen his hammer, Oxtoby goes into Welkin’s room while he is asleep and hits him

on the head with an adjustable wrench, killing him. The second half of the novel relays Oxtoby’s adventures in the criminal justice system. It finds him, paradoxically, humanised by prison, by exposure to the paedophiles and rapists and “proper” murderers with whom he seems to have little in common.

Hyland repeatedly goads the reader into diagnosing Oxtoby

in an attempt to understand why he might have committed such a disproportionately brutal crime. (Oxtoby, for his part, has no real idea. He is as inscrutable to himself as he is to us.) Time and again, I caught myself wondering where exactly to place him on

the Asperger’s spectrum, or how schizophrenia manifests itself in its early stages. Offsetting all this, however, is an emphasis on nurture in the form of his family life, especially his violent father and overbearing mother. The beautifully neat ending hints at repressed homosexuality, but it is just a patina: for this reader, at least, Oxtoby’s difficulties with girls are not connected to sex.

What is notable is that none of the people Oxtoby encounters in the novel comments on his strangeness or treats him as a misfit. His lawyer never suggests that he plead insanity, and at his trial both the landlady and the waitress he was dating praise his character. In short, there is no framework of prediction in This Is How. And so, there is no comfort, no comfort at all. l

John O’Connell is the author of “I Told You I Was Ill: Adventures in Hypochondria” (Short Books)

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