Serving up half a story

The internet blurb summarised Stephen Clayton’s novel The Art Of Being Dead as “a young man’s determination to live in emotional isolation.”

Though many years have passed since I read Jean Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea, set in a small coastal town in France in 1932, that reference to Clayton’s book immediately revived a memory about Sartre’s book and its existential hero, Antoine Roquentin: “I live alone, entirely alone. I never speak to anyone, never; I receive nothing, I give nothing.”

My early impression, that this West Yorkshire writer’s debut novel was also about solitude, viewing life through the second or third person, turned out to be mistaken, however.

In The Art Of Being Dead, immature Jonathan, not connected in any vital way either to his own life – he makes a half-hearted attempt at suicide – or the lives of others, gets caught up in aiding and abetting an angry young man called Kieran who murders a shopkeeper and rapes a mutual friend, Diana.

Kieran is what the readers of Sartre would recognise as a delusional: a criminal who believes that acts of violence free him from the restrictions and conventions of ordinary life that bind the likes of Jonathan. He becomes the hapless Jonathan’s alter ego, his Hyde to Jonathan’s Jekyll. Like Vladimir and Estragon in Waiting For Godot, these two characters become tied to one another.

This is also a book of two halves, the first related through the eyes of Jonathan – he interprets people’s motives and moods. Then the writing moves into the present tense and Kieran directly enters the story.

“Like the shopkeeper and Diana and everybody else I meet, Jonathan can only truly be himself when he devolves to somebody else all responsibility for his character and actions,” Kieran tells the reader.

Shortly before he does, Jonathan confesses: “Over the last few weeks our lives have become so inextricably linked that I doubt that I could go on living in any meaningful way, without his presence.”

Kieran knows who he is; but Jonathan can only define himself through his attachment to Kieran.

“I realise that I know nothing of other people: how they think; how they view the world; how they construct the personality that serves them best; how they manipulate their surroundings to give them satisfaction and hope and some glimpse, however slight, of salvation,” says Jonathan.

Jonathan hides Keiran in a deserted mill, a building with childhood associations. Kieran has a bad accident. As his wound turns gangrenous, Jonathan moves into the mill to stay with Kieran, to die with him. Life is pointless; only in death will he find mitigation, perfection even – hence the book’s title.

For this to work, though, the reader must feel some engagement with these two characters. I did not. By page 230 I’d had enough.

The late Harold Pinter, in his screenplay The Servant and his stageplay The Caretaker, is able to draw you in to the cat’s cradle of manipulation and voyeurism by which motive and intention are revealed. While that happens in part in the first part of the book, the style of part two pushes you away, making the reader a spectator of a quasi-philosophical debate about the nature of being.