FICTION: GILES NEWINGTONreviews The IlluminationBy Kevin Brockmeier Jonathan Cape, 257pp £16.99
‘I LOVE THE last question you ask me before bedtime. I love the way you alphabetize the CDs, but arrange the books by height. I love you in your blue winter coat that looks like upholstery fabric. I love the scent of your hair just after you’ve taken a shower . . .”
Had enough? No? Well, there's plenty more where that came from in American writer Kevin Brockmeier's The Illumination, which follows the journey of a book of love notes, transcribed by the recipient before her death in a car accident.
Wrongly believing that her husband, who wrote the notes, has also been fatally injured, one of the woman’s last acts is to pass on the treasured notebook to Carol Ann, a fellow patient in her hospital ward, from where it passes through the hands of the five more characters whose stories make up the rest of Brockmeier’s third novel.
One of the writers on Granta's Best of Young American Novelists list in 2007, Brockmeier tends to set himself restrictive challenges, what he calls "ground rules", in his work. His previous novels, The Truth About Celiaand The Brief History of the Dead, are, respectively, a book within a book and a complex fantasy about a limbo city inhabited by the recently dead (who must cease to exist entirely once they are forgotten by those still living).
In The Illuminationit could be problematic to make the potentially cloying device of love notes so central, but Brockmeier's subtle and suggestive way with their usage means he more or less gets away with it.
For the ulcer-afflicted author Nina, the notebook provides artistic inspiration for a story she is writing; for the determinedly silent, slightly autistic 10-year-old Chuck, who feels an empathy with objects, the book is something to look after; for the homeless bookseller Morse, it is the only volume he himself reads.
But the tracking of the notes is not the only ground rule observed by Brockmeier. The book’s other central conceit is the “illumination” of its title, a sudden and inexplicable change in the human condition whereby the sites of people’s wounds and pain are lit up. In this new world of transparency, the suffering of each person is a light show, with everything from toothaches and bruises to diseased organs and lethal tumours emitting their own contribution to the collective display.
Again, the imaginative potential of this idea is well exploited by Brockmeier. All over the world, physical suffering, caused by anything from self-harm to casual violence to natural catastrophe, becomes a beautiful spectacle, something the disillusioned evangelist Ryan, one of the book’s most interesting characters, suspects may give pleasure to the cruelly distant God he is no longer sure he believes in.
Perhaps, Ryan speculates, God “viewed their bodies as a doctor would – so many sorry ageing structures of blood and tissue, each displaying its own particular debility. Their wounds were majestic to him.”
Apart from Ryan, the characters unquestioningly accept their unexplained illumination, and it is implied that the visibility of their pain ultimately may help them to be a little kinder to each other.
But whether the book’s initial premise pleases or irritates, it is clear that Brockmeier is depending on his language and his characters to make it work.
While the narratives shift nimbly across time and continents, and while the gentle southern music of Arkansas-born Brockmeier’s prose is well-suited to his theme of human fragility, overall the novel never quite moves beyond the sense that it is an exercise, a frame for fine writing.
One or two of the characters do more than flicker into life, and the mood at times has the mystery and intensity of a story by Haruki Marukami, though without the latter's page-turning narrative drive, the lack of which is The Illumination's main weakness – that and the love note that starts "I love your giggle fits . . ."
GILES NEWINGTONis an Irish Timesjournalist
