When grief strikes

I Saw a Man Owen Sheers
Faber & Faber
2015, pp 257, Rs 316 (Kindle)

Something bad has happened, we learn in the first sentence of Owen Sheers’s new novel, I Saw a Man, something that “changed all of their lives.” It happened because one day, during a wiltingly steamy heat wave in London, a man named Michael Turner stepped through the open back door of his neighbours’ apparently empty house.

Michael is not a burglar, a murderer, a pedophile or a stalker — our imaginations, thrown off balance by the book’s arresting opening, scroll through possibilities — but a friend of the people who live there, Josh and Samantha Nelson and their two little girls. He has an innocent reason for his visit: He wants to retrieve a screwdriver Josh had borrowed. But he has come at a singularly unfortunate time.

Even this basic scene-setting information is parceled out slowly, gradually, in I Saw a Man. The book takes its time unlocking its secrets, with long detours, side trips and doublings-back into the complex earlier stories of its protagonists and also — mysteriously, for a time — of a US Army major whose life is somehow intertwined with Michael’s.

Michael is an “immersion journalist,” specialising in long narrative pieces in which he bores deep into his subjects’ psyches. Rived by grief over the sudden death of his wife, Caroline, he has sold their house in Wales and moved to an apartment near Hampstead Heath in London. There he is trying to write a new book and find some purpose to his shattered life.

After meeting Michael in the neighbourhood, Josh and Samantha readily welcome him into their family. He shares their dinners, helps with their daughters’ homework, jogs with Josh in the morning and meets Samantha for coffee during the day. The Nelsons’ marriage looks idyllic, but isn’t. Josh is a workaholic with a temper and a wandering eye; Samantha is silent and resentful. They both drink too much. Even worse, Josh works at Lehman Bros., and the year is 2008.

It is a measure of Sheers’ artfulness and exquisite narrative control that even though he withholds for half of the novel the solution to the mystery posed in the first paragraph, he never loses us. The suspense is almost physically frustrating, the kind you feel when you peer at a sealed envelope containing important information and addressed to someone who isn’t yet home, or when a friend refuses to get to the point of a story and keeps dancing off in ancillary directions. But Sheers knows when to let the line out and when to reel it in.

When the terrible moment finally comes, it does indeed change everything. And then the book becomes a kind of emotional suspense story, an extended examination of grief, responsibility, guilt and redemption. What does Michael do next? How is this connected to the actions of the Army officer? How does a person who has done an awful thing live with himself? What if he has lied about it? Who is most served by a confession — the perpetrator or the victim? Is healing helped — if healing is possible at all — by telling, or knowing, the complete tale of what happened?

Sheers’ first novel, Resistance (2007), about the effects of World War II on a small Welsh town, has its own riveting beginning: All the local men steal out of the valley one night — no warning, no explanation to the women left behind — to enlist. Among his poems is Pink Mist, a tour-de-force narrative work from 2013 about three friends from Bristol sent to fight in Afghanistan.

The collateral damage of war has long been a preoccupation of Sheers, and it is a thread in I Saw a Man, too, but it takes a while to realise that. He is particularly good on the ravages of grief. You can hear his poet’s voice in his sharp, taut and often lyrically beautiful language: Josh and Samantha are “honeycombed with disappointment”; the bereaved are like “life prisoners and locked-in sufferers.” At a chilling moment that tilts everything slightly, Michael is startled by something he sees in Josh’s expression — a look of “long-held animosity, not a sudden aversion.”

Sometimes the plot can strain credibility, but Sheers’ writing is so psychologically astute that it hardly matters. By the end, the questions grow more profound, addressing storytelling itself — how it can mislead but also how it can transform. Stories that go untold, Michael thinks, remembering a conversation he had with his wife, are “like landfill, unseen but still there, seeping into the soil.”

The book ends with an unexpected turn that throws a new light on everything we have just read. Michael, it turns out, has discarded the book he was working on before and written something else entirely. It is unclear whom, besides himself, these new pages are meant to benefit, but they will have to do for now. “At least in them Michael had finally told their story,” Sheers writes. “He’d offered what he could. He had brought it into the world.”