JOIN USThe View on the Way Down
Rebecca WaitPicador2014,
pp 316
Rs 350
In her assured debut novel centred around a single fatal act, Rebecca Wait manages adroitly to keep the narrative moving forward while unspooling the past. Telling the story of one family coping with the absence of one, then another member, Wait first lets it unfold in the voice of Jamie, who lives in isolation. Later, we get a perspective on the circumstances surrounding the death of his elder brother Kit, through the eyes of sister Emma and parents Rose and Joe.
Nothing is the same for the Stewarts after Kit’s death; nothing can ever be the same. Jamie is forced to leave home, Emma seeks solace in food on suddenly losing not one but two brothers, and Joe and Rose try to carry on. They are all trying to come to terms with what happened in the last hours of Kit’s life.
However, due to their own confused, only too human, handling of events, each of the characters is distanced from each other at a time when they ought to be comforting each other in grief. They take time ‘trying to fit what they knew now with what they knew then’. Emma seeks support in religion, and this adds another dimension to the book. In a terrible world where Christ himself had to cry, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” some of the psalms and hymns help Emma cope with the “terrors of death”, the stark reality of ‘the flimsiness of the partition between life and death’. Halfway through the novel one understands that the theme is not so much death, even if untimely, but the ways in which a life can come unmoored, whether from depression or mental illness. Wait says she wanted to write about “the chaos of depression and anxiety that can rise up out of nowhere to take someone apart”. From her own experience, she knew that “depression was the darkness beyond language” and yet as a writer, Wait had to “describe the indescribable.”
This she has done in simple prose that acts like clear glass. Wait reveals the inside of Jamie’s head, where the ‘limitless terror’ of chaos reigns. From his viewpoint, it is clear that one cannot resist events that can engulf one even before one has time to think. There is a sense of falling, among the many signs that presage the ‘dismantling of personality’. In hindsight, those signs all point to tragedy, only they are mis-read or ignored in real time, real life. ‘It was coming,’ he muses, remembering an outwardly normal family outing to the beach, ‘only they didn’t realise it’.
Glimpses of the past are revealed in tantalising bits, never enough to get the whole story at one go, so one is compelled to read on. However, at a certain point in the novel, when all the facts have not yet been revealed, one begins to wonder just how terrible an act could it be, that led to Jamie being banished. Pages ahead, the reader is plunged without warning into the horror of the moment, and the act of reading becomes complicit in Kit and Jamie’s simple logic.
There is consolation for the reader. Wait offers the Stewarts some redemption in the end. “How short-sighted to have blamed Jamie for tearing the family apart, Joe thought. It was he who had done that. And what was perhaps worse was that somewhere, deep down, he’d blamed Kit as well... It had been so easy at the time to see Kit’s death as the end of everything. But of course, it wasn’t.” If, as a family, they embrace truth in a clear-eyed way, a truth that is devastating, they may be able to retrace their journey back to the centre that once held them together.