Patience by Toby Litt review: The world from a curious angle

Patience

Author: Toby Litt

ISBN-13: 9781910296899

Publisher: Galley Beggar Press

Guideline Price: £9.99

It is 1979 and Elliott lives in an orphanage. He uses a wheelchair because he is unable to speak or move very much. Elliott’s head rests perpetually on either his left shoulder or his right, so he sees the world always at an angle. And this perspective, it turns out, is fresh, unusual and completely charming.

Toby Litt’s novel Patience is the story of Elliott’s brief but treasured friendship with a blind mute boy named Jim. Although he is called – and sometimes calls himself – a “spastic”, “mongoloid”, or “imbecile”, it very quickly becomes clear that Elliott is hugely intelligent. He has impressive powers of observation and an astonishingly detailed memory. He may not be able to speak or gesture clearly, but his other senses are powerful. He can tell from a child’s smell how long they have left in the orphanage: “if the girls started to smell of iron and fishpaste or orange marmalade and drains then I knew they would soon be leaving us to go to a women-only ward”. He can distinguish between the songs of a greenfinch and a blackbird, and he has perfect pitch.

As the book’s title signals, Elliott also has infinite patience. The Catholic nuns who run the orphanage leave him parked for hours at a time in one of two places: facing a window on to a courtyard, or, if they think he needs calming down, in front of a blank white wall. This view, though, is far from uninspiring for Elliott, who is never bored. Rather he is fascinated by its gradual changes in colour as the sun moves across the sky and by the myriad marks and scuffs to the paint, each of which tells a story.

New joy

This has been Elliott’s daily routine for seven years when one day Jim arrives, unable to see or speak, and immediately makes himself popular with the other children by defying the sisters’ senseless rules. In Jim’s bold actions, Elliott sees a chance for escape – to fulfil his life’s ambition of going beyond the wooden gate at the end of the corridor, down in the lift, and out into the green world beyond. With Jim’s arrival “nothing had changed except potentially everything. I still needed patience lots of patience but now I needed it to wait for something not just to wait for the end of every something meaning death my death”.

Music is the key to Elliott and Jim’s ability to communicate. By humming the national anthem or happy birthday or a Beatles song, Elliott can convey specific instructions: “Go go go” or “stop” or “I want you to hold my hand”. Together they navigate the dorms and corridors of the orphanage. And even when Jim is not making Elliott do a wheelie in his chair, his company brings a new kind of joy: “The sound of Jim’s laughter was round like the plastic bowls and it did not fly away from itself like a broken thing but turned always back in to gurgle and restart as a giggle and thus I knew for certain Jim had known love.”

Comma-free zone

Elliot’s voice is full of sincerity and enthusiasm, expressed in a style achieved partly through the total absence of commas. This style is laboured, to be sure – readers are asked to be patient with him from the start – but laboured in ways that are endearing rather than frustrating. Unlike a lot of people, Elliott “cared about such things as accuracy of verbal expression with a passion that became an ethic because I so often thought how exactly would I say this or that were I able to speak”. On nights when the pain in his spine keeps him from sleeping, he consolidates the new vocabulary in his “word-hoard”, which includes a decent amount of Latin gleaned from church services. For him, words are “more wonderfully radiant with grace than their everyday speakers and users ever know plangent quiescent rambunctious Sisyphean”.

There is the hint of a better future for Elliott, one that involves the embrace of medical science and the release of his muscles from “overenthusiasm”. But that is not the story of Patience, which is at once much smaller and infinitely richer. Elliott’s optimism, maintained despite chronic physical pain, witnessing trauma, abandonment, and excruciating frustration, is infectious. His story is full of humour as well as quiet tragedy. By giving voice to the kind of character often assumed to have nothing to say, Litt reminds us to slow down, be patient, remain curious, and find joy in the little things in life.

Ellen Jones is a researcher, editor, and literary translator from Spanish. Her translation of Rodrigo Fuentes’s Trout, Belly Up is published by Charco Press.