FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews Then Came The EveningBy Brian Hart Bloomsbury, 262pp. £11.99
A YOUNG MAN, hardly more than a teenager, arrives at the abandoned homestead where the father he never knew was raised. Slow moving, taut, strongly descriptive, this is Sam Shepard territory and Idaho-born Brian Hart’s remorseless debut sets out to explore the notion of family and the multiple horrors that tends to contain. Young Tracy, the boy, cuts an iconic figure, a frontier man out to carve a life out of the mess his father left behind.
“He walked around to the side of the house and waded into the tall grass, held his hands out to touch it. In places it was up to his stomach. He stepped carefully, moving slowly, smiling. The paint was peeling from the siding and showed bare in places but not much rot. A few nails to suck it in where it sagged wouldn’t hurt . . . He felt something behind him and when he turned there was a fox and it stopped and squatted and lowered its ears. It was mottled grey and red, ragged with molt. Tracy thought it was ugly, for a fox.”
The young man is idealistic, but Hart idealises nothing in his bleak, graceful novel. Tracy, was born after his mother, Iona, had deserted his father, Bandy Dorner. He wants to create a home, his intentions are good, and clear to even the initially suspicious old neighbour who appears on the scene prepared for whatever new hell the Dorner clan is about to ignite.
Hart has already introduced Bandy Dorner, Vietnam vet and loser. In the powerful opening chapter, a flashback, he had woken to discover he had drunkenly driven into a canal. Worse still, his wife, then pregnant, may have died in the fire that destroyed their cabin, built near the family homestead. His father had attempted to stop the police from charging Bandy with setting fire to the cabin. But within minutes, Bandy had to deal with another crime; he shot one of the unsuspecting country cops dead.
Hart sets out to look at a family that never was. The son is honest and determined, not quite a cliché. His mother, Iona, having escaped Bundy, lived for a short time with her lover before that fell apart leaving her to co-exist with her crazed sister, Faith.
The two women share little. Hostile to each other, they prey upon men, but are invariably more preyed upon. The descriptions of Iona’s squalid, despairing life are astonishing. She drags herself through days of dope and half-hearted sex. “Then it was her birthday and she was sitting at a picnic table on an overwatered patch of grass near the truck wash having a cigarette. It was her lunch break. She rolled the cigarette between her thumb and forefinger and looked at it.”
Several characters in this novel have reached a point at which they simply have to stop and wonder at what has happened to them. The neighbour articulates it best when he remarks in passing that he has been told that old men tend to re-write their lives. For young Tracy it is the chance of a beginning; for Iona it is simply more of the same. Meanwhile, in the prison where he has been serving his sentence for murder, Bandy is approaching release and is also seriously ill.
It is a good novel, vividly written, but restrained and felt. There is a human sympathy at work, but no sentiment. Hart thrives on his presentation of the ordinary. There are flashes of Pete Dexter, without the big gestures. Hart, in common with his characters, is feeling his way.
One of the strongest sequences in the narrative occurs early on. Tracy is intent on repairing the family home. His kindly neighbour, the man who had initially challenged him, gets him a job with a local builder. Tracy does well, but he has a weakness; a fear of heights.
True to his dreamer’s temperament, the young man tries to confront his fear. When he is alone, he climbs on to the roof of his house and falls. This fall, the sensation of crashing through space as described by Hart may well be the best reason for reading this novel. The writing achieves a purity that will make the reader gasp. It is remarkable, the drama of “a couple of long seconds”; only someone who has actually fallen could have described it so well. Or perhaps, Hart was merely inspired as he is, at times, throughout the narrative.
News of her son’s accident brings Iona, panicked and dizzy from dope, to his hospital room, and, more importantly, back to a place she had left 20 years earlier, when she was young. Her awareness of her physical collapse is poignant. Here is a woman who now would rather be drunk or asleep – but something is preventing her.
Hart examines the way instinct works. It is an intense novel, dreary, realistic. Bandy is also summoned by the accident. He sets off to meet a son he has never seen. Instead of a child, he is confronted by a man in a wheelchair. When Iona first sees him she remarks on how bad he looks and bluntly asks: “Are you dying?”
Later, in the absence of all hope, Bandy thinks he can reconnect with the numb, stoic wife who left him all those years ago and is herself a ghost.
Iona and Bandy find themselves sharing the house their son has attempted to save. It is awkward. The weakest dialogue is in the exchanges between Iona and Bandy, yet even so Hart succeeds in conveying that the couple have moved beyond anger to a weary, tentative affection. Anger has ruled, and ruined, Bandy’s life. But he reluctantly makes one final effort at what he thinks might be a solution when he agrees to go along with a dubious project devised by a con in whose debt he remains.
It is a perversely heroic gesture and here Hart falters closely into melodrama. But fate keeps a stronger hold, as does realism, albeit this part of the novel is slightly theatrical. Hart has brought a large, demanding and stark landscape to life; he has placed a small group of convincing characters in it. Iona and Bandy are about as star-crossed as it is possible to be.
In his quietly philosophical, eloquent way, Brian Hart is saying this is how some lives, perhaps most lives, are paralysed by chance and bad timing.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
