A bewildering failure

FICTION: This Is How By MJ HylandCanongate, 376pp, £12.99

A MAN ARRIVES at a boarding house. He knocks on the door. “I don’t bang hard like a copper, but it’s not as though I’m ashamed to be knocking either.”

It is an odd, pointless comment, almost half-hearted. Ironically it serves to establish the tone of this laboured, dull novel. The narrator is young and apparently traumatised by the abrupt ending to his relationship with a girl who used him, he feels, in order to acquire some confidence.

His arrival at the boarding house is stagey and forced. It is as if Hyland is trying so hard, too hard to make something out of his first encounter with the landlady.

“We face each other in the hallway. I’ve got my back to the door and she’s got her back to the stairs. I should say something but I can’t think what.”

Trust me, Psychoit's not.

The landlady, a young, good-looking widow is very friendly with her young male lodgers. “She comes over, stands close to me.” It is all very ambivalent, undercut by a hint of unspoken innuendo. She looks at his toolkit. He asks, “Do you want me to open it up?” She says “Never mind, I was just curious.”

Most of the dialogue is wooden and flat, at times, downright ridiculous, almost as if attempting some level of parody. But the book is not clever enough for that. Patrick, the narrator, has dropped out of college and has run away from life. So far, so what? It is impossible to engage with this character as he is utterly unconvincing. Even had MJ Hyland not written such a good second novel as Carry Me Downwhich was short-listed for the 2006 Man Booker Prize, any reader would be asking questions as to how a narrative as ill-conceived as This Is Howwas ever published. The fact that it has is very serious, it does no service to the reader and does less to Hyland, and leaves one wondering would a book as poor have been published had it been a debut?

For anyone who does trudge on and finish reading it, the author’s acknowledgement might help soften the disappointment. “Very special thanks to my friend, Julian Owen, who stepped in when this book was in a terrible state. Julian worked very hard to help me make it better and I owe him – his intelligence and his talent, as both a writer and an editor – an enormous debt.” All of which must be gratifying for Mr Owen. Indeed, perhaps we should all be thanking him for protecting us from an even worse novel? Yet it does not justify reading a vague, lazy book that seems to limp along under multiple uncertainty and a glaring lack of belief. It’s not offbeat – more off centre.

Patrick doesn’t fit in at the boarding house where two of his fellow lodgers, an architect and an actuary, are snotty types. One might have almost hoped that they would turn out to be mass murderers or bank robbers hiding out until the police lost interest in their exploits. These badly drawn lodgers fill Patrick in on the widow who is building a boat with another woman, the widow of the man who was the passenger in the car the landlady’s husband was driving when he was killed. The humour is offbeat but not sufficiently funny to deflect the weak story and the stilted writing.

Patrick has taken a job as a mechanic. But when he arrives for work it seems there is not much of a job as the garage owner (yet another overly casual characterisation) has to employ an apprentice because he is family.

If the writing were sharper, this could have aspired to a Pinter-like quality; if the plotting were better, Hyland could have approached a Patrick McCabe novel or if the psychological intensity were there, perhaps even succeeded in evoking a hint of Patrick McGrath.

Although not even a writer as gifted as McGrath could have salvaged this shaky tale. There is nothing, no characterisation, no memorable set piece; it is so clumsy and Hyland has here penned some of the worst dialogue I’ve ever read.

Her failure is bewildering considering her previous work. John Egan, the narrator of Carry Me Down, saw the world through a brilliantly pitched balance of innocence and menace. His closest relationship was with his mother. In this new book, when the narrator’s mother arrives to speak with her son, she is a caricature and he treats her badly.

Meanwhile the tension between Patrick and the other boarders, particularly Welkin, is obvious and predictable. No one could believe in the way the landlady, Patrick and Welkin settle down for a chat in the living room. Perhaps Hyland was toying with introducing the outrageous in the form of perverted sex but changed her plan? Instead what happens is no surprise and prison sequences, complete with hard-bitten cons, have been handled so many times by far better writers. Patrick is a two-dimensional creation. About the most interesting remark he makes in an excessively long narrative that runs to 376 pages but easily could have been handled in 200, is when he muses over his fiancée’s rejection of him. “She said she was breaking up with me because I didn’t know how to express my emotions. The thing is, I didn’t have that many. As far as I was concerned, it was pretty simple, I was in love with her and I liked our life. . .”

All of his encounters with women are strange. When he stands looking at a female psycharitrist who has been treating him, he thinks: “We’d get into her car and drive to the sea and on the way we’d stop at a roadside café and in the car I’d put my hand on her leg just above where the hem of her skirt is.”

All the narrative strengths so evident in Carry Me Down, are absent here. However presumptuous it may sound, having persevered through such a lacklustre yarn, I couldn't help thinking that a potentially powerful tale of violence and perversion was lurking on the sidelines, just waiting to be written, but instead MJ Hyland merely opted for a tentative sketchy story that searched in vain for direction.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times