A comic take on insecurity and loss

FICTION: The Bird Room, by Chris Killen, Canongate, 202pp, £9.99

THERE’S THIS young fella and his girlfriend and they set off to visit one of the young fella’s pals. The pal is some class of an artist, he’s probably not any good but he is cool – or at least, sufficiently cool to put pressure on the geek one with the girlfriend.

The artist character has just got back from a holiday abroad, so on the strength of that and his wayward holiday snaps, or so reasons the narrator, he is interesting – or at least interesting to a bored girlfriend who appears to have given up on the narrator, or so the narrator seems to think as the narrator has clearly given up on himself: “I want somehow, very quietly, to destroy myself.” Welcome to the sitcom world of The Bird Room, a first novel which, to quote the book jacket endorsement, is “either disturbingly brilliant or brilliantly disturbing.”

Hmm, perhaps “clever” would have been more accurate? It certainly is confident as it would take immense confidence to sustain such a thin slice of angst over 200 pages. Yet sustain it Chris Killen just about does. If you are left asking “why?”, well that may be because life is just like that.

This debut has its moments and most of them are contained in the panic attacks to which the narrator, Will, is given. Alice, the bored girlfriend, appears to have given up on our hero. Her obvious loss of interest may have something to do with the fact that his job, which consists of working from home on his computer, is not a job at all. He just happens to have a computer. She does set off to work. And when she is at work, the narrator, dastardly, insecure wreck that he is, attempts to guess the password to her e-mail account.

Projects such as this tend to fill his days. The writing is sharp and poor old Will soon establishes himself in the reader’s subconscious as a despairing Woody Allen sort of guy who is desperate to cling on to hot – and bored – girlfriend.

She seems to like his pal, the artist, who is also called Will. The narrator imagines the two of them, his girlfriend and his pal having fun together. In time they attend artist Will’s opening. There artist Will entertains the gathering with his favourite party piece: the story of the day he, the artist, “bit the head off my sister’s budgie for a dare.” The narrator recalls the first time he heard that particular story: “Stood in the school art room, I remember finding it funny and a bit shocking . . . then I heard the anecdote a hundred more times.” The exhibition, by the way, consists of pictures of birds.

The language is punchy; the dialogue full of expletives and the emphasis is on sex. Or is it? Perhaps Killen’s theme is about what happens when a character’s entire identity rests in their sex life? The narrator and his pal the artist are both called Will. Is this to imply that there are two sides to Will? This may seem far fetched but then consider Will the artist – super confident or is he? Will the artist appears likely to take Alice from the narrator without more effort than it takes to scratch his chin. Yet Will the artist has his own demons, he is advertising for a woman he can pay in return for agreeing to be filmed while they have sex. She also has to agree to wear specific clothing. Confused? Good. Interested? Sorry.

That’s the problem – a reader, discerning or otherwise, will fly through this book, hoping for the next time the narrator shares his exasperation with us in the form of his raw desperation. It is a pity because there are moments of subtle intelligence such as when the narrator, at the same exhibition, notices a woman on her own.

“She’s wearing a shiny red dress that hangs off her body as if it’s very bored.” He continues watching the woman until a man approaches her, whispers to her. “He takes her elbow gently and positions her in front of a sparrow. It’s only when she puts out her hand and leaves it there – letting him take the headphones off the wall for her and put them in her palm, her fingers anticipating them, twitching and fumbling slightly – that I realise; she’s blind.”

Meanwhile back living with his bored girlfriend Will begins selling his possessions on eBay. He suspects Alice is daydreaming about the other Will. Narrator Will despairs: “I want to disappear. I want to not be a part of things any more.”

The two Wills and Alice set off to a restaurant for a meal. Artist Will has become so fascinating for Alice that she no longer realises her boyfriend is alive, never mind with them. This is the sort of joke that can be funny as a sketch but does very quickly seem to be going on for a long time. Killen switches from the two Wills to a girl named Claire who has reinvented herself as Helen, an actress, who does a lot of porn work.

Both narrative strands connect. Killen is looking at dark issues of insecurity and identity through a comic lens. Will the narrator is anxious to save himself: “I want to pretend everything is fine. I want to somehow not be here any more; to not be the cause of the problem.” Gradually Alice begins to ignore him causing him to comment: “Sometimes I wonder if I still exist.”

It is possible to retain some concern for the narrator. Helen’s story merely drifts along leaving some space for speculation as to who she really is. Will the narrator is as adrift in the story as he is in the wider world. Killen has stayed the likeable side of clever in this whacky little book yet compared with two recent British literary debuts such as Joseph Smith’s The Wolf and Rob Raison’s God’s Own Country, The Bird Room is, even at its light-footed best, never more than ordinary.

• Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times