FICTION: WRITE WHAT you know, they say. Sean O'Brien – poet, critic, playwright, broadcaster, anthologist, editor, and now novelist – has done just that. Martin, the narrator of O'Brien's gripping and graceful debut novel, Afterlife, is a poet, critic, anthologist, editor, inadvertent broadcaster, and a lot more besides, as it turns out.
The novel opens in 2006. Martin, who has matured into a resigned, heavy-drinking fortysomething, looks on in disdain as the committee of the poetry festival he runs in the small English village of Divott decides it’s time to put the festival on the map. The festival had been inaugurated to celebrate the memory of Thomas Exton, a relatively unknown English poet who had been the parish priest in Divott from 1660 until his death by fire in 1680. The festival committee has decided to capitalise on the village’s links with another poet, the tragic cult figure Jane Jarmain, who also perished in a fire in Exton. To mark the 30th anniversary of her death, the committee has arranged to have her remains reinterred in Divott. “Are there in fact any remains to be reinterred?” one of the members asks Martin. “‘Yes, there was a body. Jane died of asphyxia rather than burns,’ I said. I might have said a lot more.”
This gap in the information offered, this chasm between what Martin tells the reader and what he knows, constitutes in part the electric charge of the novel. The other hit you get from this book (and "hit" is an appropriate term, seeing as drugs feature prominently throughout) is that it is shot through with lyrical language – it positively throbs with loss, loss that is articulated at an exquisite and poetical register, for Sean O'Brien is, after all, a poet of no small repute, his last collection, The Drowned Book, having won both the Forward Prize for best collection and the TS Eliot Prize.
The novel itself is something of a poem – a love poem, an ode to and an elegy for Jane. Martin knew Jane from his college days, inasmuch as anyone could ever know Jane. She is ostensibly the cipher at the heart of the novel (the true cipher comes to prominence at the end). Martin relates the story of the hot summer of 1976 when Jane and her boyfriend Alex, and Martin and his girlfriend Susie, rent a cottage in Divott for the summer. Susie teaches art while the other three pursue careers as poets. Jane, however, is the one with the talent. She works in her room writing the poetry that will make her posthumously famous. “In that endless meantime the boys were downstairs on the scorched lawn, rehearsing their extraordinary powers of procrastination.”
Alex was a scene-maker at Cambridge, the handsome, wealthy, successful ladies man who assumes the role of hip young poet about town. "He was at heart a performer and the work a pretext for that." When one of Jane's poems is accepted by the Times Literary Supplementfor publication, Alex seethes with a destructive jealousy. Literary jealousy has been written about before, but it is almost always depicted as a male phenomenon. The threat that female brilliance poses to the alpha male's ego – as happened in real life with another O'Brien – Edna – is not a theme that has been much explored in fiction to date. Sean O'Brien does so with chilling results.
O’Brien divides his characters into those who create and those who destroy. An American attention-seeker, two German anarchists, and a troop of Hells Angels come to ruin Martin’s literary community. The centrepiece is a party that goes on for 50 pages. This sequence is outstandingly well written, and bristles with a high-octane menace, which is sustained throughout its length. The hosts of the party have spiked their guests’ drinks with acid. O’Brien’s descriptions of acid trips are grippingly vivid and worryingly plausible: “The thrust of speed underneath the acid would shortly blow the roof of my head off, after which I would be obliged finally to disintegrate and lose my grip on the alphabet. Last to go would be the letter I.”
If the novel has a flaw, it is that the revenge could have been better choreographed. The Humbert Humbert versus Clare Quilty showdown takes place offpage. O’Brien brings the reader to such intense places during the novel that, well, you want him to keep bringing you there.
As a gothic tale of revenge and murder, Afterlifeis a consistently compelling and satisfying page-turner. It is much more than that, however: it is a meditation on the proximity of hatred to love. It is a treatise on artistic authenticity, and an exploration of the link between madness and brilliance. O'Brien discourses on these topics with subtlety and insight. The creative path is littered with cautionary examples of those who have lost their minds. Thomas Exton, the poet who drew the four graduates to the village in the first place, writes poems about religious damnation, but, as Martin comes to realise, "It was the fear of what he called damnation and I knew as madness". Only the terminology has changed. The acid Jane inadvertently ingests detonates a latent mental instability in her. "I think I might be getting a bit schitzy," she tells Martin with a smile. Is her subsequent death murder? O'Brien leaves the question hanging. Afterlifeis a deeply absorbing novel which lingers in the mind like the ghosts it so ardently evokes.
Claire Kilroy's third novel, All Names Have Been Changed, was published this year by Faber