“When and where was I ever going to feel like I belonged?” wonders Ann, the narrator of film-maker Carol Morley’s astonishing autobiographical novel about the agonising aftermath of her father’s suicide in 1977, when she was 11. (Her elder brother Paul explored this in his book, Nothing.)
Here is a girl who doesn’t feel that she belongs in her own skin, let alone in her school or home. Morley excels in articulating the most inexpressible experiences, brilliantly tackling bereavement, bullying, breakdown, and depicting depression in a style that melds heartache with humour.
Seven miles out is the distance Ann lives from Manchester, in Stockport, but the emotional distance between the characters at times feels incalculable (“in our own separate worlds even though we were in the same room”). Seven years is also the novel’s timeframe, time Ann spends searching for traces of her absent father, finding only secrets and silence surrounding his suicide.
“I knew that whatever darkness he had felt I felt too,” explains Ann. The novel sheds insight into the roots of Morley’s interest in dark themes – emotional extremes, isolation and loss – explored in her films including Dreams of a Life (based on a woman who died alone in her flat and went undiscovered for three years), and The Falling. As in The Falling, Morley here mines the turbulent teenage mind. The fraught mother/daughter relationship creates the most moving, visceral scenes, although the sections from the perspective of Ann’s mother could have been more fully developed.
Music becomes an escape and belonging for Ann, who loves John Peel’s radio show, punk and her friend’s record player (“I hoped that the music would never stop”). This evocative portrait of Manchester in the 70s and 80s captures Mancunian vernacular in superb dialogue. The city’s musical landscape is the novel’s beating heart, and the new Haçienda nightclub provides a home from home for Ann, whose precarious existence becomes saturated with alcohol, sexual misadventures and thoughts of death – territory also covered in Morley’s documentary The Alcohol Years. The suicide of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis proves pivotal in shifting Ann’s perspective: “He was a lad from around my way that had taken his own life. His songs took me straight to Dad and the possibility of what his emotions were like.”
Time is a fascinating theme: the “ability to freeze, slow down and re-examine time felt like an extraordinarily powerful gift,” explains Ann about discovering her filmmaking vocation. It’s a gift also on powerful display in this narrative as Ann goes back to traumatic moments and imagines herself into the lives of others.
A novel that begins with a death develops into an extraordinary story about how one young woman discovers an intense passion for life.
• 7 Miles Out is published by Blink Publishing (£8.99). Click here to buy it for £6.99
