A couple of years ago the broadcaster, rare book dealer and sometime Guardian blogger Rick Gekoski announced in these pages that he was giving up on a magnum opus about the history of the book and, at the age of 70, was “surprised to find himself writing a novel”. What is maybe less surprising is that the result should be the sum total of a lifetime spent rooting though library stacks and whiling away the time between lots in Sotheby’s cafe (avoid the lobster salad seems to be the message).
Neither is it entirely unexpected to discover that Gekoski’s first-person mouthpiece, James Darke, should turn out to be a reclusive bibliophile who has difficulty pushing things to a conclusion. Barricaded in his study among his beloved first editions, he refuses to go out or correspond with anybody, including his daughter, whose increasingly irate letters he ignores. Instead he occupies himself “making some notes on my current concerns, composing myself in painstakingly extracted bits. I have no job and no life: no occupation, just preoccupation.”
Darke’s pet unfinished project is a study of Dickens and disaffection. But the greater part of his endeavour seems to be concocting plans to silence the neighbour’s dog by lacing some steak with concentrated chilli extract sourced from the internet. “I cannot bear dogs, they disgust me,” he states. And as the narrative develops into an increasingly bilious catalogue of his various dislikes it becomes clear there is very little that Darke is fond of. “It is hard to make a relationship with a cat. I don’t like them”; “I have no time for the schoolmaster’s pastoral role”; “I hate the telly. Stupid stuff”; “Why has literature become so dull?”; “I once loved Paddington station”; “I’ve never been a great admirer of weather … I don’t much like natural light either.” It’s not until page 97 that he mentions something that meets with his approval: “I love the internet … the hunting ground of thieves and butchers. What surprises me is not how much malice I find there, but how little.”
It is clear that there is nothing Darke loathes more deeply and comprehensively than himself. “I thought I could write my way out of this, but I’m just writing my way further in,” he concedes. “I cannot go on like this, I cannot go on. Passing the dying days, remembering, thinking, justifying … Assembling bits of stories, making stupid jokes – logical, scatological. For what? Nothing assuages the pain of being.”
So what is the root cause of this proto-Beckettian sense of stasis and despair? If the first third of the novel is downbeat, the second becomes truly bleak as Darke describes in unsparing detail the loss of his wife to cancer. First he traces her own frustrations as a once-promising novelist who took to telling disappointed admirers: “I never stopped writing, I just stopped finishing things.”
As for Darke, down and down he goes into an ever deepening pit of solipsistic introspection: “When I’m not desperate, I’m bored. Being bored makes me desperate, and being desperate is boring”; “I am a double-helix of human emotion, and its absence. Over-filled, then empty. Up, then down. Only without the up”. You may well be wondering if there is the faintest sliver of emotional solace to be found at the end of all this; and it comes, oddly enough, with a trip to see Sheffield United playing away at Brentford. Though not an immediately attractive fixture, it provides an opportunity for Darke to reconnect with his young grandson, who, having randomly declared himself to be a Blades fan, wishes to see his chosen team play in the London area.
Perhaps the most surprising item among Gekoski’s back catalogue is a work entitled Staying Up: a blow-by-blow account of Coventry City’s 1997-8 season that contains some of the most penetrating scholarly analysis that anyone has ever directed towards Gordon Strachan. The Brentford episode is rendered with the self-punishing instinct of a true terrace stoic; the tingling anticipation of joining the flow of people towards the ground, and subsequent bathos of coming away early having gone two goals down, could only have been written with the hard-won knowledge of one who has genuinely suffered.
The suggestion that Darke may be prised from his carapace of grief by cooking fishfingers, reading Roald Dahl and discussing the offside rule with his infant grandson infuses the final passages of the novel with a warmth that is genuinely and unexpectedly moving. It comes almost too late, but is worth persevering for.
• Darke is published by Canongate. To order a copy for £12.74 (RRP £16.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
