Conor O’Callaghan is a fine Irish poet, author of half a dozen volumes, such as the brilliant Live Streaming (2017), which is a kind of compendium of what he describes as the “traumatic quotidian”. He also writes prose, including the nonfiction football memoir Red Mist: Roy Keane and the Irish World Cup Blues (2005), and Nothing on Earth, his acclaimed debut novel published in 2016. Like its predecessor, We Are Not in the World is truly a poet’s novel. Consider this:
The cargo door opens. It opens incrementally. It falls forward, away from us, into foreign day. There are men down there, stevedores in hi-viz and hardhats shouting to one another. I rotate the ignition to halfway, to check for evidence of light. The instrument panel flashes and falls still. There are chains. There is shrieking of iron like gates of hell. Then this fluorescence gradually floods the floor between rows and creeps towards us and feels warm.
If you don’t like the sound of all that fine writing just to describe some fella driving his lorry off a ferry, then We Are Not in the World is probably not going to be the novel for you – in which case, you’d be missing out. Stylish, deft, dense and delightfully depressing from start to finish, the book tells the story of Paddy, who is rather miserably and mournfully trucking his way from England to France. Paddy is accompanied on his journey – we are led to believe – by his stowaway twentysomething daughter.
It’s a road trip, but not as you know it. The book veers constantly from present to past, steering from near-miss revelations of family secrets (“the thing we never mention”) to nasty encounters with dodgy geezers, with plenty of ill-judged, ill-timed and occasionally highly disturbing sexual encounters along the way. “His breath tasted of Colombian and citrus. You bit the hard muscle of his tongue’s stub. He groaned ‘fuck’. You tasted blood, his, like battery acid on the tip of yours.” On this literal and metaphorical journey poor old Paddy is “forced incrementally to the core of this nothing that I increasingly feel”. It’s Beckett, on wheels.
Paddy’s family life is an absolute mess: his marriage is in ruins, there’s a torrid love affair behind him, and he seems both tormented and aroused by memories of his mother, Kitty. His younger brother has turned out to be the great success, and godfather to Paddy’s wild and wayward daughter, also named, significantly, Kitty, and who likes to wear her granny’s mink coat. Paddy’s only refuge – and promise of future happiness – is Tír na nÓg, the old family home on a shingle beach somewhere slightly vague and grim in Ireland. He is both running away and in the process of returning: to his country, to his family, and indeed to his sanity.
This is not an easy read, but it is an absolutely fascinating novel. It has nothing to do with the pandemic, and was presumably written before, but is very much of the moment. O’Callaghan’s big themes in his poetry and his prose are related always to thwarted desire, to loss, to feelings of disorientation, anger and disassociation – and in particular to questions of sibling rivalry, and the ache of being separated from one’s parents, one’s children, and oneself.
I’ve lived all my adult life with this floor of underlying homesickness. Not for our mother, nor the seascape in which we grew up, nor any mythical golden age. It’s more a homesickness born of absence […] It feels the way certain illnesses or functional syndromes must feel. A walking low-wattage virus you live with for decades and stop noticing, like the hungover whirr of a fridge in the small hours.
Sound familiar? We Are Not in the World – the title alone – seems a perfect description of where we find ourselves now. But whatever its current relevance or significance, and whatever it is we eventually learn about Kitty, the book throws up page after page of memorable and disturbing passages and episodes, as all the while voices are drifting in and out, engaged in “aimless remembering”, “ephemera tossed between you and me”. It’s bitter, horrible, brilliant.
• We Are Not in the World by Conor O’Callaghan is published by Doubleday (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
