Ballsy palsy
A small but nicely formed first novel contains a swelling sense of alienation.
Iwonder how Gentle Reader feels about the adjective in “slim volume”? Tom Lee’s prettily packaged first novel barely makes it to 150 small pages of generous font, wide margins, interspersed white leaves. A book apparently for the discerning – and mildly affluent – few.
Yeah, yeah: quality over quantity, etc. There’s certainly plenty of the former, right from its Kafkaesque opening sentence: “When James Orr woke up … he had the sense that there was something not quite right, some indefinable shift in the normal order of things.”
James has been stricken by the disfiguring but usually temporary facial paralysis of Bell’s palsy.
The core of what follows is the slithery way this discord between two sides of his face invades his behaviour and personality. His contorted mouth, bared teeth and fish-like eye become an excuse for, and manifestation of, a feral inner self.
Sounds melodramatic. But it builds with a calm relentlessness that stills and chills. James’s cosy life as partner, parent and prospering contributor at work and on the desirable New Glades Estate becomes a descent into disintegration. Apathy saps him. He begins to find fault with friends and neighbours. The tasteful, even twee neighbourhood starts to exude an unspecified malignity.
It’s the precise yet elusive dichotomy that Lee handles so well. Events are almost trivial in themselves – a phone call to work meets uninterest and unawareness; a couple caught having it off in the back seat don’t react as they should; the adjacent woods grow unseasonably – but each adds to the swelling sense of alienation.
Those woods become the place where James first walks for exercise, then shambles and lurks for other purposes. A weird collision with a jogger, a condom picked up by his little daughter,
the 19th-century folly where an unidentified figure in a hoodie lingers all make them more inimical. Again, Lee’s control turns potential melodrama into unsettling menace.
Back on the estate, things aren’t going too well, either. James’s behaviour on the Residents’ Committee develops fugues and fumbles. At home, he’s absent in the bedroom, and treated as such in other rooms. A social soccer game cracks apart and the world lurches sideways. There’s shape-shifting and slaughter; an ending after which you can only close the book and stare into space.
It’s an astonishing evocation of our fragile selves and self-comprehension, our faces on all levels. Lee’s writing, with its alternate lyricism and banality, only adds to the sense of dislocation. I guess it deserves that packaging. THE ALARMING PALSY OF JAMES ORR, by Tom Lee (Granta, $27.99)
It’s an astonishing evocation of our fragile selves and self-comprehension, our faces on all levels.