The Octopus Man, by Jasper Gibson
Sam Leith
SAM LEITH
The Octopus Man By Jasper Gibson Weidenfeld and Nicolson £14.99
It is nearly eight years since Jasper Gibson published his first novel, A Bright Moon for Fools.
It showed him to be the owner of an unruly but considerable talent – a gift for bright phrases, and a comic style that lurched between spleen, melancholy, lyricism and violent slapstick.
His second novel, The Octopus Man, has all those qualities and more. But it made me wonder how its author spent the last near-decade. Did he go – as one of the characters in his book insensitively calls it – bonkaroni?
For being bonkaroni – so agonisingly and suffocatingly evoked that it’s hard to believe the author just made it up – is the subject of this novel.
I’m blessed with not knowing what it’s like to have schizophrenia but, if Gibson’s account of the experience is anything like the real deal, he has achieved something remarkable. An afterword says that the story was inspired by the author’s cousin, who died at 40, having struggled with mental illness for 20 years.
The novel’s narrator, Tom Tuplow, hears voices – or, at least, one voice: that of a Hawaiian octopus-god called Malamock who, in Tom’s cosmology, wriggled through from the universe that preceded this one. Malamock is cruel to his disciple, punishing him with bouts of physical and mental pain (‘triggerings’ and ‘electrocutions’) when Tom displeases him – but occasionally rewarding him with great downpourings of warmth and comfort and light.
The story takes Tom from living independently – though under the eye of his loving but at-her-wits’-end sister, Tess – to a full-blown psychotic break, to being sectioned in a grim psychiatric hospital, to release and participation in an experimental drug trial that stops him from hearing voices – and then to his decision to stop taking the drugs.
Interspersed with the main narration, in the same present-tense form, are jumbled vignettes of his childhood and young manhood. What a mind is here overthrown: author of prize-winning essays at university, voracious and omnivorous reader, fast-track law student and fiend for drugs and booze.
The suggestion is that all that weed and amyl, all that blotter acid and triple drops of ecstasy opened a hole in Tom’s psyche that can’t now be closed. If all this sounds grim, that’s to ignore its comic energy. It’s full of jokes, capers, black ironies and a wild juxtaposition between the mundane and the transcendental.
Told as it is from Tom’s perspective, it’s not simply a story of mental illness, recovery and relapse. Tom is not freed from his thrall to an imaginary cosmic octopus when he takes his meds. He stops hearing Malamock’s voice, but he misses Him. He misses the grandeur and purpose procured by his being the lone disciple of an ancient being in touch with the ineffable truths of the universe.
As an old girlfriend on whom he fixates tells him, ‘You were Job. You were Jacob struggling with the angel. Now you’re Tom struggling on benefits.’ As Robert Lowell wrote of his own return from a psychiatric hospital, ‘Cured, I was frizzled, stale, and small.’
The Octopus Man, then, evokes the gruelling and humiliating daily life of a seriously ill person tangled in the bureaucracies of the mental-health and benefits systems, and shows the desperate effects of his illness on those who love him.
But it also – especially as it moves towards its conclusion – explores the territory mapped out in William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience.
In one passage, Tom – lawyer still to his bones – argues to the head of the psychiatric hospital that there’s no reason that his experience of faith is insanity but the local vicar’s is not.
Still, as he later glumly observes, crossing the road in front of beeping traffic, ‘Cars are really just like psychiatrists: they only know how to make one noise.’