Two novels have a date with destiny
Rachel Joyce and Peter Ackroyd look at fate through different lenses
Do we have control over the lives we lead, or are we all at the mercy of fate? Two worthy novels, both set in class-conscious England, look at the way people play the hands they are dealt. Both stories start by letting us know that something bad is going to happen, but Perfect, by Rachel Joyce, has a soft edge that helps us cope with the foreboding. In Three Brothers, by Peter Ackroyd, we understand early on that we continue reading at our own risk: Destiny is not kind.
Both stories unfold from alter nating viewpoints. Joyce’s Perfect begins with Byron Hemmings, a hapless, lovable boy worrying over news from his best friend, James: Two seconds will be added to 1972, a leap year, to put the movement of the Earth i n sync with time. Even at 11 years old, Byron’s instincts are good: Only disaster can come from messing with the universe. Within months, everything had changed and would never be put right.
Byron already has a hard time trying to understand the world, and the incomprehensible doings of adults make it even harder. Now, because of those two seconds, his world is turned upside down and his mother’s fate is in his hands. He needs to hatch a plan and turns to James for help.
Their story alter nates with that of Jim, unfolding 40 years later. Jim has spent most of his life in a nowclosed psychiatric centre. He is obsessive-compulsive, with vague memories but real fears that involve painful rituals he must perform to keep himself and the people around him safe. Jim knows he is not like everyone else but longs to have some aspect of a “normal” life.
Even with the shadow hanging over the convergence of Byron and Jim’s stories, Joyce doesn’t grind us down. In fact, I laughed aloud more than once at absurd but easily recognized scenes. She manages to observe the quirks of her characters without judging them: One do-gooder friend of Jim notes that she has a photographic memory. “In fact, what she said she had was a photogenic memory, but they knew what she meant.”
Joyce has a lovely touch, navigating just above lives of quiet desperation. Life is hard, but most people are doing the best they can, and sometimes that’s enough. In Ackroyd’s Three Brothers, the hardships are just as real, but the tone is more grim. The mother of three boys disappears when they are young, their father doesn’t know what to do with them and they find no strength in each other.
The oldest, Harry, becomes a journalist. As he works his way up from newsroom messenger to chief news reporter, his integrity is no match for his ambition. When he spikes a story about government corruption at the request of the paper’s owner, it’s “exasperating, but he might be able to use it to his advantage.”
Middle child Daniel is as eager as Harry to escape the life he was born into, and is just as ambitious. He knows how to follow the rules and make the right connections as he ascends the ladder to becoming a professor at Cambridge. As for his relationship with a colourful, criminal character in London — that remains his secret.
Sam, the youngest brother and the most affected by the absence of their mother, is a drifter. His world is murkier. The people he meets are poor and mentally ill, “yet it seemed to Sam, strangely enough, that they spoke with one voice, or, rather, that one voice spoke through all of them — the way that a hundred birds seem to sing the same song.”
Each chapter is told from the viewpoint of one brother, but their lives slowly overlap, encompassing dirty politics, immoral businessmen, petty thieves, Fleet Street and Cambridge. Ackroyd takes delicious pleasure in skewering the worlds of journalism and academia, where corruption and elitism get equal billing.
His writing is eloquent, spare and clever as he describes the net drawing closed on the three brothers. While Sam’s anonymous wanderings allow him to cope, Harry and Daniel believe they are masters of their own destiny. But as we know, nothing good can come from tampering with time or fate.