GLASS ALWAYS FULL
From the archive: Andrew Greig’s 2006 assessment of Ron Butlin’s 1987 novel on alcoholism, ‘The Sound of My Voice’
Morris Magellan is an executive with Majestic Biscuits. He has a large house with garden, an extraordinarily tolerant wife and two sweet children. In his world, he is a success. He is also an alcoholic, and clearly doomed.
Read this one before? Not like this. This is not a self-aggrandising first person confessional; nor is it an illustration of the hollowness of middle-class life. This brief, remarkable novel opens: “You are thirty-four years old; everything that has ever happened to you is still happening,” and quickly moves to “Soon you will be able to reason well enough to feel nothing at all.” This second-person present tense is a very rare yet powerful mode of storytelling. When it falters at the very end of this one week in Magellan’s life, the
effect is overwhelming.
You the reader are being directly addressed, as audience. It also invites us to be “I”. Particularly when coupled with the present tense, we are truly complicit, on the spot. In addition, it enacts self-alienation. Events and emotions have become distant – something alcohol both dissolves and promotes. Magellan’s work happens to someone else, as does his marriage and his children. Even his petty lusts and sad gropings are not him.
Naturally, Morris Magellan doesn’t see himself as an alcoholic; for him drink isn’t the problem, it’s the solution. It dissolves pain and banality and “mud”. His yearning is for clarity and peace. Yet though his alcoholism feels credible, it is not the real subject. I think the novel’s thrust is psychological, and concerns something more universal than alcoholism: the doomed effort, and cost, of burying one’s deepest pain. We experience excruciating moments from his childhood, little slivers of glass in the heart.
The novel’s spareness allows other interpretations. To Irvine Welsh, it is political, an indictment of capitalist-consumerist life in the Thatcher era (and now), all the more powerful because it happens to someone near the top of the midden. Others – particularly in France – have seen it as existential, and it is indeed about alienation in work, family, love, sex.
The writing is simple yet charged. It is at times quite terrifying as we live through his panic attacks; also downright funny, tragic, oddly beautiful. It’s a poet’s novel in its clarity, cadence, resonance, in its use of imagery to freight meaning. It’s about an alcoholic businessman and about anyone, about “you”. Lucid, harrowing, comic, lyrical and tragic, it is just possibly redemptive. Read once, it’s not forgotten. Read again, remarkable. Read again, as I did yesterday – probably a masterpiece, a completely achieved work.