She likes gin – and smelling carpets
This novel about an OCD sufferer is fresh and funny, says Violet Hudson
Sarah Baume’s A Line Made By Walking tells the story of Frankie, a depressive with OCD tendencies in her mid-twenties who decides to drop out of life. She gives up her job in a Dublin art gallery and moves to her late grandmother’s rural Irish bungalow, perched between a sparsely populated valley and a wind turbine. She keeps her mental faculties alert by testing herself on artworks, and by compiling a series of photographs of the dead animals that congregate in her vicinity: a robin, a rabbit, a rook.
It is difficult to tell the degree of Frankie’s instability. On the one hand, she is like any other solipsistic 20something, drinking gin-and-tonics and leafing through art books. On the other, she spends hours face-down on the floor, smelling carpets.
One cannot help but admire her determination to cure herself through immersion in art and nature; and yet the desire to shake her out of her pretentiousness is strong, too. But we can all empathise with her tics. “A part of me knew my rituals and the things they prophesied were insane, but a larger part of me was too wary to refute them… Just in case.” Baume, author of the 2015 novel
Spill Simmer Falter Wither, treads a graceful line between mesmerising and infuriating. Her descriptions and characterisations are exacting. “People nowadays don’t have jugs and trays,” thinks Frankie as she makes afternoon tea, “even though such things become weirdly vital as soon as you fall accidentally into using them.”
She can also be very funny; describing a poster in a religious zealot’s house that proclaims “Your Sins Have Hidden God’s Face From You”, she notes, “as though God listens with his face, like an owl”.
This is a startlingly fresh work from a talented new voice.