Guilt is something I find I feel more and more as a reader. As a reader and as someone who, from time to time these days, is asked to write things like this about books I genuinely love. I’ll explain.
I’ve always read well more than my fair share since I was a kid, but a few years back I realised that for reasons far too dull to get into in detail here (driving and not taking the train, having three kids, divorce, a job at the time that ate up all of my brain space) I wasn’t really reading a lot anymore at all.
I counted – I got through maybe 20 or so books a year. Whenever I ended up in huge bookstores I found myself on the verge of whatever the literary equivalent of a panic attack is: hyperventilation because of the sheer volume of brilliant new books coming out by authors I loved and enticing new things I was surely never ever going to get to.
I found myself wishing some sort of minor accident on myself, nothing too serious mind, just maybe a leg break or something that would incapacitate me for a couple of months so that I could hole up in a bed somewhere jacked up on painkillers and finally getting through my “to be read” list.
Actually, the more I thought about that the less appetising it seemed due to my legendarily low threshold for pain. Maybe a short prison sentence would do the trick? Six months for unpaid parking fines in somewhere low security without all the attention of tattooed muscular gentlemen and the middle of the night nibbling of rats.
Eventually I was forced into a far simpler solution – just do less of the other things (TV, internet, socialising) and read more bloody books. I read 100 books that year. When I mentioned it, people would stare at me as if I’d just admitted to being the rightful crown prince of Uzbekistan or, stranger still, would marvel in awe as if reading 100 books was the equivalent of discovering cold fusion. I read a book on that once.
Time has passed, now I still read about 60 books or so a year but the problem of my TBR shelf has never eased because, in what is surely some sub-clause of Parkinson’s law, books expand to fill the time available to read books. I’ve just done a headcount – there are 41 perfectly wonderful books sitting on the shelf behind me begging to be read and that leads to a new kind of guilt. I have everything from juicy delights like the upcoming John Boyne and Michael Chabon novels to stuff I really should have started by now like the new Eimear MacBride and the Sebastian Barry book I keep being told such good things about.
One of them even has a story I myself have written in it and I haven’t started it yet! (It’s the wonderful Looking At The Stars, the full proceeds of which go to the Rough Sleepers team at the Dublin Simon Community. I’m sure the editor will grant me a small, if self-indulgent plug for a good cause.)
Which is where Martin John comes in. I’m ashamed to say that it had sat there clamouring for my attention for months before, as happens with so many other of the longer-standing residents of that part of my sitting room, something shone a spotlight on it. In this case, it was the richly deserved nomination it got for this year’s Goldsmiths Prize. Actually maybe it was a little less of that and a little more that the Goldsmiths deals with experimental forms, which I love, and that it was listed alongside one of my favourite books of the year – Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones.
In case you haven’t read Martin John yet, it rests on one of those most central pillars both of Irish literature and Irish life of the 20th century – the solving of a problem by sending it far away. We’ve all read stories on that subject that were dull or repetitive or lacklustre, perhaps even to the point of putting us asleep in terms of that whole theme in general. If so, maybe this is the book to slap you awake from your snooze.
It’s not easy to get a reader to feel anything other than revulsion for a sex offender or a cold-blooded murderer or a monster. I remember when I was in my later teens reading American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis and feeling many things, but never sympathy, or even pity. Maybe the closest I ever came to it was Frank in Iain Banks’s incomparable The Wasp Factory. Someone who, once the story unravels, reveals to you more and more of why they have ended up where they are, who they are and why every story of this kind has a beginning and a middle, not just the end in isolation which can sometimes be all that we see.
I started with guilt and coming back to guilt is where Martin John has stayed with me long after I wish he hadn’t. I was reading it one week going into Dublin on the Dart and, more than once, I found myself deliberately distancing myself from women I was standing close to in packed carriages. Just in case.
Just in case there might be any potential misunderstanding. Just in case they might see me, a man alone with headphones and buried in a book as a Martin John. I’m not Martin John, I never will be, but part of him had hooked itself so far into my psyche as I read that I wanted to deliberately 100 per cent make sure that no-one could possibly think I might be anyone like him. I didn’t like that at all at the time but the ability to do that to me is one of the many things I love in what Anakana Schofield has done in this book.
The world of fiction is full of forgettable characters. Happens to me all the time. I’m talking to someone about something I read six months before and I’m damned if I can remember an important name from the story or, worse still, even how the book ended.
Martin John is not one of those characters. This is not one of those books. If you’re anything like me you’ll find it an him hard to shake off long after you’re finished with the last page.
