FICTION: Sanctuary,By Brian Dillon, Sternberg Press, 99pp. €16
A REMARKABLE moment in Austerlitz, WG Sebald’s haunting final novel, from 2001, is the passing observation by its titular character that “outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins”. Though perhaps more lyrical than literal, the strange and unsettling correlation it draws between monument and folly, between what is created and what falls away, nonetheless holds a kernel of truth, for it seems to point to something deep within ourselves, namely the desire to shape and determine the world around us even as we continue to exist at the mercy of processes beyond our control.
The deserted ruins of a Catholic seminary that stand at the centre of Sanctuary, a slim but wonderfully rich novella by the Dublin-born writer and critic Brian Dillon, also provide a site from which such truths might be revealed and such processes might be observed. A starkly modernist structure of curved walls and tiny windows, abandoned not long after it was built, the seminary is now deteriorating with slow purpose. It is visited only by wild animals, urban explorers and a young nameless woman who has come in search of her missing lover, a film-maker whose obsession with the place has shaped her memories of their relationship.
As she wanders through the remains of the seminary she recalls their early dates in Dublin and London, all the time piecing together a sense of who this man was: “Like many artists she had met since she had moved to London, he had a guiding faith in his own capacity to turn accidents, tangents and digressions into the very core of his work, and much of his time was spent trying to corral the mental and physical space in which these oblique and happenstance turns might take place.”
The film-maker had been drawn to the ruins precisely because it seemed a place utterly abandoned to vicissitude. She, on the other hand, preoccupied by a man whose whereabouts are unknown and tormented by agonising migraine headaches, has a far less relaxed relationship with happenstance. Her search among the ruins seems to represent the very effort to control the uncontrollable, to halt the inevitable slippage of her memories of him and to reach some sense of closure on a life so intertwined with her own.
Dillon is the UK editor of Cabinet magazine, as well as a frequent contributor to Frieze and Artforum, and at times he brings a defiantly contemporary aesthetic sensibility to his writing. Scattered throughout the novella are short italicised passages describing in fastidiously sensuous detail the physical appearance of the ruins: “The concrete dermis flakes off in dry white sheets, disclosing black depths that in turn have begun to shrivel and pale, then lift away. Elsewhere the texture of gray walls has merely roughened, as though sprayed with a fine dust of the same colour; in time these particles have drawn together in clumps or drifts, which cling to the surface like desert cities.”
A debt to the nouveaux romans of Claude Simon and Alain Robbe-Grillet notwithstanding, such passages have the uncanny effect of turning the ruins of the seminary into a virtual character in the drama of the story. The ruins seem to pulsate with the life of a complex organism and become a third interlocutor between the man and the woman, or at times a stand-in, something that might be interacted with in the absence of either one of them. This seems appropriate as, among other things, the novella is an exploration of the way in which our senses of self and of others are irrevocably bound up in concrete things and places that act as physical repositories of our memories.
Admittedly, Sanctuaryis as driven as much by ideas as it is by straightforward plot. Rather like the woman's description of her lover's digressive artistic sensibilities, Dillon makes a virtue of hovering around the margins of his story and letting his characters throw up wonderfully tangential details in a way that, save Desmond Hogan, few other Irish writers today are interested in doing. A trip to the Natural History Museum turns up the story of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, Dublin glass-makers who crafted exquisite botanical specimens "whose legible details and longevity vastly exceeded those of the real thing".
Yet such details are not mere whimsy. They reveal the interconnectedness of our lifeworlds, the manner in which so many things encountered in our everyday lives have embedded within them the stories and memories of countless other people.
Dillon has previously used this meandering, Sebaldian style to powerful effect in his 2001 memoir, In the Dark Room, to uncover the dark tapestry of his own hypochondria and the early death of his parents. In Sanctuaryhe has created a subtle weave that at times reaches far beyond the narrow confines of its pages.
Aengus Woods is co-editor of Other Edens: The Life and Work of Brian Coffey,published by Irish Academic Press. He is completing a PhD in philosophy at the New School for Social Research, in New York
