FICTION: Liam Harte reviews Counting DownBy Gerard Stembridge Penguin Ireland, 311pp. €14.99
GERARD Stembridge’s second novel, his follow-up to According to Luke (2006), introduces us to Joe Power, a Dublin-based adman and ex-husband of Juliet, with whom he has a young son, Milo. Set in 2005, the action begins with this dyspeptic divorcee trying to kill time in a Longford village before his first access visit with Milo.
Stumbling upon a car-boot sale, his eye falls upon a curious object that turns out to be a digital clock, programmed to countdown to the year 2000 and then expire. When the seller insists on telling how he came by this 1970s novelty item, Joe is drawn into a strange, supernatural story of how the clock’s original owner, a gay barrister, met his death on the stroke of the millennium, which also happened to be the night that Milo was conceived.
Intrigued, Joe takes the clock to Juliet, who supplies the batteries that re-activate this mysterious timepiece, which quickly becomes the controlling obsession of Joe’s life. Thoughts of what the disappearing seconds might portend disrupt his daily routines and alter his view of time and the future. Whereas ordinary clocks “told time as if there was no beginning or end”, the flickering digits of this plastic sphere seem pregnant with predictive power as they advance towards a pre-ordained end point. But whose doom is being foretold?
Having calculated that the countdown will reach zero in a matter of weeks, Joe becomes convinced that Juliet’s days are numbered, on the assumption that it was she who restarted the clock. What then should he do? Tell her or leave it to chance? What if he and Milo are also in peril? Might he be able to influence the course of events by staying close to her as zero hour approaches? Is he a messenger of death or a messiah who might stay the hand of fate?
Stembridge skilfully ratchets up the suspense, manoeuvring his protagonist into various time-themed scenarios and injecting fresh piquancy into the many time-worn phrases that pepper the narrative: “free time”, “dead time”, “time well spent”, “Time up”. As a character, Joe grows in complexity as we witness the seething misogyny behind his sociable façade, his silent contempt for his male friends and his disdain for the meretricious patter of the 30-second commercial: “The truth was he no longer believed any of it: the lazy laddish voice designed to encourage lazy laddish twenty-somethings to choose a certain bank; the languid cool voice that was supposed to link your success to a certain car; the soothing older voice that made mums and dads trust its promise of a pleasure-filled retirement”.
And still the clock ticks. As the digits pulse towards zero, Joe is gripped by “a kind of banshee superstition” that panics him into rash action, the outcome of which appears to confirm the clock’s prophetic power. Yet nagging doubts remain, doubts that compel him to seek out the original owner’s partner, Roger Merriman, who thwarts Joe’s desire for certainty by suggesting the clock had nothing to do with his partner’s dramatic death. Merriman frustrates him further by revealing that the clock was intended as a satirical response to the idea of planned obsolescence, a joke sweetened by the fact that it has outlasted the French firm that made it.
Joe is in no mood for jokes, however. His need to believe that some mystical force controls his fate blinds him to any suggestion that the clock is merely “a randomly dysfunctional piece of seventies kitsch”.
After he cheats death for a second time, he becomes convinced he has a guaranteed life-span and cannot die until the clock decrees it. This secret knowledge breeds in him a chilling sense of reckless invincibility and superiority, and unleashes his latent capacity for calculated malevolence. Perceiving himself to be free of all agency and responsibility, Joe Power becomes destiny’s monster, inured to human feeling, ruthlessly pursuing his selfish ends.
TIGHTLY STRUCTURED and pacily written, Counting Downis a compelling 21st-century morality tale which explores what happens when reason and personal responsibility are surrendered to the forces of myth and superstition. The novel also brings a changing Ireland into focus.
As one would expect of a writer of Stembridge’s pedigree, the look and feel of contemporary Dublin are convincingly recreated, as are the idiosyncrasies of speech and social interaction.
Yet while he displays a sharp eye for new trends and stresses, he spurns the modes of satiric realism that are a feature of much recent Irish fiction. Instead, the novel registers cultural and attitudinal change through characters’ thoughts and conversations, subtly challenging us to measure our own prejudices against theirs in the process.
And so the impression of Dublin we are left with is that of a city in flux, its increasingly multi-ethnic character visible through Joe’s daily encounters with Latvian, Polish and Chinese immigrants, whom he thinks of as “our very own serf-race”, scurrying about the city while “most of Ireland slept in bloated contentment”.
In the graceless domain that Counting Down conjures up, these anonymous incomers ultimately tend to command more sympathy than the self-absorbed, gluttonous natives.
Liam Harte’s The Literature of the Irish in Britain: Autobiography and Memoir, 1725-2001will shortly be published by Palgrave Macmillan. He teaches Irish and modern literature at the University of Manchester