FICTION: The Space Between UsBy John MacKenna New Island, 282pp. €12.99. THE PROTAGONIST of John MacKenna's new novel is an architect. We gradually learn in this slowly evolving fiction that his profession also serves as a metaphor for the private worlds he builds for himself.
His ordered and determinedly provincial existence is designed to hold things at bay. Kate, the neighbour who heroically sustains an unavailing passion for him over decades, observes that “life seems to be a series of secrets that we carry around with us”. Only in the final pages do we learn that the main character harbours a terrifying domestic secret of his own.
Belatedly, we get to know a central truth about the figure who dominates this novel. The story is told in the first person and hence his viewpoint determines the course of things. But strangely this brings him no closer to us.
MacKenna’s carefully structured and tautly written novel, in sum, confounds expectations and deliberately plays with the reader’s responses. Intimacy and familial relations are shown to be built upon shifting foundations. Contrary to the all-pervasive confessionalism of contemporary culture, human interactions here remain unfathomable. The apparent emotional dilemmas that colour the life of the chief character mask far more intractable issues, which never fully reach the surface of the narrative. MacKenna’s tightly knit group of characters, for all their closeness, seem to live at a remove from the world and to mask their feelings from themselves and each other.
This is especially true of the main protagonist, whose self-containment is only partially breached in the course of the story. Initially, the spaces that divide the figures in this novel appear to result from the emotional misunderstandings that routinely separate men and women, and the gaping absences created by death.
At the opening, the hero is told about the sudden death of his wife in a car accident. Instead of feeling grief-stricken, he is relieved because their marriage had in fact been failing. His emotions seem likewise to be out of synch when Kate, his close friend, makes overtures to him in the aftermath of his wife’s demise. Once again, he appears to react coldly and inappropriately, by rebuffing her even while agreeing to sleep with her and readily exploiting her companionship.
By contrast, his grief on the death of his daughter, Jane, who is murdered on her way home after a night out with a friend, is overtly all too explicable and familiar, rightly dominating most of the action of the novel. Its very immoderacy seems to be nothing more than the inevitable pain felt by a single father who has raised his child alone and achieved a laudable closeness with her. His refusal to dwell on any aspects of her murder, however, also strikes a false note. But it is only retrospectively that his retreat into a narcissistic cocoon of mourning takes on more sinister proportions.
The guardedness of the key persona also characterises the understatement of the novel as a whole. An unspoken family secret finally destabilises MacKenna’s narrative, and shockingly renders uncertain anything we think we have learnt about his fictional figures. The continuous disquiet we experience as readers appears to stem from the exact rendering of the pathology of grief and the shocking aftermath of the violent death of a young woman. But the novel also convinces us of the power of convention and of social ritual. Sorrow, we are almost persuaded, can be offset by the quiet rhythms of daily life.
The Space Between Usbears out MacKenna's accomplishment as a novelist and his willingness to take risks with plot and point of view. In the manner of Nabokov, he insinuates us into the interior world of a troubled protagonist who is compulsive and unknowable, and unflinchingly renders the partly occluded existential crises that beset him. Plangent descriptions of the landscapes of the Irish midlands and sharply observed accounts of seasonal change punctuate the narrative. These richly textured natural settings act as an objective correlative for the thwarted and obliquely rendered experiences of his characters.
MacKenna upends the expectation that a novel permits a cosy intimacy with its characters or that it relays cohesive narratives. Freud deemed that familial relations are always underwritten by unwieldy emotions and desires. The Space Between Usdares to build a narrative around the repressed truths that can shape intimate relations.
Yet it unnervingly leaves matters open and eschews any moral judgement. As a consequence, this is an unsettling and challenging novel that moves its readers out of their comfort zones and invites them to question the rules of plausibility that govern the stories we read and are allowed to tell ourselves.
Anne Fogarty is professor of James Joyce studies at University College Dublin