Memoir: In 1968, Francis Dillon, then a 40-year-old Irish civil servant, married Anna. She gave him three sons - Brian, the author of the book here under review being one - and cared for the family home in a Dublin suburb.
At some point during Brian's childhood, his mother's skin began to harden. Scleroderma or systemic sclerosis was diagnosed. First it was her hands, then her face, then her internal organs. Her oesophagus became a solid glass tube, so swallowing was incredibly painful. Her intestines were unable to absorb nutrients and she became horribly thin. Her lungs were subject to fibrosis, so that the slightest exertion exhausted her. Even her saliva glands suffered, so that she was permanently dry-mouthed.
Scleroderma is, in the euphemistic terminology of medical practice, usually manageable. Alas, not in Anna's case. Her specialist said she was the worst example he'd ever seen. The last years of her life saw agonising physical decline mixed with debilitating depression, partly caused by the condition, partly by her medication. She died in 1985; her shattered husband followed five years later. The writer and his brothers lived together in the family home until, in 1997, Brian forced through its sale in order to pay university fees.
In reality, of course, he just wanted rid of where he'd been so unhappy. His response in childhood to his mother's suffering was to develop extreme psoriasis-like symptoms and a talent for hypochondria that was to blight much of his adult life. There was also the psychological damage done by watching his mother die and then burying his father. As a student he suffered disabling episodes of depression: one lasted two years. Only analysis and maturation enabled him to understand his condition and, in turn, to write his book.
Dillon's story, in summary, is the stuff of daytime television chat shows. In execution, however, it is in quite a different league to most popular narratives. For a start, he eschews conventional chronology and organises his material instead around concrete items: the family house, the few family objects he possesses, the family photographs he has, his and his mother's bodies, and the places that were important to the Dillons: Mount Argus Church, where they worshipped; Ballyheigue, the Co Kerry village where they went on holiday every year; and Mount Jerome cemetery in Dublin's Harold's Cross, where his mother and father are buried.
In each section he meditates on the concrete objects - or, in the case of the section titled Bodies, on the physiological history of his and his mother's bodies. These meditations are augmented by material from literature, art history and philosophy (the author has a well-stocked mind and is an omnivorous reader) and the memories clustered around the objects, which form the heart and substance of the book. He presents his recollections in the order in which they are arranged in his psyche - not chronologically but personally. As a reading experience, the acquisition of Dillon's story, in all its appalling and heart-rending detail, is gradual, incremental.
There are two things to be said about this technique. The first is that as reader, contrary to what you expect, you acquire the story effortlessly. This is important: after all, in narrative art the reader is supposed to get the gist with as little trouble as possible. Dillon's storytelling is faultless.
The other thing to be said about his technique is that it produces a reading experience of extraordinary intimacy. By giving us not just his awful history and the ways it has affected him in life, but how this material lives in his memory as well as how it is stored and accessed, the reader acquires a sense of what it is like to be him now, with all this stuff in his head. Fiction is traditionally the form that allows us to inhabit another's skin: memoir, surprisingly, doesn't do it as often, and very rarely as well as it is done here.
Finally, it would be unjust not to mention how the author marshals language. Dillon is incredibly alert to nuance, precise, fastidious and allergic to showing off. (In many ways, the writer he most resembles is WG Sebald, who was also interested in memory). The result of these virtues is prose that is honed and authoritative and that beautifully augments the story that is told.
Our world is clogged with memoirs. Most won't last, but In the Dark Room will. It is thought-provoking and nourishing, and it deploys a unique technique to tell its tale. However, when they come to write the history of memoir, and this will be in there, it will be remembered less for its method, remarkable though that is, than for the author's ability to make the reader really feel what it was like to be a damaged child and a grief-stricken adult.
Carlo Gébler's most recent works are The Siege of Derry: A History and The Bull Raid, a new version of the Táin or the Cattle Raid of Cooley. He is currently writer-in-residence, HMP Maghaberry, Co Antrim
In the Dark Room: A Journey in Memory By Brian Dillon. Penguin Ireland, 246pp. £17.99