Image: Suicide by Scandinavian artist Joakim Back.
Caveat: Some possible book 'spoilers' here. But not really, unless you're already part way through the book.
Nick Hornby's newest book A Long Way Down
is, on the surface, about suicide. Its four protagonists, who take
turns throughout the book speaking in the first person, telling their
personal and collective story sequentially (not redundantly) meet atop
a tower famous for suicides, each with the intention of jumping off,
and become a sort of goofy self-help group. Here, as a teaser (and
testament to Hornby's extraordinary writing) is a glimpse of each of
the characters in their 'own' words:
Martin (middle-aged, has-been, self-destructive morning talk-show host):
I'd spent the previous couple of months looking up suicide inquests on
the Internet, just out of curiosity. And nearly every single time, th
coroner says the same thing: "He took his own life while the balance of
his mind was disturbed". And then you read the story about the poor
bastard. His wife was sleeping with his best friend, he'd lost his job,
his daughter had been killed in a road accident some months
before...Hello, Mr. Coroner? Anyone at home? I'm sorry, but there's no
disturbed mental balance here, my friend. I'd say he got it just right.
Bad thing upon bad thing upon bad thing until you can't take any more,
and then off to the nearest multistory car park in the family hatchback
with a length of rubber tubing. Surely that's fair enough? Surely the
coroner's report should read: "He took his own life after sober and
careful contemplation of the fucking shambles it had become."
JJ (young, failed rock-star):
The trouble with my generation is that we all think we're fucking
geniuses. Making something isn't good enough for us, and neither is
selling something, or teaching something, or even just doing something;
we have to be something. It's our inalienable right, as citizens of the 21st century. If Christina Aguilera or Britney or some American Idol
jerk can be something, then why can't I? Where's mine, huh? OK, so my
band, we put on the best live shows you could ever see in a bar, and we
made two albums, which a lot of critics and not enough real people
liked. But having talent is never enough to make us happy, is it? I
mean, it should be, because a talent is a gift, and you should thank
God for it, but I didn't. It just pissed me off because I wasn't being
paid for it, and it didn't get me on the cover of Rolling Stone.
Jess (young, impetuous, troubled daughter of a wealthy, dysfunctional family):
I'd be lost if JJ and people like that got their way, and there was
nothing unpersonal in the world. I like to know that there are big
places without windows where no one gives a shit. You need confidence
to go into small places with regular customers -- small bookshops and
small music shops and small restaurants and cafes. I'm happiest in the
Virgin Megastore and Borders and Starbucks and Pizza Express, where no
one gives a shit, and no one knows who you are. My mum and dad are
always going on about how soulless those places are, and I'm like, Der.
That's the point.
Maureen (middle-aged, single mother trapped with a severely handicapped teenaged son:
I wanted to tell Jess that I hadn't even seen an English beach since
Matty [her son] left school; they used to take them to Brighton every
year, and I went with them once or twice. I didn't say anything,
though. I may not know the weight of many things, but I could feel the
weight of that one, so I kept it all to myself. You know that things
aren't going well for you when you can't even tell people the simplest
fact about your life, just because they'll presume you're asking them
to feel sorry for you. I suppose it's why you feel so far away from
everyone, in the end; anything you can think of to tell them just ends
up making them feel terrible.
The novel has the typical
Hornby sense of impending doom running throughout it, and the typical
Hornby lame ending (it's as if the author doesn't want the novel to
end, so it doesn't, really), but it is still wonderful, utterly
engaging, and thought-provoking. Perhaps this is why the movies made
from his books don't quite work -- there just isn't enough time in a
two hour film for all the action plus
all the reflection that the ideas in his novels warrant. Because of
Hornby's cleverness and his wry, delightful sense of humour, his novels
cry out for cinematic treatment (since most movies today are so utterly
lacking in both). Jess' critique of Virginia Woolf is the most
hilarious piece of writing I've read in a decade, and is alone worth
the price of the book, but I suspect in the movie it will be just too
much too fast to work -- the audience will be laughing so hard they'll
drown out half the funny bits.
But it is the ideas
in the book that had me shivering as I read, putting the book down and
wandering around and thinking. I suspect his novels are Hornby's
cathartic way of getting these profound and troubling ideas out of his
head where they can be examined more objectively (Hornby has an
autistic child). There are three in particular that resonated with me,
and they are all somewhat related, and a book about suicide is the
perfect vehicle to illustrate them.
The first idea is that in life, as Jess puts it, we have no choice.
We are who we are and we will do what we will do. This is the concept
of 'free will', but reduced to immediate, personal terms. Despite all
the New Years' resolutions (A Long Way Down
begins on New Years' Eve), despite all the plans and self-help books
and Getting Things Done tools we employ, we will ultimately do what
were going to do anyway, and, more importantly, not do what we were not
going to do anyway. Those who go up the tower with the intention of
killing themselves consist of those who will go through with the plan,
no matter what happens, sooner or later, and those who will not, no
matter what happens. Hornby is saying that suicide prevention hotlines
will only prevent those who would be prevented somehow or other anyway.
The city of Toronto has spent a small fortune building walls and fences
around its 'popular' suicide sites (mostly buildings and bridges) and
is considering similar infrastructure in subway stations. They
understate the creativity of those who will do what they will do. And
those who lack imagination or knowledge or opportunity will find other,
metaphorical ways to kill themselves: alcohol or other drugs, or just
shutting down, disengaging. We are surrounded by the living dead, but
not of the type you see in the movies.
The second idea, and the one that I think his title most refers to, is what is holding you back?
Not just from committing suicide, but from doing other things you think
you should be doing or wish you were doing. Here's how Jess puts it:
Most
people have a rope that ties them to someone, and that rope can be
short or it can be long. You don't know how long, though. It's not your
choice. Maureen's rope ties her to Matty and is about six inches long
and it's killing her. Martin's rope ties him to his daughters and, like
a stupid dog, he thinks it isn't there. He goes running off
somewhere...and then suddenly it brings him up short and chokes him and
he acts surprised, and then he does the same thing again the next day.
I think JJ is tied to this bloke Eddie he keeps talking about, the one
he used to be in the band with. And I'm learning that I'm tied to
[Jess' older, accomplished, inexplicably missing sister] Jen, and not
to my mum and dad -- not to home, which is where the rope should be.
The
distance from the top of the tower to the bottom, from intent to
realization, seems short, but is, in fact, a long way. While we are who
we are and will do what we will do, it is not quite that simple. We are
social creatures, and as we go through life we find ourselves limited
by people, and held back, not so much by who they are as by what they
stand for, the role we, or they, or fate, has chosen for us. Are these
ropes, these people and things and circumstances that hold us back,
imposed on us, or are they our own self-imposed lifelines? If we have
no choice, is that to some extent because of the restrictions we have
somehow chosen to impose on ourselves?
When
I met my wife, I was pretty messed up, and she has kept me on a pretty
short lead ever since. I owe her everything for that, I think. In
recent years, though, now that our* amazing children no longer need our
support, she has loosened the lead somewhat. Or maybe I tugged the lead
out of her hand. Or perhaps it wasn't ever there at all, just a figment
of my imagination, self-imposed. (It's a good thing she doesn't read my
blog; I wonder if that is deliberate, too?)
You can perhaps guess at the third idea in this book, since it follows somewhat from the other two: What happens when we suddenly lose our lifeline? Martin says:
A
long time ago, I worked with an alcoholic. And he told me that the
first time he failed on an attempt to quit the booze was the most
terrifying day of his life. He always thought he could stop drinking if
he ever got round to it, so he had a choice stashed away in a sock
drawer somewhere at the back of his head. But when he found out that he
had to drink, that the choice had never really been there, Well, he
wanted to do away with himself, if I may temporarily confuse our
issues. I didn't properly understand what he meant until I saw that guy
jump off the roof. Up until then, jumping had always been an option, a
way out, money in the bank for a rainy day. And then suddenly the money
was gone -- or rather, it had never been there in the first place. It
belonged to the guy who jumped, and people like him, because dangling
your feet over the precipice is nothing unless you're prepared to go
that extra two inches.
We cling to our presumed choices, our
dreams, our distant plans and hopes, as if they were lifelines keeping
us from careening off into space, and perhaps they are. I imagine
myself an activist, a much-published and influential author, a founder
of intentional communities, an incubator of natural enterprises, a
change agent revolutionizing the way we teach, the way we treat
animals, the way we produce energy, the way our economic and political
systems work, the way we think about the world. All of these valiant
roles I picture myself filling, yet I inch towards them so slowly that
progress can barely be measured. Are these my lifelines, my tower
ledge, and do I know in my heart that none of these heady roles is my
destiny? Is that why I grabbed onto the non-philosophy of John Gray,
giving me permission to fail at all of these because, as he says, it is
not in human nature that any of these changes can occur on any
meaningful scale? Is his infuriating belief that the best we can do, all
we can do, is to be a good model for those in our immediate communities
and to be open to and aware of and fully participating in life's
astonishing joys -- is this my new lifeline, thin and frayed and shabby as it may be in comparison with the awesome, grandiose ones I clinged to before?
And what would become of me if I were to lose this lifeline too?
The
questions in the two paragraphs above are rhetorical, but these three
are not -- the great take-away from Hornby's book is how we, each for
ourselves, decide to answer these questions when we close the book's
cover:
- If we have no choice,
how can we best stop fighting the inevitable, stop wasting time trying
to be what are not and cannot be (and trying to make others what they
are not), get real about our hopes and dreams, and accept and
understand the way things are and why, and make the best of who we are
and what we are inevitably going to do and be anyway?
- What is holding us back?
What is keeping us from being what we are going to be and doing what we
are going to do? Why is it holding us back? Unless it is self-delusion
(the dangers of idealism
again) that is holding us back, there may be no changing these
restrictions, no loosening of the ropes, but at least we should be able
to recognize them and understand their purpose. In Jess' 'stupid dog'
analogy, we can accomplish a lot within the constraints of the leash
without unnecessarily and foolishly choking ourselves all the time.
- What happens when we suddenly lose our lifeline?
There is a terrible story in today's Toronto Star about a water-loving
dog who slipped his leash, ran off, and ended up drowning in a
municipal reservoir whose sides were too steep to climb. Some lifelines
are useful, even essential to our health and sanity. Others merely hold
us back, delay us from being who we really are and doing what we are
meant to do, waste our lives away in illusionary imprisonment. What is
frightening is that we don't know which is which, and we don't know
what we will do, and feel, if we suddenly lose our lifelines. But
perhaps by imagining what would happen if we did lose them, we might
free ourselves from the ones that are merely unhealthy, merely holding
us back from being something more than who we are.
Nothing
simple here. Beneath the brilliant raucous humour of Hornby's writing
lie some very dark issues, matters of life and death, like a black hole
twinned with a star going nova.
(*hers biologically,
though I am honoured and humbled that they call me their father,
considering the deliberately small role I played in their upbringing) |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
