Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer's Reviews > The Discomfort of Evening

Winner of the 2020 International Booker Prize.

I nod and think about the teacher who said I’d go far with my empathy and boundless imagination, but in time I’d have to find words for it because otherwise everything and everybody stays inside you. And one day, just like the black stockings which my classmates sometimes tease me about wearing because we’re Reformists – even though I never wear black stockings – I will crumple in on myself until I can only see darkness, eternal darkness.

Having been chosen with a group of other Goodreads friends to read “Tyll” as part of the Reading Agency’s shadowing of the 2020 International Booker Prize, I decided to read the rest of the shortlist – something I had previously decided not to do and instead concentrate my reading time (severely hampered by COVID-19) on the Women’s Prize longlist.

I had some concerns about this book before I began given: one of the same friends had abandoned it; another marked it as “difficult to enjoy … gratuitous … an exercise in breaking as many taboo’s as possible”

Barry Pierce in the Irish Times describing it as part of a trend of novels that “focus on .. grotesque characters written almost grotesquely”, a genre he describes as “abject fiction” with as its “ur text” Eileen Mosfegh’s “Eileen” – possibly in view the most execrable book ever to be longlisted for the Booker (albeit as much due to the ridiculous plot as the scatological writing). It is a genre which I seem to strongly dislike and avoid on Philippians 4:8 grounds; although genetically I seem pre-disposed towards it (my clone being a particular fan of Patti Yumi Cottrell, a persistent practitioner - and of this book).

The story of this autobiographically influenced book is simple.

Jas, is a 10 year old girl, living with her two brothers, sister and strict Dutch Reformed parents on a dairy farm in late 2000 through to 2001. The book opens immediately with tragedy – her brother Matthies drowns after falling through the ice in a long distance skating race (the author’s own brother dying when the author was 3)– and the book examines the fall out of this tragic event on the family, functioning as an examination of dysfunctional grief.

Jas blames herself for the death – having struck a bargain with God to save her pet rabbit (which she was convinced was being fattened up ready for Christmas). Her mother reverts to a form of eating disorder – repeatedly cutting out elements of her diet in a form of self-purging/fasting. Her father sinks even further than ever into anger and silence, something provoked still further by the destruction of his dairy herd after Foot and Mouth sweeps from the UK across Holland. And the children descend into experimenting with a mix of self-harm, animal abuse and sexual exploration.

The imagery in the book is strong – Jas drawing strongly on his farm experience to try (and normally fail) to make sense of the world around him.

The sight of his brother’s dead body is

“Matthies’s face was as pale as fennel”

As he struggles with his inner demons:

“There weren’t any words to take the edge off fear, the way the blades of the combine decapitated the rapeseed plants to keep only the bit you can use.”

Or as he makes sense of how his non-communicative parents could have got together, while also ruminating (an excellent choice of words by me!) on what he understands of sex via what he sees on the farm:

It’s still a mystery how our parents found each other. The thing is, Dad’s hopeless at looking. When he’s lost something it’s usually in his pocket, and when he goes to do the shopping he always comes back with something different than what was on the list: Mum’s the wrong kind of yoghurt, but one he was happy enough with and vice versa. They’ve never told us about how they met – Mum never thinks it a good time. There are rarely any good times here, and if we have them we only realize afterwards. My suspicion is that it was exactly like with the cows, that one day Granny and Grandpa opened my mum’s bedroom door and put Dad in with her like a bull. After that they shut the door and hey presto: there we were. From that day on, Dad called her ‘wife’ and Mum called him ‘husband’. On good days ‘little man’ and ‘little woman’, which I found strange, as though they were worried they’d forget each other’s sex, or that they belonged to each other.

But these excerpts are some of the few highlights. Increasingly though she draws heavily on the dark side of what sees around him in nature and in farming – her language increasingly filled with imagery of decay, blight, excrement, the mould on the left-over bakery items his father buys, rotting vegetables

When we arrived at the mangels, some of them were rotten. The mushy white pulp that looked like pus stuck to my fingers when I picked them up.

And to be honest, as so often with this genre, the sheer repetitiveness of the gross imagery turns what could be shocking into something increasingly tedious. The writers in this genre have never subscribed to the “less is more” theory of writing.

The writing becomes very predictable and easy to satire – early in my reading of the book I posted on a discussion forum

The book is growing on me like the mould on the rancid dead hamster festering in my brother’s bed, mould that reminds me of the patches my mother scrapes off our buns in turn uncovering the currants that remind me of sores on the pestilential back of our sow. As my father quotes from Leviticus “a persistent defiling mould; the novel is unclean”

Only to find to my amusement that a decaying hamster and currants (in this case like drowning beetles) featured later in the book.

The other part of my spoof quote was Biblical, Jas has been thoroughly immersed in the Bible and as any discussion in his family dries up, it’s the language of the Bible that he repeatedly reaches to.

I’ve got so many words but it’s as if fewer and fewer come out of me, while the biblical vocabulary in my head is pretty much bursting at the seams.

I found this a much more successful piece of writing by the author (themselves with a strong religious background) – the high point being this excellent analogy:

Suddenly I realize what’s going on. Everything from the recent past falls into place, all the times we were fragile, and I say, ‘This is another of the plagues from Exodus, it must be. Only they’re coming to us in the wrong order. Do you understand?’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Well, you had a nosebleed which meant water changed into blood. We’ve had the toad migration, head lice at school, the death of the firstborn, horseflies around the muck-heap, a grasshopper squashed by Obbe’s boot, ulcers on my tongue from the fried egg, and hailstorms.’ ‘And you think that’s why there’s a cattle plague now?’ Hanna asks with a shocked expression. She’s laid her hand on her heart, exactly above the Barbie’s ears, as though she’s not allowed to hear what we’re discussing. I nod slowly. After this, there’s one more to come, I think to myself, and that’s the worst one: darkness, total darkness, daytime eternally clad in Dad’s Sunday overcoat.

Unfortunately, the book then descends further into gratuitousness and repetitiveness – but this time its in the narrative action rather than the analogies. The (as described earlier) self-harm, animal abuse and sexual exploration is described in rather sickening detail – in a manner which I felt added little to the book and subtracted much from any ability to appreciate it.

The practitioners of this genre also do not subscribe to the “show not tell” theory of writing.

When they do, I think the book is more convincing – no more so than in the powerful ending.
There are a few other areas of the book which I find less convincing.

The first is fidelity to the set-up: a book set in 2000-01 has a narrator whose brother listens to an album from 2003 and how herself anticipates the 2006 demotion of Pluto as a planet, while also seeming to change age from 10 to 12 in only a few months (skipping 11 altogether).

More generally I did not find the age of the narrator convincing. Most attempts at writing children seem to me to over-estimate the maturity of the children; this book seems the opposite – Jas I find reads more like an 8-year-old than 10-12 year old, for example when (at least) 12:

I’d nervously shaken my head: once Mum was behind the glass of the TV set, we’d never get her back, or maybe only in pixels when the screen was snowy, and what would become of Dad then?

But maybe this is simply a narrator on the cusp of adolescence and caught between adult experimentation and childlike fears – and lacking supportive and loving parents to allow her to navigate this transition against a background of grieving.

The most touching part of the book speaks to this:

Promise me this will stay between us, dear toads, but sometimes I wish I had different parents. Do you understand that?’ I continue. ‘Parents like Belle’s who are as soft as shortbread just out of the oven and give her lots of cuddles when she’s sad, frightened or even very happy. Parents that chase away all the ghosts from under your bed, from inside your head, and run through a summary of the week with you every weekend like Dieuwertje Blok does on TV, so you don’t forget everything you achieved that week, all the things you tripped up on before scrabbling to your feet again. Parents that see you when you’re talking to them – even though I find it terrifying to look people in the eye, as though other people’s eyeballs are two lovely marbles you can continuously win or lose. Belle’s parents go on exotic holidays and make tea for her when she comes home from school. They’ve got hundreds of different sorts including aniseed and fennel, my favourite tea. Sometimes they drink it sitting on the floor because that’s more comfortable than sitting in a chair. And they horse around with each other without it turning into fighting. And they say sorry as often as they’re nasty to each other.

While most of the imagery is drawn from the bible or the farm around her, I was not sure if this quote was a failure of writing (unpleasant imagery drawn from outside those two areas) or bad translation of locusts:

When Mum and Dad rescued the beans they had just frozen, they lay wet and floppy on the kitchen table. The little green bodies looked dismal, like an exterminated plague of bush crickets.

One thing that is interesting about this year’s International Booker Prize shortlist is that (unlike some years where my impression is books are picked which were relatively obscure even in their homeland) they have picked a number of books which were very popular in their original language – this book for example (translated by Michele Hutchinson) selling 50,000+ copies despite its incredibly challenging style.

I wonder how many of the 50,000 copies were actually quietly put away well before being finished – this is a book which despite its merits I would find impossible to recommend.

If you read it you may also quietly decide to abandon part way through.

Lots of people want to run away, but the ones who really do rarely announce it beforehand: they just go.