Drawing on his own near-death experience, the author finds a powerful intensity in this tale of a young man’s convalescence in a Cornish village
“I
had to pick through the wreckage, blind at first. I had to find all the pieces of me, scattered all around, and put them back together, one by one.” Following a cardiac arrest which left him clinically dead for 40 minutes, Jago Trevarno, the young narrator of Patrick Charnley’s moving debut novel, has retreated to the Cornish village where he grew up, to shelter under the protection of his “off-gridder” uncle, Jacob.
His mother dead of cancer and his father long gone, at 20 Jago’s world seems to have shrunk to nothing but the hard daily labour of working a subsistence farm high above the rugged Atlantic coast. The life Jago had begun to construct in the city, “a runaway train” in flight from his mother’s death and everything that reminded him of her, has evaporated abruptly in the aftermath of his near-death experience. He has “gone from someone who needed to slow down, to be present, to someone having no choice about it”, and must start from scratch.
The building blocks available to Jago are basic. His injury has left him with “reduced processing power”: his brain’s responses are slow and have to remain so, calibrated for recovery. He is also in marked retreat from intense emotion, wary of the havoc it could wreak in his vulnerable synapses, and Jacob – kindly, protective and understanding but taciturn, unused to company – exerts only minimal emotional counterpressure.
