"We are Not in the World" by Conor O'Callaghan

 

We are Not in the World

By Conor O'Callaghan

A review

One of the best things about this novel is its title. I am not being facetious. It sums up, in a brief poetic phrase, the predicament of its cast of characters, and, with each new chapter, it assumes additional layers of meaning. 

The protagonist of the novel is Paddy, an Irishman.  Having lived for several years in America with his wife and daughter, he relocates to England, closer to home, yet not quite.   Like him, his daughter Kitty seems to live a displaced existence.  In her native country, she is considered “foreign” due to her Irish roots.  However, when she starts college in Dublin, she is even more of an outsider. A love affair gone horribly wrong turns her “homecoming” into a nightmare.

We are not in the World is a road novel of sorts. When we first meet Paddy, he is at a steering wheel of a haulage truck, crossing from England into France.  Like his daughter, love has caused him pain, and he is at the tail end of a painful extramarital relationship. In a bid to escape – physically and mentally – he unearths a truck driver’s licence which he has never previously used and offers to cover for Howard, a terminally ill friend who works as a driver for the mysterious and slightly unsettling boss Carl.  Carl is wary of his atypical recruit and he has reason to be.  Indeed, Paddy has some tricks up his sleeve. He smuggles with him on the trip his daughter Kitty, in a desperate bid to rebuild a relationship which might cure her after the trauma she recently went through.

The endless motorways, the refuelling stations where Paddy (occasionally) meets Carl for instructions, the strange fellowship of truck drivers to which Paddy never belongs… they are also “not in the world”, a sort of no-man’s land.  The driver’s cabin – in which Paddy traverses this “other world” – serves as the backdrop to the witty, bittersweet exchanges between father and daughter.  Gradually, events from their past come into focus, and we understand the scars they carry.

The “French” chapters alternate with segments narrated in the second person, describing the torrid love affair from which Paddy has just emerged.  This parallel story is told in inverse chronological order, such that we first witness the disintegration of the relationship and move back to its tentative, initial stages.

What links the two narratives is a folktale which Paddy recounts to both his daughter and his lover – the story of the Irish warrior Oisín.   Oisín falls in love with Niamh, princess of the “Land of Eternal Youth” (Tír na nÓg) Oisín is gifted immortality, but misses his homeland and kin.  Niamh sends him back on a magical horse, warning him that he should never dismount. Tragically, he slips off the beast and dies.   Elements of the myth are reworked into the novel, sometimes in ways which are not immediately obvious.  For instance, Carl provides Paddy with doctored tachographs, enabling him to spend longer stretches on the road than allowed by the law.  Again, there is this sense of stepping out of time and out of reality, like Oisín’s three hundred years in Tír na nÓg.   

This liminal existence appears to extend to the character’s thoughts, which teeter on the threshold between silence and speech.  When Paddy’s lover first meets him during an interview, she almost immediately finds herself indulging in erotic fantasies:

“Would the candidate care to lick your throat?...” The room exploded. You had a split second of panic where it seemed as if you actually might have blurted that out loud. It was, in the end, something funny someone else said.

Similarly, Paddy often finds himself wondering whether he has said something out loud:

There are certain thoughts I can’t think now, for fear of being overheard.

This is a defining aspect of the novel.  It is also one which initially irritated me and almost put me off the book.  I must admit I found the constant switch between monologue and dialogue and the sometimes-half-expressed thoughts confusing.  I had to make a considerable effort to follow who was saying what and, on top of that, the segments in second-person narration, which I tend to find artificial, provided little respite. 

But believe me, it was worth it.  Because it is only when the novel reaches its emotionally shattering climax that one can step back and watch, awestruck, as all the elements of the novel reassemble into one, impressive whole.