Small print of life
The Shock of the Fall by Nathan Filer won the Costa Book of the Year Award 2013 in January this year. An amazingly captured story told through the eyes of a 19-year old psychiatric patient, the book is the debut novel of the writer.
Filer is a psychiatric nurse and as it turns out an excellent observer too. This story is framed in such tenacious sensitivity that at times it will make you stop and simply replay in your head what you have read to make sure you are following it. Because you want to make sure you are not falling off the track.
That is not because it is confusing but because you want to make sure you are getting it right, this story of a young man, who is mentally ill - haunted by his own life - but terribly eager to make sure you can understand what he is trying to tell you.
In the story, our protagonist Matthew, who suffers from schizophrenia, describes his every day life moving back and forth between the present and the past as he lives and relives the happenings in his personal life. These are memories of a childhood incident that resulted in the tragic death of his older brother Simon, a Down's Syndrome patient. It is an incident that has changed the life of his family and continues to haunt them in insurmountable ways.
The story is told in the first voice of the protagonist Matthew, who captures our hearts as he in a matter of fact way tells us the heart-breaking story of his loss and his challenging life.
Matthew is sharp, observant, honest and totally resolute about what he is trying to say, though at times helpless at the hands of his own limitations. But he is never 'unaware' of what is happening around him. At one place he says, addressing the reader directly, "I can only describe reality as I know it. I'm doing my best, and promise to keep trying."
The parents, Susan and Richard, are sweet, sensitive and loving parents but broken by the tragic loss of their older son. Filer develops each of his characters with love, sympathy and a level of sensitivity that is a mentionable credit to him as a writer. Matthew's voice is that of a young man - only nineteen - who is not only very honest about what he is narrating but terribly understanding and accommodative of each and every character he talks about. There is a profoundly effective humour with which he relates the happenings, making excuses for the various characters' inability to be normal.
Filer uses this dark humour to bring out the true sadness of the story.
As the story unfolds, a variety of characters pop in, people who are Matthew's support system outside of his parents - his loving grandmother, the doctors he sees, the nurses at the hospital he stays in and his school friend Jacob who is unconventional and weird but loyal. Jacob has a secret to keep for he is a young boy with the terrible burden of having to care for his totally disabled mother.
Matthew somehow senses this and one day follows his friend back home to discover what he is up to during his privileged midday break from school. What he does when he finds this out is join hands to change Jacob's mother's bed sheets, empty her piss jug and prepare snacks and food for her.
The reader will definitely stop to think. This is the mind of a young person brimming with new life and who to the ordinary could look like a broken record - stuck in the confusion and pain that can be the illness of the mind. But there can be more to a mind too if one looks properly. In revealing what Matthew does, Filer unravels a mind that has challenges in conforming to the conventional but none whatsoever when it comes to compassion, empathy and loyalty.
These scenes are but only tiny parts of the bigger story that is Mathew's life and memories. There is "too much small print" in life, he says - rather wisely. He understands less than the people around him. He is often apologetic about it; at other times he writes rather plaintively, "Mental illness turns people inwards", as he attempts to explain why things turn out the way they do.
The descriptions of family life before and after the tragedy are wonderfully narrated as Matthew grows into the awkward age of 19. We find him attending the day ward of a psychiatric hospital where he has to stick to a routine and have pills and injections at regular intervals. He says his life has become a 'cut and paste' kind of life as the same routine is played out in painfully boring accuracy each day.
We watch the slow disintegration of his mental state.
The writer has cleverly sketched out how the book looks visually. He has Matthew typing out his journal on an old typewriter. Matthew interspaces his work with sketches, doodles and various big and small letters. As result the book is a delightful work of art, words interspaced with drawings, varying typefaces and typographical variations - all used to represent how Matthew sees the story he is telling. Perhaps it is a representation of how his mind makes sense of things.
Even in this struggle to cope Matthew sees the joke in it all. He talks about a genogram of his family, alluding to his father's dead relatives by saying, 'Dad comes from a long line of dead people'.
The humour never ceases. It is extremely unnerving because we can see the vulnerability of Mathew's lone journey beneath it all. It is especially touching as we as a reader become aware that something is haunting Matthew, there is something that he wishes to remember. Filer keeps the suspense up keeping the reader gripped to the pages to find out what will be revealed.
The revelation is shocking, but not as much for the reader as it is for Matthew who has to relive every moment of it. He is however more practical about it than we can expect. 'We move in circles - this illness and me' he says, again very wisely, as he describes his journey between hospital and home as his condition move back and forth often in complete cycles of it own.
Nathan Filer does a wonderful job telling us the story of not only a tragic incident but the tragic circumstances under which the befallen family has to cope with it. There is not a single moment in this book when you will think Matthew is one ounce less les from someone with a full working mind - it is only how he can communicate with that mind to the outside world is where we all appear different.
Matthew has a beautiful mind, Filer tells us a beautiful story and The Shock of the Fall is a beautiful work of fiction that will make you rethink the way you look at life around you.
The Shock of the Fall is a deserving winner of the Costa Book of the Year Prize.
Muneera Parbeen, journalist and literary critic, writes from London
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