Darke by Rick Gekoski

Canongate, £16.99

Review by Malcolm Forbes

RICK Gekoski’s impressive debut novel opens with a closed door. Darke, the book’s eponymous hero, employs a handyman to block up his letter box, change the locks and remove the door-knocker, leaving him with only a keyhole and a peephole. After implementing further “world-proofing” measures – redirecting his mail, disconnecting the phone, stockpiling supplies – he hunkers down and begins his self-imposed exile. By shutting the world out, he draws the reader in.

“I am become a thing of darkness,” Darke informs us, and for the first part of the novel he attempts to live up to his name, withholding the reasons for his bizarre actions. He is less secretive when it comes to who he is and the life he has led. In this, his “coming-of-old-age book”, he candidly records his thoughts and recounts his experiences, meditating on his marriage to Suzy, his relationship with his daughter Lucy and his career as a schoolmaster.

But it is the tone as much as the content of Darke’s journal which keeps us rapt. Relentlessly – mercilessly – Gekoski’s cantankerous protagonist lets loose splenetic rants or caustic digs. He rails against God, skewers modern art and scoffs at bad food. He dislikes weather (“It has no integrity, it teases and promises and disappoints”), hates weddings (“Give me a good funeral any day”) and reserves special disgust for dogs: “No matter how cunningly disguised by fluff and fealty, all I see is a shameless slobbering arse-sniffing leg-humping scrotum-toting arsehole flaunting filth-spreader”.

When Darke isn’t waxing critical about the hostile world he has renounced, or reminding us of “my lunatic aversion to my fellow man”, he is bewailing his increasingly malfunctioning body or engaged in more rigorous bouts of self-loathing. Not that he has entirely lost his way, or his standards: Darke is a snob who admits to feeling ill in ugly surroundings and “undelighted” at his daughter’s choice of a northern working-class husband, and who still opens his blank barricading door for Harrods and Waitrose deliveries.

Three hundred pages of self-enforced solitude, pained introspection and acerbic put-downs, no matter how well crafted, would try even the most patient reader. About a third of the way in, Gekoski judicially veers off, casts back and allows Darke to shed light. We are plunged into a moving, devastating chain of events which begins with a cough of blood and ends with the fading tail-lights of an undertaker’s car. With the greatest of subtlety our narrator assumes a new identity: he is no longer merely a disturbed and embittered crank but a man who has lost “my first and only love.”

Darke is both a tender and hard-hitting examination of grief and the slow, singular healing process. Darke finally ventures out of his bolt-hole and braves a reunion with a hurt and angry Lucy – but not before revisiting his Oxford stamping-ground, retracing old steps, and replaying Suzy’s journey from promising student to young author. The past contains pleasure and pain for Darke, but once explored and compartmentalised he faces the tougher challenge of finding his place and his purpose in the present.

Darke is a brilliantly vivid creation, a kind of secular anchorite with bite and scars, who manages to repulse and attract in equal measure. He is not only literate but literary, and his journal brims with bookish facts, opinions and allusions. There are some writers he has never cared for (“That frigid snitbag Virginia Woolf”); others, such as perennial favourite Dickens, he steadily falls out of love with. In time, all books make him “nauseous”. His plight is all the more tragic when literature, his lifelong pursuit, no longer excites or consoles and becomes just another snuffed-out spark.

Some aspects of the book don’t work. A scheme involving Darke’s Bulgarian cleaner is too contrived, while his penchant for puns (on eyeing his Indian neighbours through his peephole: “Sikh and ye shall find”) predictably grate. But these are quibbles when set against the novel’s numerous delights: the astringent prose, the pockets of pitch-black humour, the many quirks and facets of a bruised yet ultimately resilient hero.

“It’s enough to break your heart, life,” Darke tells us at one point. This fine novel, both life-affirming and life-shattering, has the power to do the same.