Jott

Sam Thompson

JM Originals, £12.99

ESSENTIALLY, Jott is a small story about three or four people, much of whose communication is conducted in silence. But, because what underlies it is nothing less than the labyrinthine workings of the human mind, what emerges is a complex, nuanced literary novel of extraordinary perception.

It concerns two Irishmen living in London in 1935, who have been friends since school. One is Arthur Bourne, who has embraced the relatively new discipline of psychiatry and treats patients in a mental institution. Always the shy, diffident one who doesn’t want to rock the boat, Arthur has recently been trying, with the help of his own psychiatrist, Dr Venn, to pinpoint “the place in childhood where he had first failed to get to grips with the world in some way he still could not explain”.

His friend, Louis Molyneux, makes quite a contrast. Louis is an aspiring writer with grand notions of his own brilliance, even if the first example we see of his work is a sub-par Joyce pastiche. Believing that anything is justified in the name of Art, he has no qualms about exploiting his friends to get what he wants: specifically, access to Mr Walker, the “incurable” patient in the hospital who most intrigues Arthur. Louis believes that getting to know Mr Walker would be an invaluable aid to the book he’s writing about mental health. Although it would be strictly against the rules for Arthur to let Louis into the wards, the dynamic that’s existed between them since childhood means that Arthur is bound to relent. (Jott, it turns out, was inspired by Thompson’s psychiatrist grandfather, Geoffrey, who allowed his lifelong friend Samuel Beckett access to London’s Bethlehem hospital as research for his first novel.)

As can be imagined, his constant submission to Louis’s demands is a worry to Arthur, symptomatic of his flawed psyche Then, when he meets and marries the free-thinking Sarah, Arthur has to negotiate an intimate relationship with a complicated human being for the first time. And it looks as if he’s not up to the challenge.

“But doesn’t it ever strike you as unbearable?” Dr Venn asks his patient, Arthur. “To live in a world where everything means something else.” He’s not far wrong. In his personal and professional life, Arthur is trying to discern the true meaning behind the behaviour of others, which often means making tenuous or counter-intuitive mental leaps. Throughout, he gives the impression of a man fumbling around in the dark, mistaking mirages for genuine psychiatric insights, until he himself shows signs of sliding into insanity.

Letting us see the story only from Arthur’s perspective as he continually revises the way he sees himself and the people around him, Jott feels like it’s built on shifting sands, giving the central character and the readers little certainty to cling to. On a more positive note, there’s a strong suggestion in this elegant, understated book that working through his relationship with Sarah will be much more the kind of therapy Arthur needs.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT