Something in Philip Eyre’s life is dying. He doesn’t know what it is but he knows what to do. Toronto is beckoning – a new job and a chance to leave behind everything in Shrewsbury that torments him, including his ex-wife and two children. With the closure of just one more case of child adoption, he’ll be able to take the flight, starting a new adventure to bury the feelings of restlessness that have escalated since he turned forty. But ‘there’s no such thing as a last case’ his friend Richard insists, and it’s a sentiment that rings dramatically true when Eyre’s last case concerns the enigmatic Janet Burns.

With just the brush of her fingers across his knuckles, the fragile hold Eyre’s been keeping on life up until then is threatened. Her touch sparks the memory of some words from a poem: ‘How love burns…’, and suddenly his stability begins to falter. It should have been enough to have ticked all the appropriate boxes on the adoption forms – mother consents, father unknown – to end that part of his life. But something about Janet brings all his insecurities fluttering to the surface, and he becomes driven to track down the father of her baby daughter, Holly, even when she insists the father is arguably the greatest father of all… God.

Driven by a developing obsession with Janet and her chequered past, Eyre becomes disturbed by the gaps in his own memories of his now deceased father. His frustration with only random fragmented images and echoes of memories is further exaggerated when his mother dies, the only one capable of giving him the answers he craves. When Eyre is finally able to close the case and move to Toronto, his new career and new relationship with ‘K’ are not enough to banish the doubts and insecurities his encounter with Janet had brought to the fore. He returns home after his mother’s death amidst a flurry of questions, increasing paranoia, and a continuing preoccupation with Janet that threatens everything he thought he knew about himself, his family, and his past.

In essence this is a book about fatherhood: Eyre’s search for the ‘our father’ that will close his last case and allow him to move on; his role as father and relationship with his children which is awkward and strained at best; and his desperation to know more about what sort of man his own father was. Yet more than this, both Eyre and Burns are examples of how we precariously construct our lives and beliefs upon fractured and unreliable memories. Janet’s past is fogged by the drugs she is given to treat her mental illness, but when these drugs are reduced, recollections of her distant past return in a disturbing mix of reality tinged with the fiction her mother read to her as a child. When Eyre looks deeper within himself, the scattered images and words of his past twist, turn, and fall upon themselves until he is left with only a list of ‘probables’ and ‘possibles’ and an overwhelming urge to find the answer to an unknown question.

Neale’s first person narrator is an intelligent man; his marriage may have broken down, but he’s been a hard worker, successful at his job. And yet, as the novel progresses, the reader’s attentions are drawn away from Janet’s mental instability towards the narrator himself, and an increasing sense that none of us are immune to the fragility of our own minds.

I read this book twice. The first time was with pen and notepad and good intentions of making detailed notes, but by chapter three the notes were thinning out and by chapter four they were abandoned altogether as I got swept along by the intense and unpredictable plot. The second read was to capture the subtle layering and echoes of the novel that had subconsciously driven me to read without stopping the first time and which I feared I may not have captured fully in my initial haste. I was not disappointed; the novel lost none of its intensity on second reading, and I gained more insight into the subtle signs of Philip Eyre’s unravelling.

As Linda Anderson’s testimony on the front of the book declares, this is a story that ‘fearlessly [delves] into our secret selves’. While Eyre’s past sends him spiralling towards an uncertain future, we have little choice but to go with him. And if there is one question the reader will be left asking themselves by the end of the book, it will be – Can I trust what I have always believed to be true?

 

The Book of Guardians was published in 2012 by Salt Publishing, London. Visit www.derekneale.com to learn more about Derek and how you can purchase his book.