A Son of the Rock

Gollancz, 2020, 260 p.

This novel charts the distanced relationship between Shaw, a man recovering from “a rough patch” and whose tetchy mother is in a care home, and Victoria Nyman – or Norman, Shaw initially can’t remember which – who inherits her own mother’s home in another town.

Then again, everything in this book is distanced, starting with Shaw. We are never given his first name, a fact which detaches him from the narrative and puts a barrier between him and us as readers, as though, like us, he is merely an observer of proceedings. This is of course, a deliberate choice on Harrison’s part, a pointer to oddness. Throughout the novel Shaw’s interactions with others are reserved, emotionally unengaged. His mother may be partly to blame; she had had a succession of relationships with unsuitable men and is dismissive towards Shaw.

Not that Victoria is much less detached. The pair’s communications are sparse, almost ad hoc, their relationship more off than on, her experiences too tinged with oddity.

By chance Shaw meets Tim Swann, who goes on to give him a job which takes him round the country. Tim’s sister, Annie S Swann, is a medium whom Shaw consults. Her name is so close to that of all but forgotten Scottish writer Annie S Swan that it is unlikely to be a coincidence – a thought reinforced by one of the book’s chapters being titled The Swanns’ Way, an obvious reference to Proust.

Victoria becomes friendly with a waitress named Pearl, with whom she goes swimming in a pool near to Victoria’s inherited house and it is with her that the book’s oddness creeps in as she simply disappears (though not drowned) while swimming on her own.

This is a world which is apparently normal but in which strange things happen at its margins and in which none of the characters ever appears wholly part of it.

A paragraph which perhaps sums it up goes – “Poor Shaw! Compelled to believe he doesn’t believe in anything, in case he unearths from himself the one belief – the one deep consolation he daren’t relinquish; that he was always one of us. So much of his attention bound up in the work of denial that what happens to him can never really be experienced, only stored, and interpreted later as symbolic. So marginally conscious that the endless return of the repressed is all he has to work with.”

Harrison’s prose is always measured and lucid.

Pedant’s corner:- sometimes there was no question mark when a question had appeared in dialogue, acquifers (aquifers.)