Wry, satisfying work brimming with black humour

Man Booker Prize judge and author Rick Gekoski's novel is suitably named.

DARKE
Rick Gekoski
Allen and Unwin

By JESSIE NEILSON
 

Dr James Darke has completely withdrawn from the world following trauma in his personal life.

He is cynical and bitter to the extreme and, as he proclaims in Darke, his journal of self-conscious lamentation, he can no longer bear the presence of his fellow man.

Closing the curtains in his London apartment, removing technological devices and boarding up the front door, he is unreachable. With a generously stocked wine cupboard that should see him out, he has negotiated a way for supplementary groceries to be delivered in the least intrusive manner. He will feign deafness to avoid conversation with erstwhile housekeepers. He is short-tempered, of fixed opinion, and fastidious.

Darke wears his name perfectly and he knows it. An Oxford scholar, he followed this with a teaching career, seeing his former role as an English teacher in shaping the boys with his own excessive judgement. By the time he quit, his impression was that his students were all congealing into one another.

However, beyond this teaching, and beyond his present-day isolation, he still has his daughter, Lucy, to mould. She, contrarily, has become passionate in her claims that she has had it of a lifetime of having her metaphors interrogated, and her emoticons  (or despised "typographical figures", as he calls them) endured.

Somehow Darke needs to break out of his ongoing prison of misery and pain. His journal is his method of attempting to find peace, or at least understanding, of life in its new form. In his journal he writes elegantly of his present situation, and remembers hazy times through the inaccuracy of faded memory. He is fully aware of the passing of time and of his own mortality. The rhetorical questions are sad, and pertinent, such as when he asks how we account for the tenacity of those "gummy spots of time that inexplicably adhere when so much more is erased".

An academic, rare books dealer and a judge for the Man Booker Prize, author Rick Gekoski is of a similar age to the character of his first novel, which brims with  black humour. While the protagonist is in his own private hell, he remains always ironic and self-deprecating. This is a wry, satisfying work.

Jessie Neilson is a University of Otago library assistant.

Dr James Darke has completely withdrawn from the world following trauma in his personal life.

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