Books
Nasty, brutish and short
by Nicholas Reid
Show me an isolated, snow-covered winter landscape, and I’ll show you territory ripe for literary symbolism. Every tree is transformed into an idea and every puff of wind into a significant memory. Bare bleakness strips things down to their essentials. At least it does in the third novel by New York-based Irishman Gerard Donovan.
Julius Winsome lives alone in a cabin deep in the woods of Maine. His grand-father and his father were soldiers in the two world wars, and both came back hating the business of killing people, but still expert in the business of firearms. Julius’s daddy taught Julius to dislike hunting and shooting. An habitual pacifist, Julius shudders when the hunters’ guns go off in the winter woods. Julius puts another log on the fire and buries himself in one of the 3000-plus books that line the walls of his cabin. He’s fond of Shakespeare and Shakespearean diction, into which he sometimes lapses. He reflects that his books insulate him from the cold. The only thing he seems to love is his terrier, Hobbes. Then one day somebody deliberately shoots Hobbes dead.
Thus the first 30-odd pages of a tight narrative that barely makes it past 200 pages, even with a lot of publisher’s bulking-up. The blurb carefully gives away no more of the plot than this. Neither will I, because from this point on the tale takes a distinctly shocking turn and the slap of surprise is one of Donovan’s most potent assets.
But I should have been warned by the dog’s name. Hobbes means Thomas Hobbes, the philosopher who said that a state of nature is permanent war of every man against every man. Julius may apparently be “winsome” (OED – “charming and presentable”), but half his name is conquering Caesar and he knows everything there is to know about sniping and the reliable British Lee-Enfield service rifle. And as the tale develops, it is clearly not merely the death of a dog that riles him so much as the painful loss of the only woman he ever got to know in a meaningful way. Really, human beings are not his thing, even if books are.
Julius Winsome has a minimalist plot and minimal cast of characters but, against the odds, it does not have minimalist language. Stylistically, despite the hunting-shooting premise, this is not Hemingway territory. Donovan has a poetic turn of phrase, a Shakespearean ambition. Or rather, Julius Winsome does, because the story is told in the first person, and this is really the novelist’s chief gamble.
As events become more outrageous, more morally indefensible, the voice telling them is still matter-of-fact, knowledgeable and apparently compassionate. There is a disjunction between voice and subject matter, like the disjunction built into the main character’s name. This is an unreliable narrator armed with a rifle. Maybe a schizophrene.
Looked at one way, it could all be said to add up to an anti-guns fable. But it is as much a parable on the folly of living alone and burying oneself in too many books. And it is certainly chilly.
JULIUS WINSOME, by Gerard Donovan (Faber and Faber, $35).
