Something New

We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books. 

     “EVENINGS AND WEEKENDS” by Oisin McKenna (published by 4^th Estate; marketed in New Zealand by Harper-Collins NZ, $NZ34.99); “THE FINAL DIAGNOSIS” by Cynric Temple-Camp (HarperCollins $NZ39.99)

            Here is a gathering of – mainly youngish – Londoners. Ed Seymour is about thirty. His girlfriend Maggie is pregnant. He’s not sure that he wants a child and he doesn’t earn much as a courier; but Maggie is more positive about her condition. The problem is that the best shelter they can afford in London is a damp, cramped apartment. Maybe a baby will mean they’ll have to move out of inner London and go into some far suburb. Maggie’s brothers Phil and Callum are very different from each other. There’s a rumour that Callum is a drug dealer, which is not unlikely given that these characters are of an age to pop party drugs and go to sweaty raves as often as they can. Ed Seymour and Maggie and her brothers grew up in homes just across the road from each other. Now the slightly-crazed mother of Ed is the only one in her house. She often drags her chairs onto the pavement to shout at passers-by. But Maggie’s mother Rosaleen is made of sturdier stuff. She’s Irish. When she was young she became tired with all the restrictions of puritanic Ireland and she headed for London. But she faced some prejudice from English Londoners. Now she sometimes wants to go back to Ireland to see if it is as she remembered it. Trouble is, she’s being eaten away with cancer.

            Curiously, there’s a great whale that has stranded itself in the Thames. It becomes a sensation, with people wondering how it got there and how it could be returned to the open sea. Every so often we are reminded of the whale and the sensation it has caused with the media.

            There now. I’ve given you the apparent backbone of this tale. A sort of families tale, which in the end manages to contrive a happy wedding scene, though it isn’t Ed and Maggie. But I have missed telling you what the real backbone of the story is. The fact is that the blurb doesn’t immediately say what is most important in Evenings and Weekends. And I noticed that some of the British book-reviewers tip-toed carefully around the novel’s chief preoccupation. I read the review in the English newspaper the Independent, and their reviewer basically told us that the novel was about London today (the novel is set in 2019), and how very difficult for younger working-class people it is to own a house in London. Younger people were forced to live elsewhere. It could, the reviewer said, be likened to the novels of Zadie Smith [such as Smith’s N-W, reviewed years ago on this blog and her Swing Time which I reviewed elsewhere] which were really about the status of London in its poorer parts and how people spend their time.

            Nonsense. Evenings and Weekends is dominantly about gay men, sexuality, gay love and cheating. To put it simply – Ed Seymour might have a girlfriend called Maggie, but Maggie’s brother Phil has seen Ed soliciting men in a public toilet, and Phil also knows much of Ed’s background. In fact, even when Ed and Phil both went to high-school they were sexually attracted to each other. Ed’s worst betrayal was joining with thuggish schoolboys and beating up Phil for being “queer”. Phil spends much of the novel wondering if he should tell Maggie that Ed is homosexual and really not a man she should marry. Then we have the long agony of Phil himself worried that his lover Keith is going to leave him for another guy. Other gays enter the story which, surprisingly, all takes place in a mere two days.

            What may be difficult for many readers is not the fact of gay love and inevitable jealousies, but the very many explicit sexual encounters there are – what often seem to be gross biological intrusions. There are a couple of episodes dealing with male rape and prolonged fellatio. Let’s just say that this will be an alien – and alienating – world for many readers.

            Evenings and Weekends is told throughout in the present tense and Oisin McKenna deserves credit for his clarity and precise prose. As you might have understood, McKenna is Irish by birth and is acutely aware of the Irish status in London, referring to racial bigotry against the Irish. When Rosaleen finally goes on her last visit to Ireland, it is like an epiphany, affirming her true Irishness.

            And what of that whale in the river? I can only guess that it is some sort of symbol, but I’m not sure what it symbolises. If you read the novel, you will have to work it out for yourself.

 

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The Final Diagnosis is the absolute opposite of Evenings and Weekends. It is non-fiction built on a series of anecdotes in New Zealand. Cynric Temple-Camp, born and raised in Southern Africa, has for years lived in New Zealand. He is a pathologist – that is, a doctor who deals with the dead, often having to determine how or why somebody died.  This can mean simply affirming how somebody died naturally; but it can often mean having to assist the police when it is possible that a murder has taken place. Inevitably, as he takes us through some of his cases, he has to give us very specific details on how the body works and he often has to use specialist words, which (for the non-specialist) can be a little confusing. However, Cynric Temple-Camp has a breezy style on the whole.  The Final Diagnosis is his third collection of real-life stories.

Let’s look at how he organises his tales.

Part One is called “Dangerous Days”. Cynric Temple-Camp tells us about a smash-up which killed a driver – but Temple-Camp, in examining the body, works out the odd circumstances that caused the crash. It had nothing to do with suicide as was first expected. A really bizarre tale follows of a mentally-impaired man who, with his delusions, pestered hospital staff about having to have injections. This was one for the psychiatrists rather that the pathologist. Then there was a woman who had cancer but the cancer was fiendishly difficult to find – and this is where he has to use many specialist terms to explain her case. Then a tale of a young woman who seemed to need psychological help… but her problem was purely physical. It was the fault of a tumour in one of her ovary.

Part Two, being headed “Chance and Circumstance”, deals with the unexpected. First the sad story of the small passenger plane that crashed against a hill in the fog. Most passengers survived, but three died by bad luck – a steward who was not protected by a seat belt; and two men who, though buckled up, had their seats unhinged and hence were thrown forward at high speed. Temple-Camp was the pathologist who had to examine the corpses and worked out exactly why these three were killed while others in the plane came through with barely a scratch. Pure chance. There follows the story of a woman who died when she was just about to give birth. In this case Temple-Camp is cautious, never quite sure why the woman had died but suggesting it was probably an embolism. Followed by the story of a woman who almost killed herself by eating too many peanuts – over indulgence of peanuts can be toxic. And of course gross obesity can also be a killer as told in the next story. Temple-Camp deals with what happened when Covid came along, where there was much misinformation but also the hell of there not being adequate medication to combat the plague.

Finally, we come to “Murder Most Foul”. Temple-Camp was often merely peripheral to the stories told in this part, such as the sordid tale of the death of Plumley-Walker partly at the hands of a dominatrix. He is very sceptical about the legal outcome of the “Sounds Murders” when Olivia Hope and Ben Smart disappeared, presumably murdered. But he fully agrees with the legal outcome of Mark Lundy who quite clearly murdered his wife and daughter. He rounds thing off with warning that old people are often erratic when they forget to take the necessary medication; with the traps of false diagnoses and – bizarrely – he includes a section about how he thinks the artist Vincent Van Gogh died, not by suicide but by murder.

Read one after the other, this is an engaging collection though it might disturb some readers to consider that what they are enjoying has to do with other people’s tragedies. Temple-Camp closes every chapter with part of a well-known poem, though sometimes they seem to have nothing to do with the case that has just been examined. Entertaining certainly, but sometimes using medical terms that are beyond the understanding of most readers.