Your Life Without Me, by James Meek review: 'his most ambitious work to date'

James Meek is a writer whom I find consistently interesting, even if some of his work “chimes” less with me than others. Both The People’s Act of Love and To Calais, In Ordinary Time struck me as ingenious and intense; by contrast his more realist and contemporary novels, We Are Now Beginning Our Descent and The Heart Broke In left me ever so slightly cold. It isn’t really a question of genre, since Andrew O’Hagan’s novels which take on similar issues in a similar style felt more whole-hearted somehow. The book I’ve returned to most, and recommended most, is the early collection of short stories, The Museum of Doubt, especially for the linked short stories featuring Gordon, a man with neither conscience or self-consciousness, a piece of modern monster-making who puts the Begbies and Caffertys to shame.

James Meek | Marzena Pogorsaly

I was reminded of them reading Your Life Without Me even though the central character, Mr Burman, could not be more different. What they share is a form of lack of affect, even though with Gordon it displays as almost total disinhibition and Mr Burman is pathologically diffident. Both create characters who are trapped by their own thought patterns. It is, in my opinion, Meek’s most ambitious and fascinating work to date, a novel which manages to combine the cerebral and the sensitive with great elegance.

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Mr Burman is Mr Burnam throughout. We learn that his late wife was called Ada (and is “was called” correct, as she is very present despite being dead). His daughter Leila lives with him, and in the opening chapter is having a lock put on her bedroom door. Even once explanations are forthcoming they cannot quite still the tocsins. Leila is hampered, as Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in an essay in Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers since “The children of lovers are orphans” and Leila certainly seems overwhelmed by her parents’ devotion to each other, and – to use an old Oxford phrase – her mother’s “effortless superiority”. Ada was a GP, a physician who did not heal herself or her family; Mr Burnam is a teacher who cannot seem to teach aright.

The fourth major character is Raf, a former pupil of Mr Burnam (who taught English, naturally), and who went on to become an expert in demolitions. It would give away too much of the plot to outline even in silhouette the various emotional knots between the characters. Although the actual action – the chronology rather than its arrangement, the fabula rather than the syuzhet if you want the literary technicalities – occurs over only a handful of days, the backstories being drip-fed to maximum effect. Mr Burnam is going to London with his daughter, who is now an estate agent. He is going to visit Raf, with whom he once campaigned to save a local landmark. But Raf is in prison, since he tried to blow up St Paul’s Cathedral. Mr Burnam is worried this is a sting operation to make either himself or Raf reveal something, but is also worried that if he rakes over the coals of their complex relationship, it might be unbearable.

There are parts of this novel which are exceptional virtuoso pieces. One technique is that Mr Burnam is often in conversation with two internal entities which he calls Comfort and Rigour, who variously interrogate him on the truthfulness of his feelings. These passages work well, because they are all aligned towards the interview, or interrogation, or reconciliation, or confrontation (no spoilers) between Raf and Mr Burnam. When it does occur it is as if Meek threw out the rule book: what seemed like social commentary and family drama becomes a truly gothic interaction.

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Before this, we get Burnam’s internal monologue about “the state of the High Street”, which is not as Bufton Tufton as you might think. There is a deep care for history, for craftsmanship, for locality and even parochiality, bulldozed under chain stores, vape shops and pawn brokers. You could walk down plenty of streets in Scotland and immediately recognise the description. One neologism is “thing-ghost”, which Burnam mutters internally at significant points. His daughter is opposed to accumulation, he feels estranged encountering its absence. Meek’s description is worth quoting in full: “This was a bomb that shattered and warped and dissolved solid structures and stripped small things of superfluous charm, leaving each object cheaper and meaner and more disposable than before. Nobody could say when this bomb had begun to go off, or if it would ever stop exploding; it had been exploding for years”. Meek manages to make this philippic queasy: do we agree with the self-confessed snob, and think it as dinosaurian as his gripes about his daughter’s iPhone use and lack of interest in reading? It is the sign of a true novelist that Meek keeps these perspectives in dynamic friction.

Despite the terrorist plot, Your Life Without Me is remarkable as it is about ordinary people in ordinary places (Mr Burnam lives in an unspecified north) with extraordinary interiors. It has its comic moments – pettinesses and misunderstanding – but as a whole it teeters between pathos and tragedy. Finishing it, I sucked a pencil for a good half hour wondering who the “your” and “me” of the title actually were. To end a novel with an almost ecstatic limbo and loneliness is quite an achievement.

Your Life Without Me, by James Meek, Canongate, £18.99

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