Septuagenarian Maureen Allcroft looks at the slack-mouthed compatriots of her suburban retirement home and asks, "Why aren't they screaming?"
She's quoting Philip Larkin, whose mordant poem The Old Fools offers little reprieve on the topic of aging. But the quotation has a wider aesthetic relevance in The News Where You Are, the second book by British author Catherine O'Flynn. It is a novel devoid of raised voices; the prose reverberates in hushed tones, balmy and imperturbable as it navigates heavy topics such as attempted suicide, depression and the way of all flesh. The book will likely garner the typical roster of praise that accompanies darkly comedic fiction (the "funny but poignant" variety) and the acclaim won't be misplaced so much as a little misleading. O'Flynn's fluid minimalism, at times eerie and even bordering on the absurd, is the work of a writer up to something more structurally ambitious.
While O'Flynn makes occasional use of a shifting third-person narrative, the story centres on the perspective of Frank Allcroft, a 43-year-old anchorman for the regional Heart of England News. Frank is an anti-hero in an eminently British sense: A terrible dresser with a heart of gold, he wishes for little more in life than a proper Guinness-and-beef pie at the local pub. He once harboured ambitions of pursuing investigative journalism, but makes the most of what panned out instead, presenting tabloid-quality reports to a largely blue-rinsed viewership.
O'Flynn gets to exercise her comic chops here, inventing all kinds of pitiable news segments. She's at her best with the character of Cyril, a gag writer in Reactolite glasses, who insists on providing material to brighten Frank's reports. Frank feels sorry for the guy even at the cost of his own reputation; the bad jokes land him a cult status among local undergrads, who find his onscreen persona gloriously ironic. They mount a website to relive his finest moments: www.unfunniestmanongodsearth.com.
Then there's all the dying. An old woman is found dead when the stench of her decomposing corpse starts to warrant a little curiosity. A man sits down on a public bench and continues to sit there, unmoving, for two days. But Frank is primarily distressed by the hit-and-run incident that killed his dear friend and former colleague, Phil Smethway. Phil was a seventy-something Botox junkie with a Malibu tan and glow-in-the-dark teeth. It's when the narrative shifts to his final days that something curious starts to happen. Phil seems plastic on the inside, too, almost willfully unconvincing, as if the stakes of life and death are less vivid in his world, never quite the real thing.
Botoxed bodies are compared to cosmeticized landscapes as Frank meditates on a country in flux and the concomitant shift in contemporary values. Frank's dad was a 1970s architect who built a series of "forward-thinking" buildings, mostly precast concrete cubes meant for low-end municipal functions. Since his dad's death, Frank has watched as the bulk of them were torn down and newfangled complexes erected in their stead. Anyone familiar with this part of England will shiver at O'Flynn's writing on the cyclical encroachment of new onto less-new, the pink-gravel cemeteries bisected by the M6, the creepy tinkle of frosted glass over artificial waterfalls and commercial colonnades. The fact that British building specifications are so lax compared to North American ones loosens the bolt of longevity that much more. Are these really the monuments of tomorrow?
But O'Flynn's masterstroke lies in her crafty play with form and content. As a kid, Frank was terrified of the faceless human forms that graced his dad's architectural sketches; he called them "Future People" and worried they were coming to get him. A discerning reader might wonder if they haven't already (they certainly got Phil Smethway!). For all of Frank's endearing equanimity, there is something in his character that feels a bit neutered (I am reminded a little of The Truman Show).
In fact, all the characters in The News Where You Are lack the blood and guts of real people; they seem sexless and a little daft, drifting through a cityscape that is sterilized of the muck and chaos of reality. Phil's widow hosts a talk show, Tough Love, where overweight women are subjected to brutal censure that's deemed reasonable under the auspices of TV. It works as a metaphor for the whole book, where terrible things seem ordinary under the guise of a glossy tone.
That O'Flynn can balance this stylized minimalism with a wholly engaging narrative is the mark of a serious writer. She managed something similar with her first novel, the acclaimed What Was Lost. On one hand, the book's an eminently readable mystery story set in a Birmingham shopping mall. But it's also a fascinating indictment of commercialism and a playful usurpation of what is, perhaps, its literary equivalent: the mystery genre. (The novel graced the Booker long-list and went on to win the Costa First Fiction Prize.)
The News Where You Are may be but a pace away from naturalism, but it's the distance between the dismissible "funny and poignant" and a work of some real literary weight. Beneath the un-screaming facades of O'Flynn's characters is a searing denunciation of modern values, and a writer who isn't afraid to sacrifice the conventions of depth for experiments in shape and restraint.
Martha Schabas's first novel will be published next year.