Spider

Courtesy of a nod in that direction by director extraordinaire, David Cronenberg, I've just read Patrick McGrath's Spider, an exploration of working class Britain and family breakdown through the perspective of a schizophrenic. It's a successful book successfully translated to the screen, partly due to the truthful performance of Ralph Fiennes, but mainly because Cronenberg understood the foundations upon which the novel succeeds: consistency of narrative voice. For a masterclass in the art of narrative consistency see Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, Easton Ellis' Less Than Zero, and, of course, Salinger's The Catcher In The Rye. Consistency requires a tremendous amount of self-restraint and, importantly, faith in the reader. Indeed, we learn of Spider's character, as we do of Clay in Less Than Zero, more from what remains unsaid, than from what we read on the page. In a glorious instant of sub-epiphanous understanding, Spider traces his sense of identity through a shift in personalities while writing in his journal; at once, his schizophrenia is bared before him, and yet he is unable to see it. (Coincidentally, it goes some way toward providing an insight into how I feel about blogging again.)

I begin to write. And as I do a strange thing happens, the pencil starts to move along the faint blue lines of the page almost as though it had a will of its own, almost as though my memories [...] were contained not within this stubbled leather helmet of this head of mine but in the pencil itself, as though they were tiny particles all packed together in a long thin column of graphite, running across the page while my fingers, like a motor, provide merely the mechanical means of their discharge. When this happens I have the curious sensation not of writing but of being written.