This, My Second Life by Patrick Charnley: A doubly poignant debut

That lovely cover caught my eye on NetGalley before I realised that Patrick Charnley is the son of the much-missed Helen Dunmore, one of my favourite authors. This, My Second Life is Charnley’s debut which starts with a sobering author’s note telling his readers that while this is a novel, the narrator’s cardiac arrest and consequent brain injury echo his own experience. In his early twenties, Jago has returned to Cornwall to live with his uncle and finds himself troubled by the behaviour of Jacob’s neighbour, clearly up to no good.

I was a runaway train before, emotionally anyway, and then there was a monumental and completely silent crash, and everything stopped.

Jago grew up in St Ives, raised by his mother after his father deserted her. She was just forty-six when she died, leaving her nineteen-year-old son so bereft the only way to accommodate his grief was to go, leaving his beloved girlfriend behind. Just a few years later, Jago collapsed, coming close to death and lapsing into a coma which left him with a brain injury. Now convalescing in the hope of further recovery, Jago spends his time helping his kind, solicitous uncle on the farm when he can, sleeping, taking gentle exercise and reacquainting himself with the area he knew so well as a child. When Jago spots Bill Sligo walking to the derelict mine wheelhouse still standing on Jacob’s land, it sets off alarm bells but both Jacob and Granny Carne warn Jago off, warnings he chooses to ignore.

The sky is a sharp deep blue that I feel I could dive into when I look up at it. The sun bounces off the horses’ heads and makes them shine like conkers.

Charnley’s novel is a straightforward story with a lightly developed plot narrated by Jago whose voice has the tone and style of a young adult, struggling with the consequences of the forty minutes he spent without oxygen reaching his brain. It’s the experience of this devastating event which has changed him irrevocably, leaving him ‘emotionally blunted’, felled by fatigue and beset by memory problems, which gives the book its focus. I read this one for sentimental reasons, not expecting the same calibre of writing that so impressed me in Dunmore’s work but Charnley’s loving descriptions of the Cornish landscape are beautiful, and often poetic. I found it a touching novel, echoing both Charnley’s grief for his mother and his struggle to recuperate. There are poignant references to Dunmore in the acknowledgements explaining that Granny Carne is a development of a character in her young adult novel, Inigo. Jago also quotes one of her poems. I hope writing this novel helped Charnley, and that his rehabilitation continues well.

Hutchinson Heinemann: London 9781529155259 304 pages Hardback (Read via NetGalley)