Kiran DassThe Invisible Rider, by Kirsten McDougall (Victoria University Press, 2012 ) 150 pp., $30.
I rather liked Wellington author Kirsten McDougall’s short story Clean Hands Save Lives, which won first prize in the ‘short’ section in The Long and the Short of It short story competition in 2011. I liked McDougall’s plaintive and straight-down-the-line approach to a simple, domestic episode. While the story isn’t a patch on anything Lionel Shriver would muster on the topic, the story, which coolly relays a scene of a harried mother, was nicely refined.
McDougall’s debut novel The Invisible Rider is a series of seventeen waif-like set pieces. Philip is a bland and restless middle-aged Wellingtonian property lawyer (even the type of law Philip practices is decidedly bland) and family man who grapples with, and quietly bumbles his way through, dreary domestic everyday life, with occasional jolts into the absurdly fantastical. His ‘speciality area was fear and stress’, and he shrugs an awful lot when he’s not talking in rather rigidly-penned dialogue. There’s a fine art to crafting convincing dialogue that flows naturally and reads as how people really do speak. In The Invisible Rider the dialogue is stilted and feels a tad too ‘written’.
In the end, The Invisible Rider isn’t particularly to my taste, and I wonder if it might be better suited for the young adult set — it even looks like a young adult book. The tone feels like a story for young adults, and the illustrations conjure the depressing atmosphere of droll childhoods spent on the mat during storytime for primmers. As with McDougall’s prizewinning short story, themes of parenthood run through The Invisible Rider. At one point, Philip strikes a deal with his son Charlie during a car-trip and promises to buy Charlie anything he likes at a cafe as long as he doesn’t talk during the rest of the journey. The humour is subtle but present: It was mean and the worst type of parenting, Philip knew that. Charlie knew it too, but he also knew a good deal when he heard one and kept quiet.
There is much to be said for the aesthetic qualities of a book. When a book feels gorgeous in your hands (if you’ve ever weighed the sublimely minimal cool gloss of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, you’ll know what I mean) — it can be such a lovely sensory experience that you don’t want to put the book down. Sad to say, TheInvisible Rider is not such a book. The paper and the font are crude and nasty. My heart sank every time I had to pick it up to read it, and consequently it took a long time to finish. A wisp of a book at less than 150 pages, the slimline format is nice, but the cover is a bloody eyesore. I deliberately kept it with the back cover face-up on my desk.
The novel features artwork by Gerard Crewdson, but these drawings failed to heighten my reading experience. They’re soft and twee in a whimsical way that did not appeal to me at all, (though fitting for such a soft and whimsical novel). It didn’t help my frame of mind that they reminded me too much of that horrible Sinead O’Connor album Universal Mother, which I remember always seeing on cassette in sale bins for a buck.
However, I fondly read the chapter ‘Bookshop’ — ‘golden in Philip’s consciousness’ —which is clearly set in Wellington’s Unity Books (during the ghastly rumble, rubble and clatter of renovations a couple of years ago), where ‘small handwritten notes promoted new titles. Readings were held there with wine and olives and small salty crackers…’ I laughed at how Philip’s friend James compulsively reads the ending of a book first, to determine whether it will be a worthy read or not. As a long-serving Unity shopgirl, I can confirm that bookshop punters like this certainly do exist, and of course we love them.
The bookshop is not the only location that McDougall successfully evokes. Island Bay and various spots around Wellington are nicely activated. Another draft could have made this book sing. As it is, the obvious is often laboured and overstated, uptight and turgid and — obvious: a numbing circularity. There were also a number of sentences that I needed to re-read several times to understand the point; and I was troubled and perplexed by the hasty confusion of ‘brought/bought’.
So The Invisible Rider does have lively moments which do elevate the book. McDougall is occasionally sharp at vivid and clever turns of phrase and insights. I ruefully identified with the description of 3 am as being ‘the hour that presents the most trouble in the twenty-four hour cycle of the anxious.’ A quiet sense of emotional turmoil and anxiety does run through the veins of the body of the novel. But at the same time, this is often only on a very polite and superficial level: hardly adrenalin-pulsing stuff. It is safe for teens perhaps, but lacking in emotional grunt for adults. I wish McDougall had delved deeper. Philip is instead troubled by clammy but vague nightmares in which his young children are under threat of ‘some nameless danger’ and notices ‘a bone-deep ache that he considered might be the beginning of something bigger.’
So The Invisible Rider does have lively moments which do elevate the book. McDougall is occasionally sharp at vivid and clever turns of phrase and insights. I ruefully identified with the description of 3 am as being ‘the hour that presents the most trouble in the twenty-four hour cycle of the anxious.’ A quiet sense of emotional turmoil and anxiety does run through the veins of the body of the novel. But at the same time, this is often only on a very polite and superficial level: hardly adrenalin-pulsing stuff. It is safe for teens perhaps, but lacking in emotional grunt for adults. I wish McDougall had delved deeper. Philip is instead troubled by clammy but vague nightmares in which his young children are under threat of ‘some nameless danger’ and notices ‘a bone-deep ache that he considered might be the beginning of something bigger.’
There were other fathers, mostly with jobs in the ‘creative sector’ who helped out: These fathers laughed with the other mothers in casual and easy-going ways. Nothing flirtatious, just comfortable, self-possessed men and women. Grown-ups, Philip supposed. I would have liked more such resonant insights. Insights that illuminate the subtly awkward and complicated dynamics of how people relate to each other and how they can feel achingly excluded when they feel they don’t relate. Philip would like to be more socially involved, but feels incapable. He keeps out of it, leaving that sort of thing to his wife Marilyn. Here and there Kirsten McDougall shows she can sensitively handle Philip’s disconnection with people, skilfully veering between wistful and hilarious moments. At one point he wryly observes that we are living ‘in the days of the final thread.’
When Philip is overwhelmed by being trapped inside his own thoughts and the banalities of (his) life, he finds himself wishing for a serious but non-fatal illness which would be enough to put him in bed for a couple of weeks but would still leave him able to read. The great escape. Philip feels undernourished by his world and dissatisfied. Happiness and contentment seem constantly out-of-reach for him; he never quite realises wistful aspirations. Invisible Rider is a bit like that too. It just left me thinking, ‘Is that it?’
KIRAN DASS is an Auckland-based writer and reviewer who has written about music, film and books for the NZ Listener, The Wire, Sunday Star-Times, Metro, Landfall, Real Groove, Rip it Up, NZ Musician, NZ Herald, Dominion Post, No, Pavement and Staple. Kiran reviews books on 95bFM’s Morning Glory show and sometimes blogs at Nick Bollinger is Away.
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