A lost brother: My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is, by Paul Stanbridge, reviewed

Grief leads us down some strange roads. Few, though, can be as peculiar as those charted by Paul Stanbridge in his auto-fictional My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is. This singular and striking book follows a narrator (the extent to which this figure overlaps with Stanbridge is kept teasingly obscure) mourning the suicide of his brother, an isolated, eccentric mathematician.

Yet, while it contains passages of raw tribute, it is a self-consciously tricksy narrative. Stanbridge circles around his brother’s death via some of history’s more overgrown byways, such as ‘Clever Hans’, the mathematical horse, locked-in syndrome and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s enthusiastic onanism. There’s a suggestion of Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Flights to this omnivorous freewheeling. But Stanbridge’s clearest model is W.G. Sebald. My Mind… is soused in an atmosphere of dreamlike melancholy, and shares Sebald’s concern with lost rivers, landscapes and people. Stanbridge even dots the text with cryptic photographs, like the coloured tacks on a detective’s corkboard – Sebald’s most intimated three-card shuffle.

At first, this mimicry is hard work, especially as these Sebaldian sleights of hand contrast with passages of somewhat impenetrable lyricism. But as the narrative develops, Stanbridge relaxes – a transformation echoed in the way the narrator hauls himself out of grief – and the novel becomes a deeply felt joy. He cracks jokes: as a young man, Rousseau, we’re told, masturbated ‘like a caged bear’. And he begins to come to terms with the prickly multiplicity of his brother, dwelling affectingly on literature’s ability to abrade the rough edges of a life and absolve.

It’s no trite narrative of healing, though. Stanbridge suggests that his brother was too difficult a presence when alive for his absence to be knitted back together through the quiet ministration of time.