A ghastly crew | 6 October 2007

Jennifer Johnston is adept at economy. Here is a short novel in which the eight characters are introduced one by one, with minimum fuss — some dialogue, a brief reference by someone else — and their complex relationships obliquely revealed. Complex indeed are these connections. ‘I am gay, bent, queer, homosexual, call it what you will,’ says Donough, coming out to his mother Stephanie. Sexual identity lies at the heart of the narrative — who is inclined to what, and with whom. By the end, four of the eight are defined as gay, bent, call it what you will, and the past is floodlit, with all its confusions and deceptions.

Stephanie’s ex-husband Henry is in hospital, recovering from a car accident in which the driver, his wife, was killed. His memory is riddled with holes, into the largest of which has vanished all recollection of this woman, Caroline, who is effectively the ninth character, absent but looming, like du Maurier’s Rebecca. Henry’s thoughts, his baffled vision of others, his struggle to position himself and everyone else, make up the central thread of the story, interwoven with the better informed and increasingly angry perceptions of Stephanie. ‘How splendidly dysfunctional you’ve all become,’ says Henry’s brother George, dropping in from Canada to further muddy the waters.

Yes indeed. Families don’t come much more disarrayed than this one, of which the matriarch is batty and alcoholic 80-year-old Tash, inefficient mother to Henry and George. I found Tash extremely trying, but then so do the characters in the book. Jennifer Johnston’s hallmark style is economic and staccato — a style in which clipped dialogue or fragmented thoughts trip down the page. This is a method cleverly handled, in which hints and information are rationed, but it can also become irritating — you long for a relaxing meditative passage.