Memories of loss

The first short chapter of The Other Side of You looks so simple. After introducing us to Elizabeth Cruickshank, a suicide patient who ‘in a certain light could have been 14 or 400’, Dr McBride explains how he and his psychiatrist colleagues ‘come alive at a certain kind of raving’. For McBride it is ‘the suicidally disposed who beckoned’. Then he tells us matter-of-factly how, when he was five, he saw his older brother run over by a reversing lorry, and of the loss that has weighed on him ever since. In these five pages Vickers discreetly and with immense skill establishes her narrator and sets out her primary theme.

Perhaps because the author is herself professionally familiar with her subject matter, there is an ease to the narrative voice. Novelists often fall into the trap of providing too much technical jargon when their narrator belongs to a particular profession, so that readers are liable to be very conscious of having a construct foisted on them. McBride has an assurance that makes jargon superfluous. When he describes the ‘ex-army’ man who finds Mrs Cruickshank as being ‘trained in that vigilance which is alert to small disjunctions’, the shrewd observation and the neat turn of phrase seem natural to him. The confidence of the language itself and its rhythm establishes the fictional world securely. We want to read on and see what this man has to say.

But he is interested in Elizabeth Cruickshank, not himself. Even at the outset when he appears to be talking about himself, his remarks about other people are more vivid, as if he naturally submerges his own feelings in the trauma of others. He is detached when describing his own loss, without self-pity.