About 30 pages in and unable to find my bearings, I flipped to the end of this novel — well, not the actual end, to the acknowledgements (always fascinating) and after them a very handy ‘Q & A with Nathan Filer’. And there I found the key I needed. As part of a creative writing MA, Filer had taken a module in Suspense Fiction. So then I knew where I was — namely in a story with a question mark hanging over it until the end. Sorted. And hooked.
The Shock of the Fall has just won the Costa Book of the Year Award, the first debut novel to win it since 2006 and described by the judges as ‘so good it will make you feel a better person’. (I squirmed a bit at that.)
The story is told by Matt Homes, a 19-year-old schizophrenic haunted by the death of his Downs syndrome brother, Simon, ten years earlier when the boys were on a family camping holiday. A tragic accident or did Matt kill his brother? That’s the delayed revelation bit.
In mental health language, Matt has ‘writing behaviour’. With flashbacks, hallucinations, lists of slightly lunatic medical questions and drug side effects, a hospital diary recording endless empty days and with added typographical tricks, drawings and asides to the reader, Matt bashes out his story of loss, grief and guilt when allowed time on the clinic’s computer or on an old typewriter provided by his understanding Nanny Noo, all the time struggling with the ‘disease with the shape and sound of a snake’ which ultimately has him sectioned in a psychiatric hospital.
The novel is a worthy winner, as moving, witty and pereceptive about Matt, about the way in which he keeps his dead brother alive within him, as about the grief of his parents and their sometimes inept but loving attempts to help him.
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