When things come to a head
Anita Brookner
THE CASE OF THOMAS N. by John David Morley
Andre Deutsch, f9.95
Here is a genuine curiosity, a novel apparently guided by the presiding spirits of Kafka, Freud, and Dostoyevski, set down in impassive professional prose — as if the writer were a psychiatrist or a court reporter — and dealing with a mystery so profound that it seems to hover on the edge of something unmentionable. A word of praise is first of all due to the picture researcher who chose for the jacket a reproduction of Munch's 'Evening on Karl Johan Street', thus establishing that the action takes place in some northern city, although its exact location is never men- tioned. The names of the protagonists seem to be English or American, although the various welfare organisations and law- enforcement agencies could belong to any sizeable town in the West. Yet Munch's blank-faced, formally dressed inhabitants, pouring down one side of a broad street at nightfall, spell urgency and despair, both as rigorously compressed as is the tone of this strange story. The effect is to awaken an unease bordering on panic. In reaching the end of The Case of Thomas N. one's relief is tempered by a sense of how much more it attempts than most contemporary novels. It is about a closed world, a delusional system, but written — and hence the panic — as if the writer were both inside and outside the deluded head. It is a fearsome piece of work.
Thomas N., a boy of 17, is discovered one morning in June sitting on a bench by the river of this unnamed town. He fails to respond to the police officer's questions, appears not to know who he is or where he has come from. A suitcase by his side contains garments in a state of filth apd disrepair and a newspaper which is 15 years old. The psychiatrist to whom he is refer- red diagnoses global amnesia, but notes that the boy never refers to himself as T; there is no personal pronoun in his uni- verse. In the clinic in which the psychiatrist has an interest the boy seems to be concerned with his own secrecy, keeps his bag packed, and is frightened of the dark. As he makes no progress he is put into a home run by the local council. Here he makes no progress either, but at this point it is difficult to distinguish whether he is in fact mad or whether his madness is the effect of the author's seamless, affectless prose. Thomas N.'s name appears on lists; he is made to eat in the scullery; his case is loudly and publicly discussed by the gov- ernor of the institution. Since his case is hopeless and his amnesia is still total, the home finds him a job in the kitchen of an hotel and a room in an approved boarding- house. His behaviour in all this time has not varied in a single respect.
In Mrs Peter's boarding-house he even- tually makes a friend of sorts, a misshapen nightwatchman by the name of Onko. Onko's name is the first indication that all might not be well in this novel, which has hitherto read like a perfectly reasonable report delivered by a perfectly reasonable person, a person very much on the safe side of reality. What follows is difficult to place, always given that the safe side of reality is the side on which we like to remain. Thomas is taken to a party held in the house of Nancy Julia Fleming, a drug- taking rich girl and a frequenter of bars. Thomas, for some reason, spends the night in this house. When he awakes he sees Nancy Fleming's severed head staring at him from a chair. Her body is in the room next door. Since he has no memory he assumes that he has killed her. Quickly he wipes up the blood, cuts off the collar of his blood-stained shirt and the cuffs of his blood-stained trousers, scrubs out the bathroom and leaves the house.
The police catch up with him, of course: his picture was in the papers when they were trying to establish his identity. But Inspector Havel (a name out of Kafka) is not satisfied. Inspector Havel is extremely interested in Onko, another man with practically no history, or no history that he would have us know. Havel unearths the fact that Onko was once a brilliant student, checks out his reader's ticket at the local library, and finds that he is unusually well- read in the natural sciences and anything pertaining to the transcendental. Havel in fact establishes that Onko suffers from the abnormal condition known in the trade as omnipotence, and would thus be capable of a motiveless murder. But there is no proof. And Thomas N. has confessed to the crime.
At the trial Thomas N. does not appear to understand the proceedings. The reader is by now enmeshed in a terrible anxiety, not that the story will end badly (it does) but that it may never end at all. The tone has reverted to the unemotive, lucid and slightly monotonous expertise of an official report. Anyone submitting the novel to some sort of analysis would detect a break in the flow when the head is discovered. This break is never quite made good. And there remains the slightly sinister deviation from apparent reality which decreed that when he was in the orphanage Thomas N. was subjected to indignities that no re- sponsible child-guidance officer would have countenanced. The effect on the reader's nerves is considerable.
Mr Morley has effectively contrived a nightmare. He has done it so well that one does not know how near he is to the heart of the matter he is describing. What is exceptional is the control he has over his various abnormal states and the elegant if capricious use to which he has put them. The book is formal and detached, marked- ly different from run-of-the-mill fictional outpourings, and a reminder of the Euro- pean origins of the psychological novel. It is an achievement worthy of considerable respect.
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