Page 45 Review by Stephen
"People create little systems of explanation. Things that are not true, but are easier to digest than the intricacies of reality."
*
"Yes, but I agree with you: you are making progress. Significant progress. And very quickly. I think you should feel proud."
"I'm trying not to."
"Feel proud?"
"Feel anything."
*
"I think this was month three. And I think that the third month was when I started to notice the slipping away, some of the muttering. It's hard to say the exact date. And, of course, I did not understand any of this explicitly. I was seven, after all."
Mother is not coming home. The lion's head doorknocker on the cover will never be used. She's dead.
The broader story of the mother's death will be revealed later on, and will be echoed during the book's final, halting moments. But for now young Thomas and his father are doing their best to survive on their own. The father, an expert in symbolic logic whose faith in reason is shattered, gradually withdraws to the point where he's drifting both physically and mentally across the opening pages, over a twilight landscape in search of the woman he loves, his determination that she must be there somewhere not born of stoicism but of denial, to avoid a reality that is too terrible for him to bear. Something occasionally occurs to him though, "Something that I think may be of some import. Something we created together. A doll? A talking something? Something that made us happy."
Thomas, the son he loves to call Aquinas*, doesn't know what's going on his father's head, but he takes it upon himself to pick up the slack and maintain the schedule his father begins missing. Donning a plastic lion mask which his mother gave him, he dutifully patrols his mother's territory - her garden, her bedroom, her hiding place (the graveside) and the woods in between - because his father can't bear to be there. His father's moved upstairs, to the mildew-ridden attic. Thomas also takes phone messages from his father's colleague Steve when his father misses lectures. But one day young Thomas makes a tiny slip when he picks up the phone, presuming that once more it's Steve when in fact it's his uncle who's calling. Thereafter his father is persuaded to voluntarily section himself, leaving Thomas to live with his aunt and uncle where he creates a fantasy life of his own, represented as a child's anthropomorphic comic strip in which he resists the attempts of his aunt and uncle to win over his love. To him, his father is being kept a prisoner in the psychiatric ward so, undaunted by the task ahead, he begins to make plans to rescue him...
This is an enormously touching book which in less thoughtful hands could have descended into string-pulling sentimentality, but Thomas is simply loving, loyal and practical, and in a way almost as oblivious as his father. The burden he doesn't feel of a child living virtually alone in an adult world is nonetheless cleverly represented: a boy in a dress-up mask trying to transcribe work messages on a phone which hangs on the wall so far above him that he has to stretch up. Nor is the father negligent, merely mentally ill, and there are moments of clear and tender love particularly when he plays along with the rescue attempt and then tries to put the complexity of how he feels into words that a seven-year-old might understand without unduly alarming him. It's a book of adult loss and depression, and of young resilience, quietly expressed, and beautifully drawn with the space and colour of Chris Ware, but with far softer lines and form.
*After St. Thomas Aquinas, I imagine, an influential theologian who taught of the importance of both faith and reason.
