Lord Jim at Home by Dinah Brooke

Giles is not in possession of his murder. His murder takes place in a dream. The poetry and justice of it is a dream. How can you perform such an action and not be freed and transformed by it? The world is full of us, haunted by dreams of violence. Swaying like figures hanging from huge balloons filled with heat and air, blind to everything but the murders we commit in our imaginations, over and over again. You have committed your crime, destroyed those who have power over you, and now you are empty and dull. I wish you were dead. There's something too single-minded and logical about that perfect Oedipal crime, leaving out nothing, not even the mother, the agent, the function that was not fulfilled. Why can you not be a true murderer? One who finds his apotheosis, his fulfilment in his crime? Whose passions flower in the white serrated petals of his act? You stand there as a young cricketer. An ex-public schoolboy, an Englishman. Those images are more powerful than your despair.

Giles Trenchard is an ordinary Englishman of his class. His father is a solicitor, as his father was a judge, and he goes from the public schoolyard to serving his country when war breaks out in Europe. Through all these experiences, Giles is a dull sort of lump, unable to answer the questions in class, unable even to understand when he doesn't know the answer; he just raises his hand like every other kid. There's something off about him, maybe, but in the English navy, there seems to be something off with just about everyone. It may have something to do with the fact that people keep getting blown apart or having holes stamped through them, through which their entrails fall out. Wouldn't you keep your mind on something banal, like cricket? But through Dinah Brooke's narration of Giles' young life, other voices break in, the voices of a courtroom. They are discussing Giles, how he came to be the person he is, and we come to understand that he has, or will have, committed an act on unspeakable violence.

God, I love a nasty book. It's no wonder that Otessa Moshfegh wrote the introduction to this one; Lord Jim at Home is the kind of book she's been trying to write her entire career: bloody, filthy, and black-hearted. The target of Brooke's satire is not so much Giles--though it's one hell of a writer who can make a character interesting for being so uninteresting, up until the point, at least, where he kills his [REDACTED]--as it is the social environment that produces something like Giles. It starts with his very birth, when the narrator labels him "The Prince" and his parents "The King" and "The Queen," not because they're particularly powerful or noble, but because even a middle-class solicitor becomes fraught, as a parent, with the Oedipal drama of inheritance and disposession. Giles' upbringing is foisted off on a number of nannies and nurses, who are no more able to make a convincing human being out of him than his parents. Nothing in Giles' narrow-minded, bourgeois milieu can or should make a man of him. At the bottom of this family life, Brooke shows, are any number of petty cruelties and jealousies, beginning with his grandfather the Judge, who dies when his elderly pelvis is splintered in two by a buxom nurse he's seduced with promises of a legacy.

Among other things, I thought that Lord Jim at Home presented a really fascinating depiction of life as a seaman during World War II. At the public school, Giles' peers look toward the advent of war with a greed for glory, but when war comes, the seamen seem utterly incapable of really thinking of any kind of higher value at all. They're barely able to see or understand the violence all around them, which in Brooke's prose is so visceral--pun not intended--and immediate, as when Giles is tasked with cleaning his own friends' blood and guts off the deck. Is the war to blame for Giles' later violent act? It would be reductive to say so, but certainly the desensitization Giles experiences at war is part of a life that makes such violence permissible. The courtroom scenes are a farce, and at the end they devolve into something that resembles a fever dream; all they underline is that it's impossible to hash out, in a single room, the influences that have made one man a murderer and another innocent. And yet, when we appreciate the scope of Giles' life, cramped and malformed as it is, it feels almost impossible that he should become anything else. And in the end, Giles may face his own music, but who is there to pass judgment on the kind of cramped and malformed English society that made him?