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“I had to pick through the wreckage, blind at first. I had to find all the pieces of me, scattered all around, and put them back together, one by one.” Following a cardiac arrest which left him clinically dead for 40 minutes, Jago Trevarno, the young narrator of Patrick Charnley’s moving debut novel, has retreated to the Cornish village where he grew up, to shelter under the protection of his “off-gridder” uncle, Jacob.
His mother dead of cancer and his father long gone, at 20 Jago’s world seems to have shrunk to nothing but the hard daily labour of working a subsistence farm high above the rugged Atlantic coast. The life Jago had begun to construct in the city, “a runaway train” in flight from his mother’s death and everything that reminded him of her, has evaporated abruptly in the aftermath of his near-death experience. He has “gone from someone who needed to slow down, to be present, to someone having no choice about it”, and must start from scratch.
The building blocks available to Jago are basic. His injury has left him with “reduced processing power”: his brain’s responses are slow and have to remain so, calibrated for recovery. He is also in marked retreat from intense emotion, wary of the havoc it could wreak in his vulnerable synapses, and Jacob – kindly, protective and understanding but taciturn, unused to company – exerts only minimal emotional counterpressure.
Together uncle and nephew live a life of extreme simplicity, their days governed by the weather, the animals, the seasons and the hours of daylight. But while this extraordinarily circumscribed and stable existence may be the perfect environment for his immediate recovery, as Jago’s condition improves the inevitable question arises as to whether he can live indefinitely in this sort of stasis, in hiding from the past and the outside world. And then the outside world takes matters into its own hands, because even an off-gridder has neighbours, well-meaning or otherwise – and sooner or later they make their presence felt.
On the benign side of the scale is Granny Carne, fierce and fiercely independent, loyal to Jago and Jacob, seer and holder of everyone’s secrets. And then there is Sophie. Jago’s first love, abandoned in the turbulent wake of his mother’s death, Sophie has never left the village, and her renewed presence in Jago’s life, along with the raft of painful feelings she evokes, inevitably begins to endanger his precarious hold on emotional stability.
It is the notorious Bill Sligo, though, whose land sits above Jacob’s and whose brand-new Range Rover definitely wasn’t bought from farming profits, who presents the greatest threat to the life Jago is trying to rebuild. Sligo has his eye on one of Jacob’s fields, where the entry to an old mineshaft sits above a honeycomb of tunnels and caves – and when it begins to look as though he will go to any lengths to get it, Jago must decide whether to retreat or to engage.
This, My Second Life is prefaced with a brief statement of the author’s own experience of cardiac arrest and brain injury. The son of the late and brilliant writer Helen Dunmore, Charnley has also lost a mother relatively young to cancer, yet to see the novel through the lens of personal trauma would be to do it a grave injustice. The prose is spare and beautiful, the narrative simple but sound – it is as finely wrought as poetry, luminous with Jago’s sheer delight in the world, electric with his fear that it might still at any moment be snatched away. The hypnotically seductive rhythms of days filled with only the most immediate things – the smell of a library or the colours of the sea, the “milky winter sun” or the exquisite savour of plain food – are layered to achieve a piercing intensity, the world made new. And as he details his own limitations and his meticulous efforts to navigate them, Jago’s distinctive voice emerges, a true and clear and entirely convincing creation, always reaching towards the light and life.
