Customer Reviews

Gone: A Novel

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'Gone,' the astounding debut novel of Irish writer Martin Roper, is an unsentimental look at the life of Stephen, a Dubliner who embarks on an almost-Joycean odyssey of bereavement and betrayal. Four-letter words abound in Stephen's candid narration and underscore his cynical and misanthropic worldview. This anti-portrait begins with a middle-of-the-night phone call from the hospice informing him of the impending death of his younger sister, Ruth, from cancer. 'Don't crash. Just get there,' Stephen says to himself. Such interior monologue punctuates the spare and unsparing prose in 'Gone,' which is also peppered by unattributed dialogue. Frequent mentions of the past as well as flashbacks are the scaffold for Stephen's story.

He marries his sixth-year school sweetheart, Ursula, and joins the workaday world as a painter of television set frames. Ursula, who is a step above Stephen's lower-working-class origin, works as a journalist and becomes 'a paragraph out of some feminist pamphlet.' Soon the one-legged Ursula and her emasculated husband buy a fixer-upper in Irishtown with her money. Neighborhood toughs taunt them and throw rocks at their windows, so they are forced to abandon their home, each going a separate way.

Running from the death throes of his marriage and 'the crude trap of Dublin,' Stephen emigrates to New York. In Manhattan, he meets a free-spirited daughter of the sixties, Icelandic photographer Holmfridur 'Holfy' Olafsdottir. Holfy is a recent widow who is fifteen years older than the now thirty-something Stephen. After the euthanasia of her cat, Holfy goes away to visit friends and leaves Stephen in her studio. During Holfy's parting instructions on plant watering, Stephen recalls a boyhood incident of near-asphyxiation at the hands of his cousin, Brian, that is analogous to the suffocation that he feels at being married to Ursula. For even though Stephen has left Ursula, he still chokes at releasing himself from her grip.

Stephen soon returns to Dublin, to his father's deathbed. He spares him the truth of his boyhood rage, so that Da 'dies happy with the inaccurate knowledge that I love him unconditionally.' Stephen consoles himself with a litany of self-deception:

'There is no resentment. I will not wound my life with bitterness. . . . There is no resentment. There is no absolution. Would need to know all to forgive all. I know more than enough. How can one know a man who lived every spare moment in front of a television, believing in his heart that his wife might walk back in any moment and all would be well?'

After another unsavory visit with Ursula, Stephen returns to life in New York with Holfry. Yet, during intimate moments with her, his thoughts cling to Ursula. It's not quite clear how he supports himself, but it seems that he's a writer. After seeing his work one night, Holfry writes a seven-page response in which she advises him to

'go deeper. . . . Forget about understanding death. My husband. Your sister. Your father. We do not have death in common. We have grief and life. . . .There is nothing to learn about death except that it is not living. Stop looking for meaning. Go back to the writing. . . . Make up your mind if you want to write or type. . . . Break the rhythm. Annoy. . . . Write about our love with unflinching honesty. . . . Balance your sentences with arrogance and indifference. Put commas in the wrong place. This is our story and syntax will not hold it.'

Stephen soon leaves Holfry and sojourns in the Midwest. Here his story unravels as he spends his days in a vodka-gimleted stupor. 'There is no forever, only the eternity of our little beginnings and endings.' All the bereavements compound the loss that Stephen had felt after his mother had abandoned the family when he was a boy. Her betrayal set in motion the series of betrayals that Stephen endures and perpetuates throughout his life. The rocks that schoolmates threw at him as a boy resound in the rocks that neighborhood toughs throw at his and Ursula's house. Stephen's 'lovehating' pattern with women has been one of leaving them before they could leave him.

His odyssey continues with a trip back to New York to revisit Holfry, who walks away but leaves him a note with some scribbled words from T.S. Eliot: ' We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.'

On his way back to Ireland, Stephen stops off in Wales to look up his mother whom he hasn't seen in thirty years, and his story ends with a seaside epiphany reminiscent of James Joyce's 'Dubliners.' If one can look past some crude words and graphic situations that are encountered in this hard-bitten tale, one will find insights here into cruel realities that mark the human condition. 'The most horrific truth is forgetting, forgetting and going on. But there is no choice. The only option is to live a fiercely joyous life knowing full well that misery leans against every street corner.'

'Gone' is a fantastic read. Courageous, painful, hilarious and sincere; I was driven to finish the novel in one sitting. Roper's character Stephen, embodies every man's search for meaning and every man's quest to conquer his/her past--hope to shape what may come. Einstien's theory of relativity, simply, very simply put, makes the argument that there are no pitching-posts in Life, that the universe, all that it may include, moves infinately. We might try to set anchors here or there to create order, meaning, only to pull them up, move on. We are here and then gone. The book is dear to me for many reasons. I look forward to his next.

Hott with two T's this book about real Irish people who do dirty things to each other and treat each other like pieces of meat. you feel this book in places other books dont have the courtesy to reach around and touch. The characters, language, descriptions -- striking. when i finished reading this book, I tell you I felt like a hundered bucks. It puts the action in satisfaction and the Arrrgh in Irish. Though I recommend this book highly, I could never read it again myself. I'm easily agitated and fear I would headbutt someone on the subway, the power of this book is formidable.

Martin Roper takes us on a fascinating journey from childhood to adulthood. There is a direct correlation between the childs mind and the person that they evolve into. From the childs eye this is reminiscent of Roddy Doyle's - Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha, but the adult perspective is disturbingly engaging. This book has everything. Gentle humour, sarcasm, Dublin wit, the tension felt by ex-pats as they bump into new life horizons and above all the tension of over-powering relationships.

Just like a washed-out photograph or an immature abstract painting, this novel lacks contrast. The characters are silhouettes that bump and grind one another while drifting through their monochrome lives. Aside from their names, genders and locations, each character seemed to be the same person; their misanthropic actions providing the only subtle clues to their existence.

The blurred story also suffers. Though there is some semblance of a few conflicts within the story, nothing major happens, nothing is resolved, and these dreary characters just continue to take up space until the reader turns the page to find it blank. It's ultimately unsatisfying and distasteful.

The writing style is also a bit uneven. The writer often uses a poetic staccato phrasing, but in a much more overt and obvious way. Words are needlessly used and bunched in an attempt to force a feeling, with the reader instead feeling as if he is reading an academic screenplay--"This paragraph is an example of the use of prose. Notice the subtlety of verbage."

So, by the gist of the above, I assume you know that I did not care for this book. All the characters, while dimly written, were nonetheless sorry excuses for human beings. The story never went anywhere, just continued to travel back and forth between one spiteful person to another. And the writing style didn't allow me to even get a feel for the surroundings, the emotions, or the people.

I am an avid reader of all types of books but I have to say this left me wanting to get on to a new book really quickly- there was no real character love, no real plot, no real yearning to keep reading; I did however. In the end this seemed like a poor version of a journal that was unread. Who did he care for, what did he want? I didn't like the character enough to care WTF he was doing or feeling... there was ~2 good quotes but that was it