Christine Dwyer Hickey's tale of a very ordinary Dubliner, starting at the close of his life, is the most profound novel I have read for years. It gripped me through a 10-hour train journey, making me turn the pages with impatience and reluctance. When we meet Farley, he has taken a catastrophic fall, his body numbly curled around the toilet pedestal, and he is unable to move or speak. It is "as if he was born here, with his face nuzzled into the bowl of this jacks".
Farley's life story is told in reverse chronology, 2010 to 1940 a technique capable of ingenious satiric force, as in Martin Amis's Time's Arrow, and of emotional resonance, as in Sarah Waters's The Night Watch. Valedictory and recessional in its structure, The Cold Eye of Heaven slips back decade by decade, questing for origins and causes. At every step we keep close company with Farley, through the author's subtle and dextrous prose. The reader lodges deep in Farley's brain and sees through his eyes. The retrospective structure turns every foretaste into an echo: because we met Farley in his dying moments, death is in the bud of every cell along the way.
Sombre, decent and well-meaning, Farley is brotherly, filial (mostly), uxorious (very) and a faithful friend (more or less). What is to be said about such an ordinary man? We know Farley, first and foremost, as mortal. Apocalypse precedes genesis.
The writerly precision of Dwyer Hickey's style or rather styles mesmerises the reader. An attuned and witty ear for Dublin idiom is everywhere apparent: "You frightened the life out of me, yafuckabastardya." Hickey's attentiveness to the minutiae of experience results in a mastery of minor-key writing: the lyrical exactitude of "he heels the door shut", a "twirl of girls", traffic "herding over the crest". Farley's restricted view confines the reader to a field of vision infected by multifarious blemishes, starting with inklings of the stroke damage in the first chapters: "a bauble of light in the darkness", "little bursts of minute crystals, rotating in the air".
In chapter two, Hickey narrates Farley's penultimate day. Someone important has died; Farley has not been invited to the funeral. Who? Why not? We are unsure, and our uncertainty haunts us with a readerly version of Farley's increasing confusion as his world disintegrates. As Farley toils through the Dublin streets, we shuffle with him and share the dismaying effort of old age, losing moments of awareness, suffering "scintillas" of disturbance and being "skewered" by needles of apprehension. Under it all spreads an amorphous sensation of betrayal and exile.
Farley's place of work, Slowey's law firm, has been for him a place of trust and intimacy. On his retirement day, sitting for the last time at his desk, he inhabits "his own little territory"; in Slowey's house, he knows "the little secrets of each room". The narrative heart of The Cold Eye of Heaven is the delayed revelation of treachery there, leading to a chain of causality that has a terrible logic. The novel's slow burn shows the sore heart on the rack of time. But Farley too is speckled with the rash of betrayal: going off drinking with the old lads on his wife's last day, he sleeps through her final moments and can never forgive himself.
Uncovering layers of lifetime experience, The Cold Eye of Heaven returns Farley to recuperation from a childhood illness that blurs into his final moments: "A man, a boy, a child, a baby, a man again, all at once." As I finished reading, I turned to the first page and began to read again.
Stevie Davies's Into Suez is published by Parthian.
