TERRA EXITUS by Scott M. Liddell
I spent yesterday afternoon and evening
reading this pithy nihilistic romance by Scott M. Liddell. It’s a novel of ideas
in which our narrator is an outwardly inarticulate, seemingly ordinary Scotsman
who’s filled inside by rage and grief. Having found his mother dead in a
corridor, waiting for A&E, he is shaken entirely out of his old life and
sets off, unthinkingly into a new one, down south, in London – a place where
people are ‘feral, wide-eyed foxes darting in fear from one overturned bin to
another.’ Which sounds about right.
This
is the story of a man who unwittingly becomes a kind of clickbait Messiah. He
works in IT so it’s a doddle for him, one boring weekend, to set up a website
addressed to all the depressed, disenfranchised people round the world. Almost
accidentally he raises a fortune by promising them membership of a society of
loners who all would prefer to quietly leave the loathsome planet and go off
with the aliens. The money he unwittingly makes he sets about distributing to
the needy and trying to do some good, and we soon find out what a crushing and
complicated job that is. My favourite scene in the whole novel is perhaps the
one where he and his self-appointed manager meet with the parents of a terribly
ill child in a pub, so that he can be reluctantly thanked for giving them a
massive wodge of cash. Needless to say, it goes a bit wrong, and there’s
toe-curling embarrassment all round.
What
I love about this novel wasn’t really the philosophy and the raging against the
awfulness of people – it was how wonderful the supporting cast was. Our hero
gets himself a new girlfriend when he trips over in Hyde Park and clonks
himself unconscious on the wine bottle from her picnic. Their relationship is
sweetly drawn – even if she remains a little bit of a romantic cipher. Their
time in Paris with her father and wandering the city is a much-needed respite
from the darkness of the rest of the book. I also loved the
haphazardly-acquired best friend Jacob, who is a gobby posho befriended during
a horrible party through the medium of insults. There’s a great pathos
underneath the bluster of Jacob and the scenes in which he breaks down are very
effective.
The
trouble with a philosophical novel is that it can sometimes feel that the
characters and events are being bent too far to carry the writer’s ideas. The
danger is that they can start spouting unmediated philosophy at each other.
Here, that stuff is cleverly couched in the scenes when our narrator goes on
telly to explain his so-called cult. Of course, he starts to actually speak his
own mind, and here’s the bit when we get to the heart of the novel’s ideas.
It’s also the point where everything starts to go horribly wrong… and there are
a few shocks in the last chapters of the novel that made me feel… manipulated,
cross, upset, dumbfounded and full of admiration for the ambition and the
chutzpah that went into the writing of this slim and thoughtful book.
Our
lead character is a bit of a know-all gobshite, and his girlfriend is a
cello-playing, life-affirming paragon and there’s maybe not enough
counter-balance to the people-are-shite subtext, but I really enjoyed this book.
The writing just rattles along and we really want to know what becomes of these
people – which is quite something in a novel of ideas.
(Terra Exitus is currently 99p on Amazon…!)
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