Reviewed by Rod McLary
There are some novels which defy easy categorisation – and Oblivion is one such novel. It is a lyrical and strangely moving story of an unnamed narrator as he travels through the East on an unspecified and rather mysterious task.
The narrator spends his time in those detached places such as airport lounges, sky-bars in luxury hotels and large anonymous cities of the East while he negotiates and finalises high-level covert deals. With the payments from these deals – if successful – the narrator will accumulate sufficient wealth to buy an expensive apartment where he will seek the oblivion he craves. As the epigraph to the novel reads: Beneath it all, desire for oblivion runs. And the narrator’s desire for oblivion runs as the central theme through the novel and is succinctly expressed in his inner dialogue about opium. After opium came oblivion and the difference between that and heaven I could barely conceive [11].
The writing is spare and evocative and beautifully describes the narrator as being at one remove from the day-to-day struggles of the world at large. His world is a very different one where planes leave one airport only to land at the same airport with another name; and he drinks the same beer overlooking the same runway with the same lights. The narrator’s life within this nebulous world where he makes his living is expressed through the poetry of the language and the sparseness of the writing. An effective use of ellipses demands that the reader complete the narrator’s thoughts and emotions and this technique adds to the otherworldliness of the author’s life. It also evokes the sense of physical and emotional remoteness of the narrator as he traverses through these non-places.
Then the narrator meets Tien – a beautiful Vietnamese woman – who says to him: Follow me, I know the way home [97] and his world shifts. He spends considerable time seeking her out while all he has of her is a hairclip – a talisman to which he clings. But this is not a story which will end neatly and romantically – it concludes as it begins with uncertainty.
Oblivion is a novel to be read and savoured for its language and its almost poetic expression of ideas and the narrator’s desires and dreams. Well recommended.
Patrick Holland has written seven books including The Mary Smokes Boys [2010] which was longlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. His other books have been recognised by the Dublin Literary Award, the Internation Scott Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize.
Oblivion
[2024]
by Patrick Holland
Transit Lounge
ISBN 978 192302 314 7
$32.99; 256pp