Review of ‘This is My Second Life’ by Patrick Charnley – An Amazing Start to Recovery | imaginary

“I He had to pick up the wreckage, blind at first. I had to find all my parts, scattered everywhere, and put them back together, one by one. After a cardiac arrest leaves him clinically dead for 40 minutes, Jago Trevarno, the young narrator of Patrick Charnley’s poignant debut novel, retreats to the Cornish village where he grew up, to take shelter under the “off the grid” protection of his uncle Jacob.

His mother has died of cancer and his father is long gone, and twenty-year-old Jago’s world seems reduced to nothing but the drudgery of working on a subsistence farm above the rugged Atlantic coast. The life that Jago had begun to build in the city, a “runaway train” while escaping his mother’s death and all that reminded him of her, suddenly evaporated in the wake of his near-death experience. He “went from someone who needed to slow down, and be present, to someone who had no choice about it” and had to start from scratch.

The building blocks available for Jago are basic. His injury has left him with “reduced processing capacity”: his brain responses are slow and must remain so, calibrated to recover. He’s also noticeably in retreat from intense emotions, wary of the havoc he can wreak on vulnerable synapses, and Jacob—gentle, protective and understanding but taciturn, unaccustomed to company—applies only minimal counter-emotional pressure.

Together, uncle and nephew live a very simple life, with their days governed by the weather, animals, seasons, and daylight hours. But while this extraordinarily stable and limited existence may be the ideal environment for his immediate recovery, as Jago’s condition improves, the inevitable question arises as to whether he can live indefinitely in this kind of stasis, hiding from the past and the outside world. Then the outside world takes matters into its own hands, because even the off-grid has neighbours, well-intentioned or otherwise – and sooner or later their presence is felt.

On the benign side of the scale is Grandma Carne, fierce and fiercely independent, loyal to Jago and Jacob, seer and bearer of everyone’s secrets. Then there is Sophie. Jago’s first love, abandoned in the turbulent wake of his mother’s death, Sophie never leaves the village, and her renewed presence in Jago’s life, along with the array of painful feelings she arouses, inevitably begins to jeopardize his precarious grip on emotional stability.

However, it is the notorious Bill Sligo, whose land lies above Jacob’s and whose brand-new Range Rover was purchased with the profits from farming, who poses the greatest threat to the life Jago is trying to rebuild. Sligo has his eye on one of Jacob’s fields, where the entrance to an old mine lies above a cluster of tunnels and caves – and when it looks as if he’ll go to great lengths to get it, Jago must decide whether to retreat or participate.

This book, My Second Life, provides a brief account of the author’s own experience with cardiac arrest and brain injury. The son of the late and great writer Helen Dunmore, Charnley lost his relatively young mother to cancer, yet to see the novel through the lens of personal trauma would be a grave injustice. The prose is simple and beautiful, the narrative simple but sound – it is as finely written as poetry, illuminated by Jaggu’s sheer delight in the world, and animated by his fear that he might be kidnapped at any moment. The seductive, seductive rhythms of days filled with only the most urgent things – the smell of the library or the colors of the sea, the “milky winter sun” or the exquisite taste of ordinary food – are layered to achieve a supernatural intensity, making the world new. As he details his limitations and his meticulous efforts to overcome them, Jago’s distinctive voice emerges, a true, clear and utterly convincing creativity, always reaching toward light and life.