Review of Your Life Without Me by James Meek – The Angel of Destruction Haunts a Local Drama | books

A A major demolition is also a creative act, as long as its execution is bold and impressive enough, and as long as it clears away dead wood and opens up the terrain. It’s the spirit that connects Pablo Picasso to 1970s punk, and Shiva the Destroyer to the anarchist hero in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Tear it up and start again. Or tear it up for the pure thrill of shredding. In Graham Greene’s short story “The Destroyers,” student vandals from the combined Wormsley gang methodically dismantle a London house designed by Christopher Wren, working from the inside out so that it disintegrates into rubble the moment the support column is torn down. The adult witness to the crime, the truck driver, laughs at the sight. “I’m sorry, I can’t help it,” he tells the distraught homeowner. “Nothing personal, but you have to admit it’s funny.”

Rafe, the angel of destruction stalking the wings of James Meek’s beautiful, death-haunted domestic drama, is also drawn to Wren’s work – even though his project was conceived on a much larger scale. Rafe is a professional demolition man, a talented young engineer who is a natural extremist, easily moved to laugh or cry and effortlessly dazzles everyone in his orbit. For his doctoral project, he was given free commissioning of St Paul’s Cathedral in order to test the resistance of the ancient building to modern traffic vibrations. He drills secret holes in the construction to install movement control devices. But it also fills the cavities with Semtex.

It’s not a spoiler to reveal that Rafe never completed his masterpiece. At the beginning of Mick’s novel, he is imprisoned in Belmarsh Prison, held without charge and refusing to speak to the authorities, as the narrative repeats and sets up the camp next door, seeing the ripple effect this would-be terrorist has on his informal adoptive family. Why would Rafe want to blow up St. Paul’s Cathedral anyway? He suggests that this is because the building gives shape to the city and highlights its worst excesses. And also because it’s outdated, a tired prop, an unquestionable symbol of virtue and grace. He believes its removal would be liberating. People would mourn it, appreciate it, and then go and build something new and fresh in its place.

Perhaps more establishments would benefit from a visit from Rafe, the son of a taxi driver from a small Lancashire town, who waves a metaphorical wrecking ball through the home of the respectable Borman family. Mr. Borman, a middle-aged man (we are never told his first name), was Rafe’s English teacher and surrogate father of sorts. He now worries that he may have inadvertently sent Rafe down the wrong path, arousing the kid with his idle Marxist chatter to the point where Scotland Yard might view him as an accomplice. But it’s clear that Rafe’s crime is part of a broader, quieter family tragedy. Bormann is still reeling from the death of his charismatic wife, Ada, while his adult daughter, Leila, burns with resentment over a lifetime of slights, both perceived and otherwise.

Disorientingly, and with an elegant narrative sleight of hand, Mick redirects the drama of Rafe’s terrorist plot into the cozy rooms of the Boorman family home. It makes the house seem precarious and dangerous, like a shell of its former self, with broken glass under every anxious step. Bormann longs to talk to Leyla as if they were a couple of normal human beings. His daughter is having none of it. “Speaking like humans is not the way humans talk,” she says.

Mick – the Guardian’s one-time Moscow bureau chief – is best known for his light, allegorical historical fiction: The 2005 Booker Prize longlisted The Act of Popular Love, and 2019’s delightful To Calais in Ordinary Time. Despite its modern-day setting, Your Life Without Me is equally interested in the interplay of the turbulent past with the present, sliding along the family timeline and across different perspectives (Mr. Borman, Lila, Rafe) to weigh the merits of Preservation, demolition, commitment and freedom.

The narrative plotline is a high-concept thriller or an epic about the state of the nation. But the tale unfolds like a magic eye trick, an experiment in psychogeography that casts St. Paul as an agent for the absent Ada and observes how the landscape is changed by her loss. It’s a neat marriage metaphor that’s slowly but surely coming into focus; Provocatively at the beginning and quite frankly towards the end. Because for all its meticulous plotting and waves of rebellion, Your Life With Me works best as a compelling and compassionate portrait of an English family in flux. Meek builds us a beautiful cast of heroes in Borman, Ada, Leila, and Rafe. Its people are complicated and vulnerable, complex, flawed but durable, and seem powerfully three-dimensional until the moment they’re not.