This is, explicitly, a book about art and “sadness”, but it is neither affected nor mawkish. When its narrator, 25-year-old art student Frankie, hacks off her hair in response to her grandmother’s death, her not uncaring mother’s first thought is for her shears. “‘It knackers them if you use them on anything that isn’t fabric,’ she said.”
Frankie’s grandmother has been dead for three years when Irish writer Sara Baume’s novel begins, but her depression has only lately come to a head. Jacking in her job at a Dublin gallery, she has fled to the country and her grandmother’s empty bungalow to “get better or die altogether”.
In the early stages of this bold experiment Frankie is struck by the number of celebrities eager to share tales of woe – cancer or breakdown. “If each one perceived their respective illness in a unique and interesting way, it wouldn’t bother me so much,” she thinks. This is the challenge that Baume has evidently set herself – to find a fresh perspective – and she has excelled.
Her success is in part down to the method of psychic self-maintenance that she has Frankie hit upon. “I must take responsibility for the furniture inside my head,” she resolves, and as this furniture largely comprises conceptual artworks, her narrative is punctuated by brief, incisive meditations on pieces that speak to her predicament.
But Baume has also taken a subject typically treated with scorn, the quarter-life crisis, and produced a portrait both particular – Frankie’s illness has long, deep roots – and instantly recognisable. The shabby, solitary, half-size house in which Frankie holes up is a rich metaphor for her lost, “adult-child” state. And even though its former occupants are gone, it remains a refuge from the relentlessly attritional business of growing up in the way that grandparents’ houses so often do. No longer a child – Frankie has, she realises, lost an early talent for ear-waggling – she can’t cut it as an adult: washing machines confound her.
Meanwhile the traces of Frankie’s grandmother persist – handprints on secateurs, kneeprints on a piece of foam – in the way that the artist Richard Long’s body persisted in the landscape after he had completed the 1967 piece that gives Baume’s novel its title.
For her part, Frankie embarks on a series of photographs of dead animals, images that reflect her own sense of disintegration and which are reproduced in black and white in the text. But while Baume’s novel is every bit as compelling as Long’s work she, like he, is wary of mysticism. The self-confessedly curmudgeonly Frankie is possessed of a pleasing, lightly sardonic streak: her dead-animal pictures, she muses, are “about the immense poignancy of how, in the course of ordinary life, we only get to look closely at the sublime once it has dropped to the ditch”. And early on the pathetic fallacy is held up to the light, seen through. “The weather doesn’t match my mood; the script never supplies itself, nor is the score composed to instruct my feelings,” Frankie acknowledges.
Baume’s is an immensely sensitive balancing act of a book, one that declines to resolve its tensions. Towards its conclusion, Frankie muses on how her odyssey ought to “end in a substantial event”. The adjective is strikingly ironic in view of Baume’s actual denouement, and further evidence of just how carefully calibrated this original and affecting novel is.
• A Line Made By Walking by Sara Baume is published by Heinemann (£12.99). To order a copy for £9.74 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
