The poet Patrick McGuinness has always been interested in the hidden folds of our inner lives, the seams connecting present and past. As he admits in Other People’s Countries, his ingeniously fractured 2014 memoir about the sleepy Belgian town where he spent part of his childhood, “like a character in a Beckett play, I’ve always found the hardest words of all to be here and now”. In that book he described how his dressmaker grandmother would sew his school uniform, as ever paying particular attention to the lining or “doublure” (“the wearer might project the outer garment, but really their relationship was with the doublure”). Off he went to English public school, in a uniform that was secretly unique.
McGuinness’s Booker-shortlisted first novel, The Last Hundred Days, was a drippingly atmospheric portrait of the final months of the Ceaușescu regime: it explored the way tyranny both doubles and divides, with the black market running as “the system’s other self, its shadow aspect”. People lived with the inevitability of betrayal and corruption by separating themselves from their actions “like a body and its shadow at dusk”.
Eight years later, his second novel is based on the 2010 murder of Joanna Yeates and the press feeding frenzy around the initial suspect, a retired teacher whose monstering also inspired a TV drama, The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies. In Throw Me to the Wolves, Jefferies’ fictional stand-in, Michael Wolphram, is refined, withdrawn, overarticulate and otherworldly – perfect tabloid fodder as “the nation’s High-Culture Hermit-Ogre”. “If innocence can look this bad, who needs guilt?”
We are in a strange palimpsest of a place: Bristol, with its iconic Clifton suspension bridge, the site in the novel of much vertiginous nostalgia, grafted on to a down-at-heel Kent. The detective questioning Wolphram about the murder of Zalie Dyer is his former pupil, Ander, who three decades previously arrived at boarding school from Ghent in a hand-sewn uniform and speaking only piecemeal English (McGuinness was himself taught by Jefferies).
But it’s clear from the beginning, as Ander agonises over the grammar of interrogation – the body or her body? – that this is no standard police procedural. McGuinness has fun with the colour and cliche of crime fiction – the office nicknames, the banter, an aperçu-coining, porkpie-munching sidekick called Gary who gleefully occupies his own stereotype – but the novel, like the insubstantial Ander, is strangely disconnected from its main plot line.
Instead, the book’s beating heart is firmly in the past: in Ander’s memories of school, as much a totalitarian state as the Romania of The Last Hundred Days, where the bullying is built in and letters home are self-censored for fear of being mockingly read aloud to the class (“Shame their bodies, yes, but be sure to shame their souls, too”). Boys unblinkingly endure abuse ranging from the casual to the baroque at the hands of teachers who have returned to their own childhood trauma, “haunting their lives while thinking they’re reliving them”. These sections are sad, furious and blisteringly effective, written with an almost hallucinogenic clarity. As they move towards the revelation of a particular classroom atrocity, we begin to understand why present day Ander is so dissociated. “We are solving something,” he realises, “but it isn’t the murder of Zalie Dyer.”
The school sections are framed by discussions between Ander and Gary about the present’s perspective on the past. Today, says Gary, we’re vomiting up the structural abuses of the 1970s and 80s – they’re “burning our throats as we retch it out, we’re all pretending we didn’t know about it”. The consequences of history are also symbolised by the discovery of an enormous fatberg in the sewers, the return of everything that we’d rather jettison. “It’s like we’re looking at ourselves in a mirror of shit” (Gary again).
Ander is a cop arrested by the past, a ghost in his own history. The human desire to reclaim what is lost and to capture the intangible is also represented by an old woman called Mrs Snow who refuses to accept her husband’s death, and Ander’s young niece, obsessed with recording the sounds of silence, fog and thoughts. These various hauntings are the novel’s real subject, to the extent that the tabloid pursuit of Wolphram, in the shape of a female journalist who unspools stagey state-of-the-nation speeches, feels like a brasher intrusion from another book.
In its elegiac exploration of memory and the legacy of childhood trauma, though, Throw Me to the Wolves is intensely powerful, and a beautifully measured evocation of the way that far from being dead the past is, as Faulkner said, not even past. “If you’re measuring it in … what? Inside-time? Heart-and-blood time? Lining-of-our-lives time?... in that case it’s yesterday. It’s always yesterday there, in the lining of our lives.”
• Throw Me to the Wolves is published by Cape (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
