Last week my review of Brian Dillon's rather beautiful essay-cum-memoir, In the Dark Room, appeared in Time Out. Since the piece is not available online, and because the printed version was truncated into near-unintelligibility, I'm putting my original review up here:
There is a tradition of autobiographical writing that derives from St Augustine, who believed that the soul can be mistaken about its own nature and that it comes to know itself through the conquest of division or dispersion. He called the act of assembling the scraps of oneself into an authentic self-understanding, ‘memory’
Brian Dillon’s remarkable first book is subtitled ‘A Journey in Memory’ and is, in part, an attempt to excavate and reassemble the fragments of his past – a past shaped by the deaths, some five years apart, of his mother and father. But In the Dark Room is also a philosophical reflection on the phenomenon of memory itself and, crucially, on Dillon’s inability to discern in his own story the kind of consoling ‘symmetries’ that, in Augustine’s view, recollection and retrospection are meant to disclose.
Dillon’s model here is not Augustine, therefore, but the work of writers like Walter Benjamin and W.G. Sebald, for whom it is an ‘idealist fantasy’ to suppose that in imagining the past we gain direct access to our essential selves. In Dillon’s ‘journey’, the relics and mementoes with which he surrounds himself stubbornly fail to cohere into some larger, significant pattern. The few photographs of his parents he has kept don’t provide an ‘uninterrupted corridor’ into his past because he sees them through the smothering optic of mourning – rather as the ‘fog’ of his late mother’s depression was the element in which he lived out his youth.
At one point, Dillon observes the ‘unwarranted precision’ with which the medical literature describes the rare and ghastly auto-immune condition to which his mother eventually succumbed. The origins of that condition, however, are still enigmatic. Dillon’s prose frequently achieves a comparable and impressively unsettling rigour in exploring a past whose essence is always elusive.
