Hope
2005
This, the debut novel of British author Glen Duncan, sets the stage for what is to come in his body of work and is a very fine, ambitious debut novel in itself. An intimate, breathtaking, passionate first-person narrative voice, confiding confessional-style to you, reader, often, but telling you to "f-ck off" as it scents your inevitable judgment of the character. Unforgettable scenes, hyper-realized in their attention to detail. Off-the-cuff improvisations on topics connected to the narrative that are laugh-out-loud funny. Sentences so true and so perfectly put you want to share them with everyone you know. Existential musings. Daring engagement with some of the darkest of which humanity is capable. A steady character development that endears the characters to you, no matter what awful things they may do. A focus on a relationship so tender and beautiful and real that it eventually glows with the same warm light that the better memories of your own do. Sudden, jagged twists in the narrative that make you question whether you want to keep reading the book. A consistent literary, intelligent, highly allusive and effusive quality that answers that question, "YES," no matter how repelled you were moments ago.
As a novel, it does not have much plot. It is a person's life, being written in pieces, jumping between the present and very recent and college days and childhood. It is alternating scenes and meditations. It attempts to honor the range in life and never cheat. There are many themes, but at its propulsive center is a love so good and so real that it defined the narrator's life, even as he was aware he did not "deserve" it. The fact that this love was lost, driven away, really, by the narrator, and his fall into an addiction, is what the narrator is trying to come to terms with, along with what to make of life, reality, and himself in the wake of its failing. In the process, he candidly engages in exorcising demons about sexual experiences that juxtapose the sanctity of those within the lost relationship's: experiences of horror eventually revealed from childhood and ongoing experiences with a prostitute who calls herself Hope, which interact with a history of the narrator's involvement with consuming pornography and the effects it has had on his psyche or soul.
As an examination of human perversity and the duality of exalting sublime heights & horrifying wretched depths between which man finds himself cast, this novel finds Duncan with only Poe as a competitor.
