"Tinkers" by Paul Harding (Windmill, 2011)

It begins with "George Washington Crosby began to hallucinate eight days before he died. From the rented hospital bed, placed in the middle of his own living room, he saw insects". He's 80. We find out about his life. We read about his father Howard, an itinerant salesman -

He thought, Buy the pendant, sneak it into your hand from the folds of your dress and let the low light of the fire lap at it late at night as you wait for the roof to give out or your will to snap and the ice to be too thick to chop through with the ax as you stand in your husband's boots on the frozen lake at midnight, the dry hack of the blade on ice so tiny under the wheeling and frozen stars, the soundproof lid of heaven, that your husband would never stir from his sleep in the cabin across the ice, would never hear and come running, half-frozen, in only his union suit, to save you from chopping a hole in the ice and sliding into it as if it were a blue vein (p.24)

which is perhaps Howard's lyricism - he has epilepsy and strange pre-fit states. I presume the following is the Georges's voice -

There was another oil painting hanging above the desk, this one of a packet schooner sailing out of Gloucester in stormy weather. It was a scene of roiling dark greens and blues and grays swarming around the lines of the ship, which was seen from the rear. The insides of the very tips of the waves were illuminated from within by a sourceless light. If you watched the straight lines of the schooner's masts and rigging (storm up, the ship was not under sail) long enough in the dim light of an early evening or on a rainy day, the sea would begin to move at the corners of your vision. They would stop the moment you looked directly at them, only to slither and snake again when you returned your gaze to the ship. (p.32)

He mends clocks. We learn what the parts of a clock - the escapement especially - do. As well as delving into the past, there are flash-forwards - on p.34 we read about how he wife later lived for years in a retirement complex.

In section 2 his father bites him during a fit. His mother takes him to the doctor. He needs stitches. He sneaks away from home. He doesn't get far - his father soon finds him, following his tracks. Then his father goes. In section 3 we go back another generation. Howard's father, a churchman in mental decline, is taken away. Howard does country walks in an attempt to connect somehow with his "quiet, strange" father. Section 4, the final section, begins with a return to George's death-bed. Somebody's always at the foot of the bed -

I was just thinking, the person said in a silvery voice, I was just thinking that I am not very many years old, but that I am centuries wide. I think that I have my literal age but am surrounded in a radius of years. I think that these years of days, this near century of years, is a gift from you. Thankyou. Now, let me read you something to get you back to sleep Cometa Borealis: We entered the atmosphere at dusk. We trailed a wake of fire. We were a sparkling trail of white fire hurtling over herds that grazed alluvial plains. The purple plains: steppe and table, clastic rocks from an extinct river strewn over the bed of an extinct ocean. Perhaps, far away, there was a revolution - the storming of a bereft fort built on the bend of a remote, misty, woods-shrouded river (p.158)

"As George died, the dark blood retreated from his limbs ... it evaporated and had left a residue of salt and metal along the passages of his dry veins. ... His bone-filled feet were like lead weights that were held by his dried veins - his salt-cured, metal-strengthened veins, which were now as tough as gut, as strong as iron chains. It was as if it would be possible to reach into his chest and grab the very vessels leading from his heart and pull at them and hoist the heavy bones of his feet up through his legs and trunk until they hung just below that nearly exhausted engine" (p.183). I can imagine readers thinking that such thoughts are inappropriate, or unrealistic. Then "His face was pale. It no longer showed expression. True, it showed a kind of peace, or, more precisely, seemed to predict that peace, but such peace was not a human one" (p.183). I have my doubts about the "more precisely" ploy.

At the end we learn that Howard remarried, and went back once to his old house. George's last memory is of that visit.

Strange things happen to time in the book-

• "the whole event seemed as if it hadn't actually happened outside of my imagination. In fact, it seemed not to happen at all, but, rather, suddenly, to have happened" (p.148)
• "After glancing away for a moment to look at the first robin of spring, I looked back at the canoe and the Indian had vanished without sound, without, seeming, even movement, but, rather, had been reabsorbed back not only into trunk and root, stone and leaf but into light and shadow and season and time itself" (p.149)

Throughout there are fragments I like -

• "George looked surprised at his reflection, as if after a lifetime of seeing himself in mirrors and windows and metal and water, now, at the end, suddenly a rude, impatient stranger had shown up in place of himself, someone anxious to get into the picture, although his proper cue was George's exit" (p.52)
• "My mother opened the outside door and the light came in and carved every object in the kitchen into an ancient relic" (p.138)

There's a typo in p.149 - "faher" instead of "father".

Other reviews

• Jay Parini (Harding slips in and out of dialogue without quotation marks. He jumps from thought to thought, centred in the consciousness of old George but never confined to it. Stories are layered within stories ... Harding never tires of painting the scene with prose that, here and there, edges toward the poetic with a little too much muscle, reaching for metaphors that don't quite work)
• Peter Scott ( This is a difficult novel; narrators and narrative are unreliable, the syntax is complicated, while the plot, such as it is, jumps around so much as to elude any easy attempts at identifying a temporal progression of events. Yet time is absolutely central to Tinkers. ... Among the many triumphs of this novel, Harding enables a reader to look at the world differently, without the things that normally encumber experience. Tinkers is a considerable achievement.)
• interview with Motoko Rich
• William Palmer