The Underground Man by Mick
Jackson (1997)
Recommended by Anna
I’m halfway through my
fifty-two books!
Arbitrary milestones like
this demand a bit of stock-taking. I’ve read some absolute blinders, and particularly
rated Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, Stella Gibbons's Westwood, Chester Brown's Ed The Happy Clown, Shauna Singh Baldwin's What The Body Remembers and Teju Cole's Open City. All of these are
brilliantly realised achievements in themselves plus (and importantly, for the
project) each expresses something about the friend who recommended the book.
I’m so pleased with myself
for embarking upon this resolution, and thankful to all my friends who have
stepped up to the oche with recommendations. I’m missing Jude, of course – I
hope she’ll be back when the time is right – but I kind of feel she’s here with
me anyway. After all, to blog about the project was her idea. I’d just have sat
in my room and read ‘em.
The photo-with-the-book
was also Jude’s invention. And, on that note, have another look at the one
above. Two thumbs up. That’s because The
Underground Man is FUCKING AWESOME AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS I’VE EVER
READ.
And it’s all thanks to
Anna. Sweet Anna, one of the people I know less well in this project but,
nevertheless, a key part of my Sheffield world. Exceptionally passionate about
ecological and animal issues, keen walker and allotment-owner, she’s got her
feet planted firmly in South Yorkshire soil; and, as a talented designer, her
brain is bubbling with creative cells. You know what? I think this unique book
is going to bring us closer together.
The Underground Man concerns the fifth Duke Of
Portland, a real-life Victorian aristocrat. The Duke (referred to as ‘His Grace’
throughout the book) was a figure of some public fascination in the middle
nineteenth century. He was an extreme loner, and his enormous wealth allowed
him to indulge his introversion to its logical conclusion. Few ever saw him, so
wild rumours built up about his behaviour and his physical appearance. His most
famous eccentricity was constructing a web of tunnels underneath his estate at Welbeck
Abbey, in Nottinghamshire.
Mick Jackson takes these
points of His Grace’s life as the starting point, and etches out the imagined
thought processes behind them. He invents the demons that drove His Grace to
such a peculiar routine, sympathetically analysing the thoughts and actions of
a man who is getting older and finding life increasingly painful; a man who, on
some level, knows that he is mentally crumbling, and is all at sea with how to
react to a mind increasingly not his own; and, especially, a man who is
extraordinarily, disastrously, heartbreakingly, all alone. His choices have
condemned him to a life without touch, without perspective, without the
steadying hands of trusted friends or family.
Each lung is in fact a tiny inverted tree with the base
of the trunk coming out at my throat. When I breathe in, leaves appear on the
branches. When I exhale, the leaves disappear.
The first third of The Underground Man is bathed in memorable
images like this, conjured up by His Grace, showing how florid his mind has
become while his body has retreated from the world. He is a refined writer
(most of The Underground Man is in
diary format) and can express himself perfectly in his own script. Yet, awkward
and shy and too conditioned to solitude, he can never translate this to the
real world. He relates an incident where he speaks to a man with psoriasis; His
Grace has asked how it is treated.
‘You drink coal
tar, man?’ had popped out of me, in a voice so loud and clear that the
fellows who had recently returned to their digging immediately stopped again
and stared.
The big chap looked me over very coolly, his eyes
narrowing to two tiny slits. When he spoke it was as if he was addressing a
backwards child.
‘Not drinks it, sir. Wipes
it on.’
[…]
No doubt while I sit here recording the embarrassing event,
that same labourer holds court in some nearby alehouse, telling anyone who
cares to listen all about the mad old Duke who suggested drinking coal tar to
cure his psoriatic scabs.
Those tiny confusions,
they happen to all of us. And some of them simply won’t settle, continuing to
wreak a terrible, very disproportionate, power over the mind. I don’t think
I’ve ever read a book that captures this so perfectly.
As His Grace’s physical
complaints multiply, he tries increasingly spurious treatments. One, towards
the end of the book, is especially shocking and upsetting (Jackson’s powerful body-horror
prose in this sequence is even more disturbing than the skin-peeling in Haruki
Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle).
His Grace’s sense of what is reasonable and what is extreme has completely
disintegrated; and it is this, rather than the graphic nature of the medical procedure,
that makes this section so very frightening.
In his quest to find refuge
from his pains, His Grace can also be tragicomically bizarre. Many, many times
during The Underground Man I giggled,
and found myself welling up at exactly the same point.
Called down to Mrs Pledger, asking for more bacon – as
hot and greasy as it would come.
When Clement arrived with the bacon I grabbed the plate
and slid the rashers straight under my shirt. Buttoned it back up to keep the
fellows in place […] I marched at the front, proud and barefoot, my
bacon-epaulettes now showing through my shirt.
But sometimes there are
simply no laughs to be found. Although, mostly, His Grace doesn’t directly
address his own mental anguish, when he does, the words are raw:
She nodded at me, then mercifully turned and left me to
suffer my distress alone. And as the door closed behind her I felt the bubble
finally burst and I fell, as if my legs had been kicked from under me. I fell
and continued falling and was at long last engulfed in my own tears.
The sway this book wielded
over me in these last few days has been incredible. I thought about it
incessantly, and I ran over passages in my mind as I walked around Sheffield. When
I read that His Grace believed this…
All I’ve done with my life is take countless melancholy
constitutionals and grow apples by the ton.
…I wanted to tell him, with
a whisper piercing the impossibilities of history and fiction, that he has done
something more, at least for me. He has touched me on a level that only about five or six
other characters ever have.
Read this book. Seriously, read this
book. I already want to read it again.
