Human constellations

When a book takes its title from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, you can expect the shock of something supernatural. But although Paul Dalgarno’s A Country of Eternal Light is narrated by a dead woman, there is little here to horrify.

Margaret Bryce is a self-conscious and self-questioning narrator. We find her shuffling, or being shuffled, through scenes from her life like old photographs. Neither tragic nor spooky, Margaret is pragmatic, a self-described Episcopalian who soon lets us know her impatience with the whole arrangement, declaring: ‘I don’t believe in souls.’ If she seems uncomfortable in a story like this, that’s part of her charm. While her enthusiasm for eager explanatory digressions sometimes seem to belong more to the author than his character – I sometimes wondered if Margaret had access to some afterlife version of Wikipedia – for the most part this chatty ghost is observant company, both enjoying and perturbed by her memories, determined to puzzle out some pattern or purpose in them. She is doing her accounts, the way the dying often do, setting things right as best she can from the elevated, if slippery, perspective of an afterlife.

In his work so far, Dalgarno has proven himself to be very good at evoking life in its details, particularly the minutiae of human relationships. His previous novel, Poly (2020), was a slow suburban relationship drama, a painfully honest blow-by-blow of the insecurities that can attach to polyamorous relationships. Told with a meticulous and sometimes uncomfortable level of detail, that novel – like its characters – struggled to find a balance between honesty and oversharing, but often found quick redemption in self-effacing humour.