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Storyline and first chapter>
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THE RECONSTRUCTIONIST
Storyline
Coolly and compellingly narrated by a man dedicated to the examination of other people's pasts and the reconstruction of their lives, this is a brilliant, dark and grippng new novel that surpasses even Hart's materpiece, Damage. A psychiatrist, Jack is divorced. His own past and that of his beautiful, enigmatic sister Kate certainly bear scrutiny.
Then he gets a phone call telling him that their family house in Ireland is for sale - and when he finally returns to the house, terrible truths emerge about what happened there years ago in a family tragedy that left indelible marks on those who survived it. The facts have been reconstructed many times, but the shocking truth has not.
Chapter 1
Afterwards, we were asked to reconstruct the event. Much detail was
required of us concerning how the hours had been spent between midday,
when we had been seen to return from church, and four-thirty that
afternoon when they broke the window and entered the house. A moment
I see now as the first moment of dispossession.
They found us sitting on high-backed chairs, placed exactly opposite each other in the stone hallway. It was a position from which we had not moved for over an hour. We were obedient children. That day we did exactly as our father had ordered before he silently, and for the last time, left the house.
Later, and with those who loved us, we too departed. Or, more accurately,
we were removed as though we were precious objects, which must be
saved at all costs form the inferno. Removal from the house in which
we had spent our childhood was not, however deemed adequate protection.
We were transported, therefore, again by those who loved us, to another
country.
And as the doors of that old life closed behind us, others opened. We were guided through a corridor of time designed to take us far away from that Sunday in August and from the house in which the event took place. We were encouraged into a life which would, in its busy intensity, lay siege to memory and, it was hoped, finally kill it.
The years moved us down the river and we dipped our oars lightly.
Nature had created me an observer and I had inherited from someone,
not my parents, a cool mind. She had been fashioned in another mode.
She had inherited from them not only beauty but also something striking
in her colouring which made her unforgettable. She could not have
ignored this inheritance, even if she'd wanted to. So strong was its
impact that a privileged education - St. Paul's , followed by Cambridge
- became not the driving force to a life of achievement, but simply
another adornment and, over time, the least important.
My own achievement in life, such as it is, is due in part to the judicious
application of the knowledge I gained through years of study and training.
It is due also to the almost obsessive attention that I pay to the
body language, tone of voice and expression in the eyes of almost
everyone with whom I come into close contact. Professionally, I have
no doubt that has been of enormous advantage to me. Personally, this
alert and constant vigilance is practised in the hope that, in discerning,
even in the distance, a shadowy outline of potential danger, I may
be able to pre-empt it.
I am a very busy man. I make this statement, as other busy men do,
with rueful pride. Like them, I am in fact grateful for my demanding,
professional life. Its daily pressures - pressure, of course gives
balance - provide an antidote to the potentially fatal seduction of
memory. Perversely, however, my hours are spent in investigation of
the memories of others. |
