One thing I kept thinking about while reading After You’d Gone by Maggie O’Farrell were the words of a colleague, “The truth will out.” He had said this more than a decade ago when we were discussing certain politicians involved with atrocities and corruption. His belief was that it doesn’t matter how long it takes, or in what form, but no matter what, the truth will come out.
It’s something I come back to these days as we flail in this purgatory of misinformation. What does it mean to lie, to conceal, to mislead if the purveyors of deceit themselves hold firm in their belief that they are in the right?
O’Farrell’s main protagonist, Alice Raikes, and the people around her aren’t so concerned about the big societal questions. Instead, as she lies in a coma, she slowly sifts through memories of her childhood and of her recent past while those in her life wonder, “Was it an accident or did she try to commit suicide by stepping out into traffic? What did she see that led her to do such a thing?” The truth will always out, as one will see by the end of the novel. We lie to ourselves more than anyone else, but what happens if not speaking the truth hurts those we love the most?
And there you go — the basic premise of the book… except O’Farrell answers that first question in the literal first sentence: “The day she would try to kill herself, she realised winter was coming again.” Alice wakes up, feeds her cats, then absent-mindedly boards a train to Edinburgh where she meets her sisters briefly, goes to the bathroom, sees something jarring, and then boards the next train back to London where she walks out in front of an incoming vehicle, landing herself in a coma.
There is a dreamy quality to the beginning that is reminiscent of being in a dream, switching from first person to third as Alice remembers her childhood and a recent love affair. Sometimes when I’m dreaming, I feel like I’m experiencing exactly the things happening around me, while other times it’s as if I’m watching the dream as a movie-goer. That’s what Coma Alice feels like and muddying through the perspective and abrupt scene changes can be jarring but the mystery behind Alice’s actions makes it a compelling reason to push through.
The other two women in her life feel downright earthy in comparison. Her mother Ann is told with a matter-of-fact deftness, making it clear that she’s not really a woman who knows how to love a partner — only one who can feel strong emotions for her children. Meanwhile her grandma Elspeth, who Alice adores, feels more typecast. She’s recognizable as a character who soldiers through a solitary childhood after her missionary parents left her in boarding school, with no resentment. She leaves her fiance days after meeting her soon-to-be husband, and sees with that same clarity early on that Ann does not actually love her son Ben. But Elspeth opted to stay out of the way — only intervening to recommend fertility treatments after the couple struggled for two years to get pregnant.
We also get glimpses of Alice’s father Ben’s point of view — an adoration of bewildering immediacy for Ann who he meets in college — and of John, the man who wins Alice’s heart after a couple tumultuous love affairs.
The timelines of all three women are jumbled together, and I imagine O’Farrell must have had flashcards of various moments organized on her study floor as she wrote. How successful she is depends on your mileage for this sort of gimmick — and your patience. O’Farrell is a highly detailed writer, teasing out sensory fragments, almost insisting that you see the stage yourself, which can be tiresome if you believe color should inform the character and not serve as scene-setting.
But where she excels in are little flick of emotions, like as Ann cleans Alice’s closet while her husband is at the hospital to visit their comatose daughter. She begins crying when she sees Alice’s clothes hanging by John’s:
She’s not sure who she’s crying for: for her daughter, yes, the thought of whose death makes her feel like a glove pulled inside out on itself… and a part of her cries for herself, whose clothes would never hang like this with anyone’s.”
I suppose these love stories are really about grief — grief for past lives, for lost lovers, and for a closeness with those you love the most. Since O’Farrell didn’t seem to care that Ann and Elspeth’s histories were jumbled in with Alice’s in her comatose state, I wish she’d had taken the time to flesh out more of Ben and John’s point of view. I wish she’d linger a bit longer on John’s father.
Men and fathers — if you hear writers tell it, or I suppose daughters — always seem to remain above the fray when it comes to human drama, as if they are better than it all. It’s always the mothers who get the blame for the trauma. Even in O’Farrell’s dedication, she said, “To my mother for not being like Alice’s” — a disservice to a character who could have otherwise been rendered more empathetically. I don’t have to like Ann — I don’t even think I really like Alice, to be honest. But it would have been more whole if we could have seen the sketch lines of an unlovable woman firmed up into a girl who felt shamed giving herself into love, whose very surrendering to love could lead to unspeakable disaster. O’Farrell is an excellent writer, and I look forward to diving into her other works to see if such an oversight is repeated — an understandable one (we all have mothers and we all have our histories) in an otherwise achingly poignant debut novel.