Greif and regret on the road.

A haulier drives south through France, carrying a secret passenger, his estranged daughter. Over the course of their journey they attempt to heal the hurt.

O’Callaghan is reticent with detail, making the reader work hard. His narrative style of abbreviated dialogue and blurring memories with the present takes some getting used to. In particular, the truncated dialogue initially feels affected. But, as the journey progresses, the portrayal of missed opportunities turns poignant.

Ultimately, I failed to connect with the characters.

My thanks to NetGalley and Random House UK, Transworld Publishers Doubleday, for the ARC.

I struggled to get engaged with this book and only got about 20% in before I bailed (and I never bail on books).

I just couldn't connect with the characters, and much of the time I couldn't even figure out who was speaking. (Maybe that's as a result of the formatting of the ARC, but if it is it needs correcting before publication). There was never a full conversation, which perhaps was meant to lend the book an air of mystery or was perhaps the unreliable narrator trope, but for me it was just confusing not intriguing.

Once the woman was introduced (the one who Paddy seems to leave behind) I just lost interest all toegther.

Sorry - just not for me.

Even if I found part of this book engrossing and poignant it find hard to connect to the characters on a general level.
I think it's one of those cases "It's me not the story", not my cup of tea.
Many thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this ARC, all opinions are mine.

Regrets, missed opportunities and family hostilities are brought to the surface on a road trip through France, with the narrator musing about his fraught relationship with his daughter, who is along for the ride. As the journey progresses, the revelations become ever more hazy and ambiguous over the events which haunt the father’s mind, leaving the reader puzzling over the truth long afterward - though the title may offer a clue. A beautifully written and poignant portrayal of grief and loss.

Paddy is a middle class man who has accepted a short term job driving an articulated lorry on a run from Northern England to France. This is supposed to take a week, there and back. Paddy has his daughter Kitty for company, unknown to Carl who is running the operation.

This is one of those novels where everything seems to be deliberately opaque. It's not clear what the lorry run is all about. Why has Paddy decided to do it? Why was he even asked? Why is his daughter with him? Who is Carl and why is he shadowing the journey?

The novel is divided into interleaving sections. One is the truck journey; dialogue between Paddy and Kitty; trucker cafes; and introspection. Sentences are left hanging, there are text messages from A, we slip from dialogue into introspection with little signposting. And the second thread is about Paddy's former partner - or is it his daughter - and her relationships with unsympathetic men.

In a further attempt to obfuscate, characters share names. And there seems to be a lot of dying.

It becomes apparent reasonably early on that something is not right, but for most of the novel it isn't clear exactly what. Timelines blur, stories slip into one another, Paddy seems to be hiding from Carl. There's something happening with the tachographs where Paddy slips from fastidious refusal to tamper with the system to not using it at all. I suspect some of this would make more sense from a re-read.

But a re-read is unlikely, mostly because I found the characters unknowable - and that's not fantastic in what is perhaps a character led novel. The characters do things, and they think things, and they say things but they never seem to feel anything. Their pasts are too fragmentary to build into a clear picture of who they are and what drives them as people. Their actions don't seem to have clear motivations. Perhaps in the final pages it is possible to make some inferences and that is what redeems this in part, but for a short book this feels very long.

This novel is the story of an Irishman man (Paddy), who has spent time in both the US (where he married and had a daughter) and in the UK (originally moving, after the break up of his relationship, to be close to his dying mother – Kitty – the name he also chooses for his daughter).

Now following the death of his mother and the break-up of a long affair with a married woman, he dusts off an old HGV licence (acquired in the aftermath of the financial crash) and takes a job driving a haulage lorry (borrowed from a dying acquaintance) down through France, under the supervision of the controlling Carl. Unbeknownst to Carl (as it would invalidate his insurance) he has smuggled his twentysomething daughter – now early twenties – to join him in something of an attempt to rebuild a broken relationship.

The two – who at times behave more like older brother and younger sister, and sometime like father and daughter - verbally joust around areas like their mixed US/Irish heritage, mannerisms and accents; their respective relationship with the father’s younger brother Art. Art was the favoured son of his father (even named after him), and went off to boarding school after the latters death while the less favoured older brother stayed at home. Art also has a successful career and marriage and is executing his mother’s will - mainly the sale of the old run-down family house Tír Na nÓg.

At the same time, they circle around both the father’s relationship and some form of incident or breakdown which the daughter suffered.

Meanwhile Carl hovers on the margins, with a passive aggressive control of the father often via text, while the father also receives texts from his ex-lover and exchanges texts and calls with his brother. We also share the father’s memories of his rather mixed up relationship with his mother when he was an older teenager, which at times was on the edge of being sexual.

This story is interleaved with the tale of Paddy’s lover, married to a much older academic and with a son born after she no longer believed it possible. That story moves back in time over her relationship with Paddy.

The lorry journey sections features some dialogue which places the story firmly in a the camp of modern Irish literary fiction, reminiscent as it is, in its sharp interactions and unfinished sentences, of say a Kevin Barry or an Eimear McBride.

But the author’s own stamp comes through, in a particularly descriptive way of capturing speech emphasis and phrasing and in some repeated phraseology.

I loved for example: "Lads who go through turmoil. Carl looked especially chuffed with that last word. Carl had savoured it, given it an extra syllable. Like Carl had happened upon it in the quick crossword (fifteen down, a state of upheaval, seven letters, ends in L) and taken a shine to it and filed it away for future usage among discerning listeners."

And "Time does what time does best. We’re back on the road. Time slips underneath and gets sucked into a pinhole of past in a rearview’s middle distance."

While the journey sections are in a standard third-party point of view, the lover’s memories are in the second person. Something which is difficult to pull off but which the author manages and uses I think to produce a sense of the woman in dialogue with herself and her memory. This section is strongly sexually charged, sometimes just a list of reminiscences of the place and circumstance of the two’s sexual encounters. The woman repeatedly says though that the sex was not what she either wanted or valued from the relationship and the use of second person means that this ambiguity and apparent contradiction remains open.

Two themes which run through the novel, and which I think match the two sections:

- The lyrics of the Foo Fighters “Best of You”
- The Tír Na nÓg legend of Oisín and Niamh

As the book progresses the truth about the daughter’s breakdown, it’s two way interaction with the break-up of the father’s relationship and the real quest of their journey in France becomes clear to the reader and turns what is already an emotionally charged novel into a even more powerful and affecting one.

Recommended.

This is a rambling story about a girl connecting with her estranged father who is a trucker on a long delivery route with flashbacks to earlier times and meetigs with the sinister Cral, his father's boss/intermediary. I wanted to like this book but I just didn't connect with the characters or the writing style. It even took me quite a while at the start to work out if the the trucker was the girls father or mother or some other significant adult and what was actually going on with all the jumping about in narrative and time. There is lots of detail about truck stops and how to live in the truck etc. It just wasn't for me.

‘Time does what time does best. We’re back on the road. Time slips underneath and gets sucked into a pinhole of past in a rearview’s middle distance.’

This is an emotionally charged story told in that Irish way I love so much. Once I’d got used to the dialogue - no punctuation, unfinished sentences and having to concentrate to make out who was saying what - I could relax into the banter between the father and daughter on their road trip, using the time to reminisce about her and his childhoods and forge a new relationship. The slightly creepy truck supervisor Carl lurks around, keeping tabs on our narrator’s journey and introducing a note of foreboding. I thought he was really well portrayed, we all know someone like him, looking out for a chink of weakness in others he can exploit. The sense of dislocation is central, both father and daughter are cut free from their old lives, the trip serves as a space to think, a period of suspension before the new begins. Sad stories, some lovely writing and an ending that pleased me.

Reminiscent of Kevin Barry’s ‘Night Boat to Tangier’ in its understated way of conveying deep emotion, I’d recommend this highly.

We Are Not in the World by Conor O'Callaghan is quite a complex and modernistic novel about a lorry driver and his relationship with his daughter.