In Jean-Paul Sartre’s first novel, Nausea, the protagonist, Roquentin, suffers an odd “candy illness” that’s the bodily manifestation of a deep existential malaise. Phillip Notman, the hero of Rupert Thomson’s How you can Make a Bomb, is, like Roquentin, an educational researching a biography of an obscure historic determine. Like Roquentin, he’s struck by a sudden and paralysing nausea, one which threatens to capsize his apparently ordered existence. Like Roquentin, he seeks solace in a girl’s love. Thomson’s 14 novels are overwhelmingly disparate, sharing solely a profound regard for model, an engagement with the European avant garde custom, and an curiosity within the secret and occluded corners of life.
It’s at a convention in Norway that Notman suffers his first bout of sickness. He’s on his technique to the airport after a night spent within the firm of a Spanish tutorial, Inés. How you can Make a Bomb is written in an uncommon type of free verse with line breaks changing full stops, though, as with every profitable stylistic impact, you cease noticing it after a web page or two. On the tram to the airport, Notman feels as if:
“A hand had wrapped itself round his mind, and it was squeezing
He was fearful he may throw up or go out
He was fearful he may scream
He couldn’t suppose
There was nothing left to suppose with”
Notman decides to go away his “ordered and predictable” life, his spouse – the stoical Anya – and his troubled son, Seth, and got down to discover the Spanish tutorial, feeling that she is ultimately implicated in his breakdown. He flies to Cádiz; Inés is “shocked and flattered” by his arrival. They embark on a type of chaste affair, immersing themselves within the lifetime of town, inhabiting a dreamlike world of very European pleasures: good wine, flamenco, deep conversations. Notman tells Inés that he doesn’t need something from her, that to get into mattress along with her can be to fall right into a cliche. He meets an aged couple who provide him their vacation home in Crete. On a whim, he flies there, hoping to discover a extra rugged and important model of the world.
That concept about falling right into a cliche appears necessary on this guide and in Thomson’s writing extra broadly. There’s all the time a pressure between the austere avant-gardist and the crowd-pleasing storyteller. How you can Make a Bomb is a novel a few midlife disaster, elevated and rarefied by its protagonist’s exalted view of himself in a literary and historic custom of struggling males. The ending sees Notman try to wrest his life within the path of a extra heroic, tragic plotline, the ultimate pages left pleasingly open to the reader’s interpretation: will Notman observe by on the dictates of his “Notmanifesto”, or will he return to the snug, atypical household life that – extremely – has waited for him over the course of his absurd midlife lurch?
