Nothing On Earth

Nothing On Earth was a novel I read in one huge gulp of a sitting, obsessively from the very first page to the very last page. It is strangely, softly, utterly terrifying. And quite quite beautiful.<br /><br />A reviewers dilemma here: I want to say so much about it, but this book, really, no. In a way it is indescribable in any way that would not spoil it – even now I’m not really sure about anything. It has a surreal, deeply disturbing, yet utterly gorgeous vibe to it, the prose is lyrical with an eerie cadence – I actually think I was hypnotised somewhat by it, certainly by the characters in the pages and most definitely by the story being told. A story that begins with a girl banging on a door one evening in Summer…<br /><br />That girl. Oh good lord that girl…<br /><br />Sometimes a book surprises and delights you, floors you with an unexpected rythym, those moments when you get something you are not quite prepared for. This book did that to me, I loved it. A brilliantly imaginative concept executed in haunting, compelling fashion and this was a unique reading experience for me – but don’t ask me to put into words why or why right now I feel like I’m in fight or flight mode and may never sleep again, but thats where I ended up.<br /><br />I’ve never read a story that is so utterly alluring and elegantly written but has chilled me to the bone in quite the same way, this book has at its heart many things unseen, and something different there is no word for yet. Perhaps Conor O’Callaghan could come up with one, he is certainly talented enough to be creating language as well as using it. Nothing On Earth comes highly recommended from me – read it if you really do want something out of the ordinary and appreciate skill when you see it – or simply because its a blast of a tale told slowly but surely and with oodles of heart.<br /><br />I’ll really need to read it again. Hang on what just happened?

There is something inherently unsettling about a failed building estate (as housing developments are called in Britain). This is the fourth or fifth novel I've read in the past few years using such a setting. And this one, the best. <br /><br />All those unrealized dreams and all that rotting material. A fitting metaphor for this truly terrifying debut novel. Don't read if you are looking for tidy answers to tidy questions. Not everything is made clear. I started it several times before it grabbed me by the neck and didn't let go until the final page. And don't read anything that summarizes the plot -- let the information wash up bit by bit. <br />

Really not sure what to make of this.

Is this a ghost story? Well the setting is a ghost estate somewhere outside of Dublin, Ireland.<br /><a target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow" href="http://cf.broadsheet.ie/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/90266705.jpg">http://cf.broadsheet.ie/wp-content/up...</a><br />The book begins with the appearance of a panicked 12-year-old girl. Her appearance at this particular house brings heaps of problems for the man who tries to help her. Who is her family? What happened to them?<br /><br />It's hard to describe the appeal of this book. One thing I can say with confidence is that O'Callaghan creates a description of the lives of those who live in these half abandoned estates that captures their haunted horror. It also reinforces my impression that Tana French's attempt to write about ghost estates in <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/13123877.Broken_Harbor__Dublin_Murder_Squad___4_" title="Broken Harbor (Dublin Murder Squad, #4) by Tana French" rel="noopener">Broken Harbor</a>was feeble, with a ridiculous premise, as well as being very insulting with stereotypes of working class families. I haven't read French again (and won't). On the other hand O'Callahan displays a deft touch with this topic and weaves a haunting story.

A heatwave. A near abandoned housing estate. A hot, heady, clammy evening in August. A knock on a door. <br /><br />Our narrator tells the story - the one that began that fateful evening when the girl knocked on his door. Dirty, unkempt, covered in writing and proclaiming that her dad had gone missing - we hear her story. <br /><br />I really don't know how to review this without giving anything away, because I think this is the type of book that is best read blind - I'm not entirely sure I could do the plot justice. There's also the added problem of not knowing whether or not our narrator is being entirely honest with us or with himself. <br /><br />This was genuinely quite scary in parts - not because of the story, but because of the atmosphere created by the author. It left me with more questions than anything, but it's a real page turner and one that will be discussed in many a book club this year. <br /><br />An accomplished debut, one that will stay with me. <br />

The narrator's authoritative and unreliable voice was already determined for me, having attended Conor O'Callaghan's mesmeric reading of Ch 5 at Galway's Cuirt festival earlier this year. Is there a new 'Irish Gothic', centred on that peculiar limbo of the ghost estate? If so, this strange novel looks set to be one of its key texts.

<em>Nothing on Earth</em> opens with a twelve-year-old girl hammering on the door of a priest – the narrator. She is malnourished, dishevelled, filthy, and her skin is covered in words written in blue biro. He lets her in, and she tells him a story: the story of her family's disappearance. That story is retold by the narrator, followed by his own explanation of how he has come to be 'at the centre of a story that should never have been mine'.<br /><br />The girl has been living with her parents, Helen and Paul, and her aunt, Helen's sister Martina. The family is locally notorious: because something happened to Helen and Martina's parents (we never discover what, and this is just one of many peculiarities); because the whole family lived abroad for a number of years before returning to their hometown; because of where they now live. Like Tana French's <em><a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/10805160.Broken_Harbour__Dublin_Murder_Squad___4_" title="Broken Harbour (Dublin Murder Squad, #4) by Tana French" rel="noopener">Broken Harbour</a>,</em> O'Callaghan's novel makes use of a half-finished 'ghost estate' as its setting. Apart from a young man who lives in a caravan and acts as estate security, the family are the only residents, living in what's supposed to be a show home, making do with flimsy temporary furniture. A family from the Midlands will be moving in soon, says the estate agent, but they never do. A heatwave comes; Martina and Paul lose their jobs. And then Helen disappears. <br /><br />Right from the start, it's clear we're in classic unreliable narrator territory here – doubly so, since much of what the narrator relates was ostensibly told to him by the girl. Throughout the story, the narrator hints at ways in which his story has been misinterpreted after the fact. But he also describes scenes and private thoughts neither he nor the girl can possibly have been party to.<br /><br />There are two major undercurrents in this story. The first is a constant low-level suggestion of something <em>weird,</em> exemplified by the inexplicable disappearance of the girl's family, bizarre secondary characters whose very existence seems questionable, and details like the words 'so be it' appearing out of nowhere, written in the dust on the windows. The second is the narrator's uncomfortable awareness that he may be suspected of inappropriate behaviour in his conduct with the girl, particularly in allowing her to stay at his house. He is all-too-aware of stereotypes about priests and children, and takes steps to ensure their contact is minimised, for example refusing her pleas to sleep in his room despite her distraught state. Yet late in the book, he admits to having fantasies about her. What's more, the way in which he justifies this is alarmingly blunt, going completely against his previous reserve:<br /><br /><em>If I'm guilty of anything else, I'm guilty of that. I'm guilty of thinking about the girl in bed in the room across from my own. I am a man as well, after all. She was twelve, or so they said. But even then I wondered if she might have been more than that. She was as pitiful as she was pretty, and she was pretty in spades. There was something about that combination, at my mercy, that I could not help imagining.</em><br /><br />When I was thinking back over the book in light of its ending, I remembered I'd blanched at the first couple of pages because of the narrator's exhaustive description of the girl's body, including her 'emerald' eyes and 'barely pronounced breasts'. Then I began to realise just how many hints are woven into the text. There's a scene in which he describes embarrassment at being told, by his cleaner, that the girl is on her period – possibly genuine; also possibly a pre-emptive defence of the blood later found on the bed she slept in. When he claims to hear her screaming from his bedroom, and doesn't go out to help her or find out what's happening – <em>is</em> he in his room, or is that just where he's placed himself in his memory, unable to admit the truth? He's asked to explain a visit made to the family's house during which he spied on Martina and the girl sunbathing topless; he tells the reader he was 'soft on' Martina, despite never having met her, yet tellingly says he could have stared at 'them', not her, for hours. It's fitting that the title comes from a phrase the narrator uses to describe the girl, one it is difficult to read without inferring a wistful tone: 'she was like nothing on earth'. <br /><br />Those two strands, the implicit weirdness and the suggestions of sexual misconduct, are brought together with a suggestion/accusation made by Curtin, the chief detective assigned to the case: that 'there never was any girl'. The jury's out on whether this really works: it's the sort of 'wait, what?' maybe-twist that makes you want to go back and reread everything that came before it, though it remains as one possible theory rather than an actual explanation of the story. (I have to admit that I found it baffling to the point that it almost made the whole story come unstuck for me. If 'the girl' wasn't who she's portrayed to be, what are we to make of all the incriminating details in the narrator's account? Why would his story take this form?)<br /><br />A profoundly unsettling book in more ways than one, <em>Nothing on Earth</em> is one of those very short novels – easy to read in its entirety in a couple of hours – that leaves you with weeks' worth of material to pick over. I don't really know how I feel about it, but it certainly got under my skin.<br /><br /><a href="http://tinyletter.com/learnthisphrase" rel="nofollow noopener">TinyLetter</a> | <a href="http://twitter.com/learnthisphrase" rel="nofollow noopener">Twitter</a> | <a href="http://instagram.com/learnthisphrase" rel="nofollow noopener">Instagram</a> | <a href="http://learnthisphrase.tumblr.com" rel="nofollow noopener">Tumblr</a>

There was something of <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/9957.The_Cement_Garden" title="The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan" rel="noopener">The Cement Garden</a> about this book. The intensely hot summer with nothing to do but lay around in the garden, parents disappearing, the sexual tension as oppressive as the heat. It is set on a new housing estate that the Irish were so keen on building during their EU honeymoon but which remained empty and left the suburbs of Dublin eerily deserted like a Wimpey Mary Celeste and has a cast of characters that would be at home in a David Lynch film. Like in his films they tend to be recurrent motifs rather than fully fledged people. <br />There is the estate manager whose role is to periodically pop up to tell the family the others will be arriving soon, the night security guard who remains a shadowy figure but who is visited nightly by one of the women in a repeated ritual. Of course, being Ireland, we need religion to percolate through proceedings and predictably the Catholic priest is a shady character who narrates the beginning and end of the tale. His story is not completely credible but equally the alternative is even less so but his is the only explanation of some of the events (incomplete as they are).<br />This is not a book for you if you don’t like David Lynch films, if you don’t like not having events referenced repeatedly not being explained, if you don’t like finishing a book and still wondering what actually happened. This is a book where the pleasure is found in the writing, in the mystery, in the journey rather than the conclusion and so if you can cope with your reading matter mirroring life with its unanswered questions then invest your time in this gem.<br />

<i> <b>”After a certain age, a man has to work hard to look trustworthy. That’s even truer in this vocation.”</b> </i><br /><br />It is rare that I am left both disturbed and perplexed by a book. In <i>Nothing on Earth</i>, the debut novel by Irish poet Conor O’Callaghan, an atmosphere of dread is conjured in the opening pages when a filthy, malnourished 12-year-old girls bangs loudly on the door of an Irish priest. She has ran to the priest’s house from her own, a show home on an abandoned and isolated ghost estate on the outskirts of an unnamed town. She is breathless and sweaty and when the priest invites her in, he notices her revealing, dirty clothes, her emerald green eyes, her “barely pronounced breasts” and the strange words scrawled on her skin in blue ink.<br /><br />The girl tells the priest about her family: her young father and mother, recently returned to Ireland from “over beyond”; and her aunt, her mother’s twin sister. Oddly, all three have recently disappeared without a trance in separate instances. Added to this, the priest already knows things about the family. The whole town does. Something tragic happened the twin sisters’ parents but we never learn what. And the strangeness doesn’t end there. There are accounts in the story of things that happened in that house on the ghost estate: strange noises at night, doors slamming, words written backwards on windows; everything about the house and the family that lived in it invokes a quiet terror.<br /><br />The priest calls the authorities shortly after the girl arrives, and he tells us they come and speak to her. When they bring the girl home and verify that her house is, in fact, empty, they return her to the priests house for the night and begin enquiries on the whereabouts of her family.<br /><br />O’Callaghan uses the technique of the unreliable narrator very effectively here. Our narrator is recounting both his memories of events and the girl’s story, as told to him by her. When things take another disturbing turn, we begin to question if the priest is telling the truth, or if his story is a conjuring or imagining of events to mask something darker. The whole situation plays with the mind and the effect is both unnerving and seductive. There are a lot of things that are unclear here: stories are rewritten, identities slip and slide, and the young girl and the circumstances surrounding her family have an otherworldly menace that is truly chilling. A lot of this story is left open to interpretation, including the many hints that there is something of a sexual nature to the priest’s fascination with the girl. What you choose to take from it, is up to you.<br /><br /><b>With a strange but intriguing story and some beautiful writing, <i>Nothing on Earth</i> is a quick and elusive read that will completely absorb you and disturb you.</b>

Oddly, and not by design, this is the second book in a row that I've read which centers on the disappearance of a person/persons without much of a resolution (<a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/30256420.Infinite_Ground" title="Infinite Ground by Martin MacInnes" rel="noopener">Infinite Ground</a> being the last one). It is well done for what it is, and some of the prose itself is terrific, just expecting a bit more.