Brian Dillon, In the Dark Room

Brian Dillon's In the Dark Room has taken a long time to read for the fast reader I usually am. Praise for the book's intertwining of wide reading and personal pain lent doubt from the start: either because much of his reading echoes my own or because I am at least as circumspect as he is about what I have coolly called personal pain.

His careful sentences lend an ache to his tale. A woman I used to know called Kathy said she could never believe what I said about the difficulties of my life because I expressed them so well. It's not that I disbelieve what I read of Brian Dillon's early life, rather that his complex sentences wring my heart and make me turn away. To bind your inner life into a grammatically intact version of things, is pain in itself.

John Banville in his back cover blurb says In the Dark Room is a wonderfully controlled yet passionate meditation on memory and the things of the past. Controlled yet passionate is probably how John Banville likes to think about his own writing.

In the end, which I am nearing now on page 257, a slow reading, a few pages before sleep, was probably about right. I read Brian Dillon's Essayism with a rare sense of identification. I like him unreservedly when he is writing about writing. His memoir, written 15 years earlier, is a more painful case of word over mind.