Alex Diggins

A draining experience: Insignificance, by James Clammer, reviewed

It’s a hot summer’s day in surburbia and Joseph, a plumber, is trying to cope with blinding migraines and the suspicion that his son might be a murderer

Credit: Alamy 
issue 29 May 2021

Spare a thought for the white van man. It’s not yet nine on a summer’s morning and already Joseph, a plumber and the hero of James Clammer’s arresting novel, is having a pig of a day.

He’s slept poorly. It’s the umpteenth day of a heat wave, and the biscuits left by his client Amanda Margaret Hollander are ‘a dispiriting selection, childish and sugary… unmanly biscuits’. Plus, despite her tight, ‘iridescent’ trousers, Amanda Margaret seems uninterested in a ‘little dallying, a little flirting’ and dashes off, leaving him to the job. Which, it transpires, is far more difficult than promised: ‘Truly, if it isn’t one thing it’s the other.’

For the rest of Insignificance, we follow Joseph as this breathless day crests into endless, greenish night. Yet beneath its sunshine ordinariness, something ghastly stirs. This, we learn, is Joseph’s first time back on the tools after a breakdown, an unravelling which has left his insides knotted and alien. It bequeaths other legacies too. His body is failing him: the skin of his fingertips has become thin and old-womanly; it tears easily. And he suffers blinding migraines, a flash of ‘golden lighting’, auditory hallucinations, the sounds of his tools and the coiled pipes rising in terrifying orchestration.

Yet it is his relationship with his wife Alison and son Edward where the collapse is most precipitous. Edward is in prison after an awful act of violence. Joseph ignored the signs of his disturbance: a Tarot card interleaved in the family Bible; the discovery of a mannequin of Alison buried in the flower bed, throttled with a lank of her hair. These ‘eerie, uncancellable moments’ are all the more memorable because they take place in a landscape of Ballardian banality: littered and heat-exhausted verges, rumbling A-roads and hosepipe bans.

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