A line I often employ when talking to creative writing students, to discourage them from over-writing, is that “sometimes the sky is just blue”. If The Edges is anything to go by, I suspect Dutch author Angelo Tijssens would agree with me, for this slight book – only 93 pages – is written in clear, unfussy language while still packing a punch worthy of Sonny Liston.
Following the death of his mother, a young man returns to his hometown, where he’s forced to confront the memories of her brutality to him during his childhood, a degree of violence and fear that continues to haunt him. While there, he visits a man he knew when they were both teenagers, his first love, a boy who introduced him to the ways of sex but who pulled away when their relationship graduated from the purely physical to the emotional.
Encountering a ghost from one’s past can be difficult. Regardless of who initiated it, there’s always a consideration of who has “won” any break-up. This question hovers over their reunion but few answers are given. We learn little about the narrator, although it seems he has a new partner offstage, while his ex lives a hermetic existence, sharing a run-down cottage with his dog, having apparently failed to negotiate his way in the world since the onset of adulthood.
Tijssens writes of their evening together with great sensitivity. Although the narrator feels some resentment over what happened between them as boys, this is not a novel where old wounds are reopened and accusations made. Instead, they simply talk, make love and part, a necessary epilogue, perhaps, to a relationship that had never felt fully closed for either.
Those who saw the excellent Belgian film Close, directed by Lukas Dhont, will recognise Tijssens’ name as co-writer of that movie, which explores the friendship between two much younger boys and the traumatic events that follow the revelation that one holds romantic, but unreciprocated, feelings for the other. That was a powerful piece of cinema and while The Edges does not quite reach those heights, the two combined mark Tijssens out as one of the most impressive of new European writers, for both page and screen.
