The experience of sliding – or getting sucked – into the slimy dense goo of this addiction and recovery memoir by Kilkenny-born, Paris-based writer and journalist Tim MacGabhann is like heavily overdoing it on booze and drugs.
It’s clear that MacGabhann is highly educated and erudite in Literature with a capital L. He produces novels, short stories and poetry, and is a virtuosic literary writer. In turning his impressive skills to his own real-life version of The Inferno (Dante is a cherished author), MacGabhann has created a masterpiece in making the reader feel out of it.
I mean it as a high compliment when I say that, aside from its redemptive recovery moment, The Black Pool is one long whitey from start to finish. It gave me the spins. Anyone who wants to know, without doing the damage directly to themselves, what it feels like viscerally, in your body – and the splintering hallucinogenic effects in your brain – to go for days without sleep or food whilst snorting, inhaling, imbibing and injecting every powder, pill, joint, bag of heroin and bottle you can get your hands on, should turn to this book.
[ Call Him Mine: Dial M for murderous proseOpens in new window ]
American poet-memoirist Mary Karr had my top prize for bringing readers into the fractured heaven and hell of inebriated escape, and the shit and vomit of both substance addiction and its detox. That honour now goes to MacGabhann.
Capturing the chaos and confusion of severe suffering, especially in the realm of mental health, The Black Pool is deftly crafted to appear “structureless” in the traditional narrative sense. Instead it’s psychedelic, episodic, non-linear, impressionistic and reflective of the raw sensitivity, existential dread and straight-up madness that seems to have plagued its author since early childhood.
Subtly, without facile causality, MacGabhann suggests that what got him into trouble was the “safety” that inebriation bestowed. Plastered, he escaped The Fear. Healing comes when sobriety, through the recovery process, replaces intoxication as MacGabhann’s safe womb-home.
Unapologetic in its literary allusions and exalted linguistic style, with long dense paragraphs and liberal use of poetic diction such as “pellucid”, “ebullition”, and “tintinnabulation”, The Black Pool isn’t a mainstream manual on drink and drug addiction. But literary memoir readers craving transport to extreme terrains will find here the substance abuse equivalent of Ernest Shackleton’s South.
