As its title implies, We Are Not in the World inhabits a hazy purgatory – temporal, spatial and psychological. Heartbroken after the end of an affair with a married woman, Paddy dusts off an old HGV licence, borrows a lorry from an ailing friend and takes a job driving from England down through France.
Kitty, his 20-something daughter, comes along for the ride, disobeying the insurance company’s no-passenger rule. Kitty has suffered a terrible trauma – “the thing that we never mention” – the details of which are revealed as the story drives towards its denouement.
The trip takes place in August 2015, when the refugee population in the Calais Jungle was growing: “The road was lined with wire fencing, fingers pushed through, faces pressed against . . . The fence is staring at us. And we’re trying not to make eye contact with the fence.”
Paddy and Kitty’s dialogue is interspersed with flashbacks. We learn about Paddy’s long-term love affair, told in reverse-chronological order, the fraught relationship with his family and Kitty’s struggles to fit in growing up in America. Paddy feels guilty for having moved back to Ireland after divorcing Kitty’s mother and not being more present in her life while he was “fogbound in desire” for his mistress.
“I’m sorry for leaving her half alone in a place where we were always already strangers,” he thinks. “There are whole years there somewhere still, when she was more of a girl and more in need than I could see or she would have allowed herself to admit, that her old man would have again and do over and make better.”
Tír na nÓg
While Paddy drives away from Ireland, his brother – the family favourite – is trying to sell their childhood home, christened Tír na nÓg. When Kitty was a girl, Paddy often told her the legend of the poet-hero Oisín accompanying the fairy Niamh to the Land of Youth. Homesick after what feels like three years, but turns out to have been 300, Oisín returns to visit Ireland on a magical white steed, so as not to touch the ground and break the spell of eternal youth. When he stops to help a man moving marble, Oisín falls from the horse, ages rapidly and dies.
“Time passes,” reflects Paddy. “Or rather, this is what passes for time. We are not in the world exactly . . . The saddle is sliding off. We’re sliding off with it and can’t stop time happening.”
As Paddy fudges the tachographs to gain time between delivery destinations, Kitty notes that they’re “driving around anywhere and nowhere”. The fluorescent glow of all-night rest stops adds to the feeling of transience. Our grounding is further destabilised by shifting points of view, as the narration toggles between Paddy’s first-person account and a second-person retelling of the affair.
Spectral states echo throughout O’Callaghan’s oeuvre. “Elsewhere the lived world happens,” reads a line from a 2007 poem, In Praise of Sprinklers. His debut novel Nothing on Earth (2016) featured mysterious disappearances on a ghost estate. Seated at a cafe outmoded by a new commercial centre, Paddy remarks that “existence is elsewhere” – a nod to the line from Rimbaud that lends We Are Not in the World its title: “La vraie vie est absente. Nous ne sommes pas au monde.”
Lyricism
A poet first, O’Callaghan has spoken of the burden of inheritance of the Yeatsian singing line. Nonetheless, his prose can’t help but sing beautifully. It is arresting to see haulage described in poetic terms: “There’s that moment when the cab, after its rest in a stationary position, reconnects with its load. Like memory and forgetting. There are a couple of millimetres of slack, when the truck’s cab is moving and the truck’s load isn’t, before it’s forced to remember the weight it’s here to tow.” Such lyricism makes it all the more jarring when the other-worldly ambience is disrupted by text messages contained in bubbles on the page, a device I found distracting.
Unlike Nothing on Earth, in which the mystery is left unresolved, by the end of We Are Not in the World the picture of the events leading Paddy to take to the road is heart-wrenchingly clear. He may try to outrun his regrets, but as the old adage goes, wherever you go, there you are. It is only when he is ready to accept the consequences of his life choices that he can begin to make his way back home.
