Fiction: A young man recalls a nomadic childhood spent in the company of the flamboyant Maureen, his mother, as she toured Europe supposedly researching a guidebook that never got written.
Gordon's story is told in a quiet, thoughtful voice. His memories of her are respectful, almost fearful, and never quite sympathetic. Life with Maureen was one shaped more by information than by feeling. His experience as a companion and witness to his mother's career as a glamorous amateur intellectual intent on justifying spending her ex-husband's money has rendered the narrator passive, eager for love and almost obsessively observant.
Justin Haythe's elegiac Jamesian début is graceful and evocative. Deservedly longlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize, it possesses the same cool appeal as does Damon Galgut's The Good Doctor, which made the shortlist last year. Despite its contemporary setting, The Honeymoon could as easily be a 19th- or early 20th-century work. The characterisation is adroit and the prose is assured and formal as well as attractively conversational. It achieves the sense of our being told a story that is both as odd and as real as life itself. In Gordon, Haythe has created a gentle narrator, a victim who makes his plight clear without ever complaining.
There are echoes of Somerset Maugham and Ford Madox Ford as well as US masters such as William Maxwell and Peter Taylor. Alongside the pain is the subtle humour of an individual who has suffered the worst sort of hurt, pain at its least obvious. Volumes of grief are expressed in two simple sentences: "I was not the sort of companion she wanted. I could not sit down to dinner and discuss the paintings we had seen together."
Gordon sees everything and remembers. For him, watching his mother was never really like witnessing a life, it was more like a performance to which he was privy. As a child his days were passed not in play but in watching rituals, such as his mother preparing to go out and meet the world: "We spent our afternoons in the museums; our mornings in the park across the street . . . Maureen did not consider us tourists."
Without deliberately setting out to settle a score, the narrator evokes his mother as a calculating monster. Yet she is drawn as a believable character, not a caricature.
Of his father his memories are succinct, less anecdotal, yet remarkably telling:
How to describe Theo? How to show all sides of something perpetually in motion? He exercises regularly, but remains slightly heavier than he'd like . . . He was considered slightly strange and was not liked in school (this according to Maureen) but success has settled him. He is kind, and generous. All his stepchildren like him very much. They come to him for advice and money long after he is no longer married to their mothers.
Early in the narrative he refers to his practice of having supper once or twice a year with his father. These meals take place in "the same old English dining room in the Berkeley Hotel where he likes to stay and where there are cages on the windows to prevent terrorists from throwing bombs in at the remnants of the ruling class". As the years have passed, Gordon, having studied art history himself, can spot the errors in his mother's writings, but none of his corrections suggest a triumphalism.
Instead, Haythe brilliantly catches the mood of an individual who has learnt so much and has, with time, discovered how memory may be supported by actual fact in arriving at the truth. In a novel of many wonderful moments, there is a particularly defining episode when Gordon describes his mother, the arch-manipulator, in action as she exploits an airport mishap involving lost passports: "I was suddenly overwhelmed by the thought that I understood why Theo had left her . . . I had understood what made her unlovable." It is this level of psychological intensity that makes the novel so good, and Gordon so believable.
Somehow, at the end of a childhood that seems to have never happened yet to have lasted forever, he discovers love with a young woman, Annie, who is some years his senior, far more sexually experienced and already engaged to a man called Heathcliff (the one jarring note in the book).
The characterisation of Annie, a woman caught in a world that she can understand only by virtue of having read so many books, is well handled, as is Gordon himself, whom Haythe presents as caught between cultures, an American more at home as an American in Europe. Also apparent is the tension created by his mother's reluctance to allow the child, whose very childhood she had stolen, and to whom she brags that she has taught him "self-sufficiency", to experience a relationship as an adult with Annie, whom he marries.
By the time the narrator begins his account of the honeymoon, which Maureen and her new partner, Gerhardt, a wealthy, middle-aged Swiss German - who is shrewdly drawn - both finance and control as well as accompanying the young couple on, the stage is set for a drama.
Throughout the novel Gordon is suspended in a state of passive trauma. Just as he had watched Maureen, he is destined to observe Annie, whose slow-moving demeanour suggests another careful watcher, if a far more complete survivor than Gordon. It is Annie who sees both mother and son as old- fashioned, it is she who sees Maureen as dangerous. Venice is the theatre in which the honeymoon foursome act out the closing stages of the mother-and-son story. The watery city is an apt location for Haythe, who proves himself as skilled at describing place and light as he is in evoking character.
Just as the narrator is caught between Europe and the US, so too is this beautiful, eloquent novel that looks to the best of both English and US writing. In many ways a study of the complexities of interpersonal power and dependency, it is ultimately one man's account of how his life was stolen.
• Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
