A man is sitting on the train. As the landscape rushes past, he looks at an image of the bedroom of a house boat, listening to a voice message from Pascal, a famous photographer. This picture, Pascal is saying, brings him pleasure – but it also leads him to doubt his own art. While it concretises some memories, it lets others disappear.
The house boat photograph, we learn, is one of a series: since he was fourteen, Pascal has been photographing each of his bedrooms as he wanders from DDR-era Berlin to Leeds, Sarajevo, a Swedish riverbank. On his deathbed, he charges his old friend Ben with writing a text to accompany the photos. Over 36 delirious hours, Ben travels from London via Berlin to the Baltic island where Pascal is dying, with Pascal’s narration accompanying him in his headphones.
Scraton is a masterful writer of people and place, and this is no exception. As in Annie Ernaux’s The Years, we never see Pascal’s photos: they are, instead, our ghostly guides through a meditation on friendship, memory and the places that make up a life.
- Out now from Bluemoose Books.
