Adrian Duncan is a man who knows his angles. Having previously worked as an engineer and visual artist, the Irish-born Berliner comes to literature with a unique sense for the geometry of life – for the distances, vantage points, and tricks of perspective that rule our relationships to each other and our pasts. His fiction features melancholic draughtsmen, mid-century bog-drainers, legendary bridge-builders and mathematicians on the run.
His latest novel, a diptych, continues this literary experiment with space. The first half sees John, a wounded Irish statue-repairer on a work trip in an unnamed city, falling in love with an Italian woman while facing a repressed memory from his Catholic youth.
In the second half, set 10 years later, the two are distractedly cohabiting when John finds out an old friend, now dying, has requested that he pray for her. But John has not prayed for years. Frantic, he roams the churches of Bologna, interrogating their silent stony statues – and having increasingly outlandish visions.
Here Duncan, ever the geometer, has written an intriguing story about the spatial reasoning of intimacy: how lovers carve out space together, how reticent people bend or break, and how you can begin to see someone in a totally new light.
