Book review: My Life in Orbit by Richard Blandford

Niall Griffiths

What would you call it, this genre? It’s not a study of madness, as such, or debilitating depressive/anxiety disorder (it’s not Charlotte Perkins Gilman, say, or early Samuel Beckett); rather, it coasts across, in several media (fiction and TV drama especially), the diverse landscapes of the spectrum: you can see it in Mark Haddon, or Pure, or Such Brave Girls, and in Jasper Gibson’s The Octopus God (a criminally underrated novel, in my opinion).

Denis Johnson’s Jesus’s Son. O’Hagan’s Personality. Hundreds more. Let us apply, for convenience, a suitably wide-ranging epithet and one that can be usefully acronymised and call it the Novel of Neuro-Divergence, or NOND for short.

Hilarious

So Richard Blandford’s new novel (his first, Hound Dog, about a sociopathic Elvis impersonator in Cambridgeshire, was a hectic and hilarious ride), introduces us to Fantasticus Autisticus (Ian Dury would have given a nod of approval, I’m sure), a comics obsessed drifter, or ‘orbiter’, fixated on the minutiae of diurnal routine and on the continuity errors of the approximately 31,000 editions of Atom Comics (the fervid pedantry of comic fans is deftly done).

‘Different realities’ are, as he sees it, the only viable arenas in which to assess the seeming illogicalities of both worldly existence and the inconsistent colours and/or amounts of strips on the shoulder of a superhero’s costume (echoes of Kelly Anne Conway here, maybe, with her demented insistence on ‘alternative facts’?). Fantasticus is due to see his adult daughter for the first time in his life later in the day/novel. So he prepares his autobiography to present to her.

Guru

There is some involvement in a movement labelled ‘Vibrationist Studies’, the central figure of which was a Micajah Culp, an obscure 60s counter-cultural guru. Vibrationism remains somewhat vague and fuzzy and seems to be a mishmash of half-digested ideas taken from Reich, multi-verse theory, Carl Sagan, chaos theory, even Kellogg, confided to Culp by the Archangel Gabriel following the ingestion of peyote: ‘each person’s soul vibrates on multiple, and potentially infinite planes of reality, with each individual living many different lives simultaneously…[T]hrough a careful process of meditation, diet (bran-based), enemas and medicinal potions such as those sold by Culp, a person can tune their own earthly vibration to those on a different plane, merging with the self that exists there.

In this way they move towards a theoretical sense of totality, only achieved when the selves from across all planes, infinite though they may be, are merged’. Such drivel is concocted, it seems, to ensnare the lost and the confused and the floundering and, it goes without saying, to make certain shameless charlatans very (or even more) wealthy. Nothing particularly original or insightful here.

Skilled

Yet Blandford is too skilled and perspicacious a writer to present this tired trope as any kind of profound thematic focus for this novel. Whereas a lesser practitioner of the NOND might have used this idea as a chequered flag, Blandford uses it as a starting gun, as permission to take us on a historical picaresque through the autobiography of his peculiar, alluring protagonist, told through the first person voice obsessed with routine and particularities.

Humour

There is a guiding voice he calls ‘Daddy’; there are two temporal registers (an italicised past, a Times Roman present); there is a desperate need for order, for systemic control, in a confusing world; there is a voice that is compellingly and convincingly wrought; there is an abundance of humour (incidentally, why is the transposition of the epithet so conspicuous both in the NOND and the humorous novel? Here, we have ‘a satisfactory map’, and a ‘painful thought’, and a ‘fateful envelope’; it was Wodehouse’s favourite syntactical gambol, of course, but why it should have been adopted by the NOND writer, I do not know. Somehow works, though).

There is also a Stewart Lee-esque series of disquisitions on the purpose and workings of humour which are, in themselves, humorous; the section entitled simply ‘Happy’ would work perfectly as a stand-up routine and/or a standalone piece of flash fiction. Some of the writing is a joy.

It could benefit from stricter editing, perhaps; the italicised flashbacks do have a tendency to derail the narrative, some characters could have been excised, and there is a fair amount of repetition.

The wide-eyed narrator is used to de-familiarise and present human commerce in all its absurdity and this is thrilling and addictive but by the time we’re re-introduced to Ahmet and Teigan, after a volume of recollection, we’ve forgotten about them, and the intrusion of the contemporary feels jarring, unsettling; maybe this is the point, but the reader can resent having to re-read the first pages in order to reorient herself, so close to the denouement. But none of this really dilutes the enjoyment of being immersed in the world of this novel. It’s better than good.

Richard Blandford’s ‘My Life in Orbit is published by Everything With Words and is available from all good bookshops.