Yet his vision of these women has a different sadness. He hates their low-cost identikit homes: “The housing estate houses are as young as the boys and just as indistinguishable from one another.” He also derides the boys’ mothers when he sees one on the street he identifies her as such “from the way she has the face of a potato and the hair of a film star.” Ray’s disgust and fear are founded in the distress of his early life, and the novel gradually reveals its dismal consequences for him. Ray stays inside when these boys are around he reviles them with bewildering force. He is borderline obsessed with a group of local kids, “the summer boys,” who play soccer on the beach near his house on warm evenings.
He despises ordinary people and the ordinary things they do: those who barbecue in cool weather parents who avoid kids’ books that are merely “ever-so-slightly racist” shopkeepers who attempt chitchat. For Ray, other human beings tend to present as categories or herds. Ray doesn’t suggest how he reads an au pair’s mental notes as he drives past, but perhaps that offhand “some au-pair” tells us what we need to know.
“When I drive past a children’s playground, some au-pair nearly always makes a mental note of my registration number.” Supermarket cashiers take a bathroom break when they see him waiting in the queue. Men step out of the way when Ray passes on the street.
Now, at fifty-seven, he finds a kindred spirit in hairy, malodorous One Eye, who is prone to aggression.
Ray was bullied as a schoolboy-“I didn’t really believe I was of the same species” as other children, he says-and his father cruelly neglected him. Her first novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither (2015), tells the story of Ray, a self-proclaimed misfit who goes on the run in rural Ireland with One Eye, his adopted dog. Are novelists required to like humans? It’s fair to say, on the evidence of her published writing, that Sara Baume is not a people person.
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