Absolution

ABSOLUTION

by Patrick Flanery

 

Nominations: Center For Fiction Finalist 2012, Dublin Finalist 2014

 

Date Read: October 27, 2022

 

The fact that Absolution is a debut novel for Patrick Flanery is beyond belief. The complexity of the narrative, combined with the political climate and speculative occurrences is just mind boggling. I can’t imagine how one even begins to chart a novel of this involvedness. The outline would have driven most to insanity.

 

Centering around Clare, an acerbic older novelist who has reached the point in her years and career to warrant a novel, Absolution charts the course of her loss. She has lost her parents, her sister and brother-in-law, and most traumatic, her daughter Laura. Clare’s deliberate choice of biographer is Sam, a man who is closely linked with Laura and was rejected by Clare as a guardian when Sam was orphaned.

 

Although this doesn’t sound that complex, the interweaving realities, fictions and suppositions that surround Laura and Sam’s fated meeting, the killing of Sam’s would-be guardian, Bernard, and the means by which Sam arrives on Clare’s doorstep trying to sift through what is “fact” and what is fiction can be labor intensive. Yet, I became invested in the outcome of these character’s lives, particularly Sam’s, at a very early point.

 

Seeing the dissolving of apartheid through the eyes of those who “lived” it was enlightening. I know only the broad strokes of apartheid but never considered the societal upheaval during its collapse. Throughout, the security lengths the upper-class go through is astounding. I don’t know if I would have the bravery needed to live in a place that is so obviously harmful to your existence. Giving away all your money wouldn’t alleviate poverty enough to make the country more safe. 

 

Clare and Sam form an interesting dynamic in that neither will admit to the other who they are. Clare doesn’t acknowledge she remembers rejecting Sam when he was an orphaned child and Sam doesn’t acknowledge he was the child rejected by Clare. Only in their last face-to-face meeting at the conclusion to a book fair do the duo lay all their cards on the table. Admitting to what they shared in the past seems to create more room to breathe for them both. I just don’t know if the same holds true for the reader.