Craig Sherborne’s protagonist, Colin, is a green kind of hero, prone, as his critical father insists, to pipedreams. He is both an amateur in love, in the nobler sense, and amateurish in love, an ineptitude towards which he directs a relentless scorn that mirrors his father’s. Colin is, first in his father’s eyes, then his own, a bungler and a fool. Yet he is also vain and arrogant. This contradiction is as potent and askew as the amateur scientist it creates.

The Colin who narrates the novel’s events is a slightly older one. He scrutinises his erstwhile self with a lacerating wit, which is one of the book’s unsettling delights. Still more lacerating are his descriptions of pretty much everyone else. His father – ‘the old boy’ – is a conventional man keen to have his son return to their New Zealand farm, where he imagines the relationship will suddenly correct itself: ‘more blood brothers than father and son.’ Instead, they exist in a hostile stand-off, mediated by Colin’s ineffectual mother, whom Colin describes as ‘a drunken farm wife’.

Colin decides to remake himself, contemplating a change of name to John Adore and inflating the possibilities of the applause he receives as a schoolboy performer into forecasts of fame. He sets off to London to audition for the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where he puts on ‘a shake-tangle show’ of an audition. He rages silently at the judges with their mop-tops and moth-holed jumpers, without authority as he understands it, but still ‘magistrates of me’. The description of the failed audition is excruciating: a shooting foot-nerve ‘rattles [his] leg-bones’ and mangles his words. While he directs some of his self-loathing towards the ‘magistrates’, its core remains trapped in his disjointed language and body, a pathology Sherborne evokes powerfully. With the advent of real drama into his life, Colin takes on the role of self-magistrate. His written account, he says, shifting significantly into the second person, is to ‘make sense of it to clear your conscience, square your soul’.

Sherborne, a first-time novelist, has written two memoirs, Hoi Polloi (2005) and Muck (2007), as well as poetry, verse drama, and journalism. His experience is abundantly evident here. Colin’s voice is distinctive in its gnarled scorn and flashes of lucid observation. Colin writes his memoir in the house he still shares with a no-longer-beloved Tilda. His narrative feels cramped and clandestine, folded in on itself even before it is stuffed into the secret corners of the house.First, though, Colin waxes lyrical about love and about Tilda, who interrupts his life in the youth hostel where he is living. Before she arrives, Sherborne captures a frisson of unobserved anticipation and a sense of universal flux. Tilda, associated with a radiant yellow that clashes with Colin’s greenness, is bringing Colin’s future with her when she arrives in London. This future ‘had hatched in her hair, was growing down her limbs and about to make contact with me’.

Even this shimmering description, though, has darker echoes. Colin talks about falling in love, but focuses on the bubbling and rust of bodily fluids as the lovers engage in what they call ‘congress’. Even their congress seems self-conscious and troubled, its moments of pleasure tensely negotiated. From the start, Tilda is embarrassed by and censorious of Colin, while he reports feeling ‘bored and mischievous’. Love – ‘sweet poison’ – produces symptoms that lead to ‘exquisite illness’.

In a small town west of Melbourne, the lovers set up house, Tilda to pursue her dreams of being an artist, Colin to take the pulse of love, which he finds weakening: ‘a flattening-out of feeling, an unspecified disappointment.’ While Colin’s tale undertakes the scientific observation of love its title promises, that disappointment – as his pipedreams curl and vanish – is crucial to the novel, which feels more autopsic than anatomical.

The future hatched in Tilda’s hair brings illness, as well as its exquisite metaphorical variety, and this reshapes a relationship each of them appears to doubt from the start. Throughout this, Colin’s rebarbative and bitter narrative potion, equal parts arrogance and self-recrimination, remains more interested in the warts than the all of love. Tilda and Colin become locked in a stalemate, and each appears to become more monstrous, or, perhaps, to reveal normally hidden human monstrosity. Guilt and dependency glue Colin to Tilda, whom he variously lusts after, admires, deceives, abhors, and derides. A study of glue, rather than love, is at the novel’s heart.

Colin’s clandestine narrative is a claustrophobic one. The rancour and vitality of his voice are superbly maintained and uncomfortable to endure. Like other literary monsters, he becomes compelling, and his confession comes to dazzle even his own sceptical and juridical self. But as he tries to write himself towards an ending, closure recedes, mirage-like, and the walls of his confinement appear to move relentlessly closer in this chilling novel’s ultimate rearrangement of narrative shapes.

CONTENTS: JULY–AUGUST 2011