Ten months later, Garner writes, driving his sons back to their mother after an outing on Father’s Day in 2005, this ‘discarded husband’ swerves off the highway. His car plunges into a dam. He frees himself and swims to the bank. The car sinks, and the children drown. He claims it is an accident; that he suffered a ‘cough syncope’, blacking out and losing control of the car.

One of the book’s epigraphs is from Janet Malcolm’s The Purloined Clinic (1992): ‘Life is lived on two levels of thought and act: one in our awareness and the other only inferable, from dreams, slips of the tongue, and inexplicable behaviour.’ This House of Grief proceeds, similarly, to chart two narratives. On the surface is the story of the legal trial following the boys’ deaths. In this Garner comes to find that ‘Did he do it?’ is ‘the least interesting question one could possibly ask’.

Beneath this surface lurk the mysterious, contradictory, and dark shapes of human motivations and love’s ambivalence, graspable better by intuition than by fact-finding. It is in these murky waters that Garner experiences the dismantling of ‘my residual fantasies of [Farquharson’s] innocence, blow by blow, and out of his own mouth’. This dark dismantling occurs at the limits of empathy, where Garner lingers, even after the ‘very loud clanging’ of her ‘shit-detector going off’, hoping to hold herself ‘in a state where I could still be persuaded by argument’.

Empathic, too, is Garner’s illumination of one of the great silences in our culture: ‘Since when has loving someone meant you would never want to kill them?’ In one of the book’s many moments of irradiating disclosure, Garner writes of the ambivalence parenting can involve. Holding her grandson on her knee as he ‘spread his right hand like a fan, inserted a delicate thumb into his mouth, and tucked his head under my chin’, she remembers a moment of blinding rage when ‘he and his four-year-old brother disobeyed me at bedtime and went crashing and yelling like maniacs down the hall’. This honesty subverts what Garner calls a ‘fantasy of love as a condition of simple benevolence’.

Adrienne Rich’s ground-breaking study of motherhood, Of Woman Born (1977), centres on this ambivalence – the ‘murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness’. Rich expresses the hope that the ‘masks of motherhood’ might be starting to slip. Yet conventional narratives and a lynch-mob mentality continue to envisage the dark facets of parental ambivalence as monstrous and aberrant. Garner’s bolder approach, like Rich’s, is to keep open the corridors of empathy. Watching Farquharson ‘exposed up there, in his tight collar and big stripey tie’, she sees ‘a pathetic figure … carrying our terrible projections’.

Garner shifts her focus from Farquharson to the amorphous sphere of these terrible projections. She explores the co-mingling of love and fury, and the cloying fantastical narratives used both to simplify and occlude the contradictory and protean nature of emotions. One of these is grief. In a literal sense, the ‘house of grief’ is the courtroom – stage and repository where the theatre and museum of mourning are played out and curated. This is terrain that Garner has written about before, most sustainedly in Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004), about the trial of law student Anu Singh for the murder of her boyfriend, Joe Cinque.

Here, Garner offers an anatomy of the legal system in a brilliant, poetic work of jurisprudence. She writes about lawyers’ efforts as well as the arrogance and costumery of legal storytelling. She observes a frisson of jubilance in some criminal barristers’ performances as ‘free-wheeling adventurers, armed with learning and wit, who gallop to defend the embattled individual … [playing] to the gallery … something savage in the greatest of them … a sort of blood-lust’.

Garner asks why ‘lawyers always make [her] feel so stupid’. She is too self-effacing to suggest directly that this may be a strategy, not an effect. Questions of intelligence, stupefaction and concentration lead to the idea of ‘court fatigue’ resulting from the ‘flood of detail’ and ‘sheer bulk of technical minutiae’ in the ‘mysterious web of the story’. This prompts an interrogation of the power invested in jurors: ‘these twelve strangers of unknown sympathies and reasoning.’

The possibility that jurors’ concentration may wax and wane as they assess complex scientific and medical evidence is one of the book’s most provocative comments on the law. Another troubles me even after Garner appears to have resolved it. Could this case have involved a miscarriage of justice? Does there remain the ‘reasonable doubt’ as to the possibility of a cough syncope that should have caused the trial judge to direct the jury to a conviction of manslaughter?

In a book about contradiction and uncertainty, and the legal architecture within which these things are weighed, This House of Grief enacts its own textual uncertainties. It works in the liminal spaces between the fictive and non-fictional as Garner’s writing always has. Criticism that her first novel Monkey Grip (1977) originated from her own experience fails to witness its radical disclosure – a refusal to conceal Garner’s own experience – that is a crucial part of the energy of her work, decades before Karl Ove Knausgaard’s not dissimilar experiments. Garner is a writer willing to ‘speak the unspeakable’, to use Adrienne Rich’s phrase. Garner describes Janet Malcolm’s work as ‘magisterial’. I agree, but find something deeper and more confronting in Garner’s disclosure, and a relative reserve in Malcolm.

Another beauty of Garner’s writing – and another facet of its liminality – is her exceptional lyricism. Garner’s spare, clean style flowers into magnificent poetry. Perhaps the most poignant blossoming here is the vision Garner creates to make bearable the story of the small boys’ deaths. Writing about the testimony of the first police officer to reach the submerged car, Garner describes the ‘tender reverse midwifery’ by which the diver gently guided a small skull back into the car to protect it as the car was dragged to the surface. Other evidence reveals that a car in similar circumstances takes ‘almost eight minutes to fill and sink’. The unbearable conjunction of this evidence is an image of a long horror; of ‘Jai battling in the dark to free his shrieking brothers’.

In that lonely underwater place, in the ‘shit car’ that was becoming the coffin in which the three boys would be buried alive, there seems little air left for empathy. To bear witness requires staying alert and grasping facts of specific and nightmarish force. Garner refuses a comfortable looking-away in a steady, courageous manner that recalls Gillian Rose’s argument against the plea of Adorno’s ‘After Auschwitz, no poetry’ for respectable silence in the face of atrocity:

To argue for silence, prayer, the banishment equally of poetry and knowledge, in short, the witness of ‘ineffability’, that is, non-representability, is to mystify something we dare not understand, because we fear that it may be all too understandable, all too continuous, with what we are – human, all too human.

After the ‘tinnitus-like racket of competing testimony’, what remains is the fact of those eight minutes: the slowness and panic of three young children bearing witness to one another’s deaths. Yet after the book’s unflinching witness, Garner performs her own ‘tender reverse midwifery’ in a new act of compassion. She re-imagines the ending of the story, picturing:

the boys as water creatures: naked little sprites, muscular as fish, who slithered through a crack in the car’s rear window and, with a flip of their sinuous feet, sped away together into their new element.