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| Gavin Broom |
The Scottish Book of the Dead
A
novel by Gavin Broom
Island
City Publishing LLC
Review
by Timothy Gager
If
you’re Elisabeth Kübler-Ross you’ve had a widely accepted theory
about the five stages of death and dying. If you are the author,
Gavin Broom, your characters get to experience two of them, (maybe
three, without giving away the ending) the denial stage and the anger
stage. In The
Scottish Book of the Dead,
a father dies and it brings a dysfunctional family together in one
location to deal with his death, and to pick up the pieces of their
own lives. These characters, the son, the runaway ex-wife, the
brother, and the sister-in-law all must address their shortcomings
and their past, while attempting to close a chapter with someone
else’s.
In
humanity, we all deal with death in different ways, whether it’s
diving into side projects (needing to clean out the person’s
belongings immediately), quitting a job, or traveling across the
world to see a son you’ve not seen in an eternity. Truth is that
when someone close dies, each of us die a little ourselves. Broom
takes us through this in short, stunning chapters, and in four
distinct varied sections. He presents the insanity, real or imagined
of the physical and mental world during a pivotal life event. Broom
strikes a chord using various writing techniques which show that
things aren’t what they look like or appear to be. Often, when a
family member dies, people can go a bit crazy, but as you read
through the layers of The
Scottish Book of the Dead,
the world as we know it, also, doesn’t seem based in reality.
Author, Broom, allows us to wrestle with the metaphysics of this, but
then often, the reality becomes a metaphor, and/or the metaphor
becomes the reality. For example, when an earthquake hits, opening up
a large crack in the ground, son Adam throws an item of his dead
father into the bottomless hole. Later this same item re-appears back
at the father’s house. We understand that this empty hole, is the
wound, and emptiness, we feel when we lose someone. By using this
technique, he puts the reader in a familiar emotional place, a place
many of us have been who have attended at an actual funeral, where
the feelings of displacement, combined with the lack of sleep from
the night before gives off a surreal kind of vibe. In fact, many of
the characters, in the different sections have gone on without much
sleep for large periods of time, thus changing their mental statuses.
The
author, born in Scotland, captures Scottish dialect within the novel.
Though this may be distracting for some, it creates authenticity
within the text. The sound of the pages are just one of the layers of
this multi-layered book. The questioning of reality, and of grieving
is another. Perhaps there are more stages of death Kübler-Ross has
ignored, which author Broom gives us front row seats to---the stages
of guilt and obligation. This is shown again, and again, the
characters continuing on, overcoming these stages, only to arrive at
a decent emotional place by the end of the book. The
Scottish Book of the Dead, is
not light reading, but there is enough humor, magic, and philosophy
mixed in to not bury us in a giant hole of sadness.
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