Davis Wood, Daniel. In Ruins. Splice Publishing, 2021. RRP: £12.99, 128pp, ISBN: 9781838078737
Peter D. Mathews
A ‘Catastrophe of Agglomeration’
Last year, Daniel Davis Wood’s At the Edge of the Solid World (2020) came to my attention after being shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award. Davis Wood’s novel is about grief, triggered by the death of the protagonist’s newborn daughter, the narrative moving around this nucleus in brilliantly constructed meditative spirals of tragedy and suffering. That book led me to seek out Davis Wood’s earlier fiction: Blood and Bone (2014), which blends family history with the frontier sensibility of Cormac McCarthy, and Unspeakable (2016), about the aftermath of a former friend’s criminal attack on a young girl. Davis Wood’s latest work, In Ruins (2021), is an experimental novella that traces the emotional journey of an expatriate Australian man as he makes his way through the streets of Edinburgh.
Repetition is one of the hallmarks of Davis Wood’s writing, with the story circling around continuously in a complex series of thematic variations. The protagonist of In Ruins thus finds himself at the top of a repetitious cycle, his third such iteration in this city. His movements are marked in the text by elegant diagrams, which become increasingly elaborate with each section of narrative. The places he visits are loaded with symbolism, from his homage to the statue of David Hume to his climb up the stairway known as Jacob’s Ladder. Other locations echo more personal memories steeped in humiliation and disillusionment. The ghosts of the city’s past, private and collective, loom large in this short novel.
Against the novel’s persistent melancholy, Edinburgh is associated with the complicated richness of authentic experience, a depth of living in which pain is often the necessary price. ‘These were the sights that used to release the stories from where they inhered in the stones’, the protagonist muses, as he stands in the rain, looking out over the gloomy graveyard (48). Edinburgh engages his intellectual and creative side like no other location: ‘This place felt like mine’, he reflects upon his first visit. ‘What was in reality an arrival felt to me like a return’ (18). During this third sojourn in Edinburgh, he observes a congruent spirit in his fellow travellers, and a passing conversation with a young man named Joel, in particular, reminds him of his earlier self.
The peak of the novel’s symbolism is Davis Wood’s transformation of the city’s landmark castle into an emblem of accumulated experience: ‘What I value about the castle […] is how a structure so grand remains profoundly beholden to the feral and the wild’ (51). Like Davis Wood’s writing, the castle is composed of recurring layers, ‘a formation of mounds, mound upon mound, clutching precipitously at the sky in a catastrophe of agglomeration’ (52). The castle as an intact space is thus subverted, turning it into ‘an emblem of refined civility’ that is ‘frayed at its outermost limits by everything it attempts to stand against’ (52). Edinburgh disturbs, liberating even as (and perhaps because) it alienates. The city heaps experience onto the scattered remnants of the protagonist’s old life, not to create something entirely new, but to construct an ever greater, more magnificent ruin.
Although Davis Wood has, like his protagonist, taken up residence in Scotland, he has no interest in putting down new roots in the conventional sense. Indeed, he caricatures this impulse through his protagonist’s recurring dream of being transformed into a tree, an oneiric prison where he is ‘locked inside for hours at a time’ (98) until he is released into waking life. His overwhelming desire instead is to occupy an internal space that allows him his impulse to write, ‘affixing ink to paper across the desert of the empty page’ (99). For Davis Wood, the true author exists in ruins, ‘without a home, without a grounding, without a sense of my possible selves, starting everything over again for the third time in my life’ (99–100). In Ruins is utterly compelling in the relentlessness of this artistic vision, a ‘catastrophe of agglomeration’ itself, which ascends up the symbolic stairs of Jacob’s Ladder and towards the heavens.
Peter D. Mathews is Professor of English Literature at Hanyang University in Seoul, South Korea. He is the author of Lacan the Charlatan (2020), English Magic and Imperial Madness (2021), and From Poet to Novelist: The Orphic Journey of John A. Scott (2022).