Follow-up novel a masterful study of bereavement

MICK LITTLE is from Glasgow.

He’s the protagonist of Waterline, the follow-up to Ross Raisin’s acclaimed debut novel, In God’s Country. He has just buried his wife of 35 years. She has died of cancer, most likely as a result of the asbestos that he used to unwittingly drag home to their house during the 20 years he spent working on the Clyde shipyards. The guilt and the grief are tearing him apart. Slowly.

He has two grown-up sons. Robbie is the youngest. He returns from Australia with his wife for the funeral. They have an infant child. Then there is Craig, moody and “as Scottish as thistles”, who is estranged from Mick. Craig mournfully visits his mother’s grave every day. He brings fresh flowers, but — notices Mick, who is only an occasional visitor — he leaves his father’s withering flowers graveside, as a kind of marker. It’s “exactly the kind of thing he would do”, he thinks sadly, as if grief were a contest.

The mother, of course, as in most families, was the glue that kept everyone together. Without her things fall apart, most noticeably in the case of Mick’s mental health. His disintegration happens almost imperceptibly. There are delinquent actions, like his ogling of his neighbour while she is sunbathing topless; he steals flowers from a park for his wife’s grave. He loses his job as a cab driver. He begins to sidestep life, retreating into himself, avoiding contact at all costs. When he spots someone at the door of his house, “a strange hopeful thought that it’s a robber” overcomes him. Alcoholism takes control of him. He starts sleeping in the shed, until one day he just boards a bus to London. “The brain is a genuine minefield of all these thoughts,” he says. Best to try to flee them, he concludes.

He gets a job as a kitchen cook at an airport hotel, an interesting passage which gives an insight into the underbelly of the minimum wage world, although the novel really excels when it comes to tell the tale of his homelessness, which comes inevitably. Raisin’s depiction of life on the streets of London is unsentimental where everything is reduced to “a race between the reminders and the drink”; it brings to mind the wanderings of John Healy in The Grass Arena.

It is some imaginative leap for Raisin, who is a 31-year-old novelist from Yorkshire, to credibly inhabit the mind of a “cloyed-up” Scottish vagrant. His writing, which has the phonetic cadences of James Kelman, isadmirably restrained with only the occasional flourish like when, at one stage, he takes to describing Mick’s breakfast in a greasy spoon one morning, with “ketchup and brown sauce and mustard all mixed together on his plate like a mental sunset”.

The novel describes a heart-breaking descent, for Mick is an endearing character, who abhors self pity and is full of black humour. “One thing is for sure, they don’t like you sitting down in this city,” he says drily at one stage.

There is a dubious, slightly ambiguous conclusion to Waterline. It may or may not be to your liking but to mention it seems churlish, as Raisin has written a masterful study of bereavement.