Dillon's darkroom

In his new memoir, In the Darkroom, Brian Dillon attempts to come to terms with the tragic death of his parents, and subsequently examines the connections between grief, loss and memory, invoking the theories of Proust and Augustine along the way. Review by Daragh Reddin

It is a truism in publishing circles that a writer who uses many highbrow quotations to introduce the individual chapters of his or her book is often doing so to mask their own lack of talent. In framing sections of his memoir, In the Dark Room, with quotations from such literary luminaries as WG Sebald and Virginia Woolf, and expanding on those references within the text by way of Proust, Augustine and others, debut memoirist Brian Dillon is fortunate – for the most part – in being the exception that proves the rule.

Centering around the tragic deaths of the author's parents – firstly his mother to a rare auto-immune disease, scleroderma, and later his father to a sudden heart attack – In the Dark Room is an ambitious and often challenging examination of the interplay between grief, loss and memory. The traditional autobiography usually involves a linear style that moves from birth through childhood to adulthood. But by choosing a fragmented style, Dillon tackles the complexity of personal reflection.

By choosing to use a fragmented rather than a linear style, Dillon demonstrates that, far from the autobiographer being fully in control of memory, it is memory that controls him, or, as Cyril Connolly once wrote, "Our memories are card-indexes consulted, and then put back in disorder by authorities whom we do not control." In each of his themed sections Dillon demonstrates how the memory of his parents is mediated through the objects and places with which they are associated. In 'House' he tackles the paradox that as a repository of memory the family home only becomes truly alive once it has been vacated. No house, he says, "could be more comprehensively stocked with the detritus of the past than the empty house."

'Things' is a Proustian examination of the way certain objects, be it his mother's bible or his father's ash-tray, can evoke their owner long after they themselves have passed away, or as Dillon more eloquently puts it, "There is something terrible about the way in which a dumb artefact can lead us back to the past, if only because its very existence is at odds with the passing of the bodies to which it once shared the space of daily life." The poignancy Dillon feels on finding a scrap of paper on which his ailing mother has transcribed a passage from scripture is all the more effective for its lack of sentimentality, "the crippled handwriting is enough to tell me that it dates from that period when her hands had become so twisted and agonised that she held a pen with great difficulty and had to move her whole arm to write. Her fingers could no longer make those minute adjustments which writing demands; it is as if her entire body is twisting and turning to produce those awkward marks." Likewise, after unearthing a poem written by his late father, Dillon describes perfectly his feelings of ambivalence; on the one hand he is touched by a literary ambition he was unaware of in his father, and on the other he is bewildered by the simple pious sentiment which the poem expresses.

'Photographs' sees Dillon draw attention to the images he holds of his parents both before and after their marriage. In early pictures he sees his father on holiday in France and observes in his demeanour an ease of expression which is sadly absent in those photos taken after his marriage. Finding a photo of his parents crossing O'Connell Bridge in the early stages of courtship Dillon sees not just a literal bridge but a metaphorical one, "a bridge between a distant past and my own", between the earlier images of his childless parents and the later images from the family album.

Perhaps of all the sections it is Bodies, with its examination of his mother's decline as a result of scleroderma,which is the most affecting. It jumps from language at times poetic; "…there was no sudden plunge into sickness, just this protracted drift away from the shores of ease with the world into icy currents of pain", to a more clinical description of the form her suffering took, "the oesophagus contracts and becomes rigid… what little food the patient can swallow causes an excruciating acid reflux, leading to further scarring."

Finally, in 'Places' Dillan turns his attention to his childhood experience of attending Mount Argus church with his mother and the fear he felt within the oppressive walls of its "monstrous architecture".

While there is no questioning Dillon's gift as a writer, there remains something a tad frustrating for the reader in the very style of memoir that Dillon employs. By writing a biography rich in literary references but sometimes short in the actual details of his own childhood. The emotional impact of the death of Dillon's parents is occasionally undermined by the unnecessary inclusion of literary theory. It is the very simple but effective descriptions of his relationship with his mother that made John McGahern's recent Memoir such a moving read. Nevertheless, as a philosophical study in the meshing of grief and memory In The Dark Room is still an assured and memorable debut.