Mr Burman is a middle-aged widower, still grieving the loss of his wife, Ada, in a car accident. By day he teaches English at a local high school, by night he grapples with the effects of his blood-pressure medication and worrying about his virtual estrangement from daughter, Leila. This low-key existence is shattered when one of Mr Burman’s ex-students, Raf, attempts to blow up St Paul’s cathedral. In Your Life Without Me by James Meek, we follow Mr Burman’s journey to London, where he is intent on visiting Raf in custody and uncovering the truth, in a richly metaphorical story of loss and the passage of time.
Raf’s foiled attempt to destroy St Paul’s was an act that shocked the world and prompted an outbreak of national hysteria. A PhD student who was ostensibly conducting research into the impact of local traffic vibration on the hallowed stone, Raf was secretly putting in demolition-grade explosives. His motives, Mr Burman fears, may be traced back to conversations and ideas shared between them years before. As a self-confessed ‘armchair revolutionary’, he knows he will have to re-examine the nature of his relationship with his one-time protégé.
At home, packing his overnight case in preparation to leave, Mr Burman attempts conversation with Leila. Emotionally detached and like an invisible lodger, she leads a separate life under his roof and has done for many years. She has her own story to tell about Raf, as, it emerges, did her poised, charismatic mother.
Meek cleverly weaves seemingly disparate strands of plot into this absorbing and original novel; themes of architecture, history and society alongside the domestic drama. From the moment he leaves home, his walk to the station, train journey into London and preparation to meet Raf, Mr Burman is sharing recollections of both his family history, personal politics, and the potential igniting of Raf’s radicalism.
Raf at eighteen, a brilliant student, passionately campaigning alongside his teacher, to save a historic tower. Appalled to discover that following its reprieve, developers have surrounded it with ‘urban riverside’ flats and an identikit retail street, Raf is furious at the meanness of modern construction. He wishes he hadn’t bothered. Riffing on Beowulfian themes (as introduced by Burman), he imagines a contemporary monster creeping out of business school to ‘feed on the quaintness’ of his ancestors’ grand buildings, stroking and licking the old brick ‘with his abrasive, lascivious tongue, to snuggle his scaly hide down among the spaces thus cleaned, and carefully squirt into them eggs that would years later hatch out into income streams’.
Years down the line, when Burman arrives in London, St Paul’s stands, diminished by skyscrapers and retail outlets. Would its loss prompt us to think harder, do better, construct our own marvels?
Meanwhile, Leila too is en route to London, burdened with her own history and secrets, and after a life lived in the self-imposed shadow of her mother, in need of her own reconstruction.
A novel that leaves you thinking about the space left by loss and assumptions unchallenged. Highly recommended.
Your Life Without Me by James Meek is published by Canongate Books, 259 pages.
