A life in fragments

Lily O’CONNOR had a bad mam, a very bad mam. Lily’s first epileptic seizure came on when she was a little girl, just after her mother -- as we call them on this side of the pond -- threw her headlong down a flight of stairs. If Lily had a fit in the supermarket thereafter, her mother would hide in embarrassment until little Lily, alone on the floor, had stopped writhing. Grand mal seizures often cause the bladder to release, and Lily’s mother refused to wash her daughter’s skirt more than once a week, “said it would teach me.” They gave Lily her own chair at school, she remembers. “They made me sit at the back, near the door, I stank that much.”

So it should come as no surprise that the protagonist of Ray Robinson’s “Electricity” is angry, electrically so. The novel begins with Lily all grown up -- 30 years old, 6 feet tall and “tough as old boots” -- working at a slot machine arcade in a gloomy Yorkshire seaside town, unaware of how bored and alone she is until two policeman pick her up and cart her to her dying mother’s side. (They do this in England, apparently.) Mam dies before she arrives, though, and Lily can’t help but smack her mother’s corpse. “The skin on her cheek moved slowly back. Like mud. And I swear that she smiled.”

Mam’s death is followed by the appearance of Lily’s long-lost brother Barry, from whom she was separated two decades earlier when their mother handed him and their brother Mikey over to the care of the state. Known to his friends as Slick, Barry is a drug-sniffing card shark, soggy with charm. Unbeknown to Lily, he has been living in Yorkshire all along.

He does not know, he tells Lily, the whereabouts of Mikey, allegedly last seen in London after the authorities had shut down his reptile house. (Sadly, we learn no more about that odd chapter of O’Connor lore.) But as soon as Barry has sufficiently shaken Lily from her safe and sleepy routines and all the accommodations she has made with herself to keep her epilepsy under control, he up and leaves, taking his share of the sale of their mother’s house to the States to buy a seat in a high-stakes poker tournament.

Lily goes to London to look for Mikey, despite the admonitions of her one friend in the world, her alcoholic, karaoke-star landlord, Al, who asks: “Why London, lass? It’s a filthy, stinking place.” She soon finds she can leave everything behind but her fits -- and the buried fragments of her past they cause to resurface.

Between debilitating seizures, overwhelmed by the bustle and the noise, she searches for her brother among the foggy-eyed drunks and addicts who fill the city’s stoops and alleys.

I won’t be giving much away if I reveal that she doesn’t find him there. She does make a couple of friends, though: Mel, the angelic, yuppie lesbian; and Dave, the over-eager Cockney electrician who has a secret locked room in his apartment and with whom Lily improbably falls in love.

Both of those are odd enough matches that they strain credulity at times, and both pull “Electricity” off its original, tight, find-Mikey course. A few long, saggy spells ensue. Mel and Dave also provide the opportunities for some of Robinson’s laziest language. As she lies in bed with Mel, Lily says, “I realized I’d never felt so close to a woman before. . . . It felt special.” And of Dave, she reports a few pages later, “I’d just feel so close to him, so special.”

But these soft spots are noticeable mostly because Lily’s voice, and Robinson’s writing, is usually viciously sharp. It’s easy to stumble (delightedly) over the occasional opaque Britishism (“I turned up that first day at daft o’clock in the morning, but when I saw the naff uniform, I told them to stick it,” for instance, or “What happened to the bombsite in your gob?”).

For the most part, however, Robinson pulls out of Lily’s narration a blunt and almost brutal lyricism, well-suited to the dull, claustrophobia-inducing British landscape: “Some birds were going mental in the trees. The sky looked . . . weird, like bits of orange peel floating in blood.” And elsewhere: “The street was turning to mush outside, the fallen leaves sopping.”

Robinson is at his best when describing Lily’s ailment, from the first intimations of a coming fit (“I could feel it sizzling away in my head. Static on a record. Egg being fried in a distant kitchen”) to the terror, pain and occasional ecstasy of the fit itself (“I flap my elbows like stiff jaggy wings and that breeze of gorgeousness comes over me”) to the amnesia, exhaustion and depression that follow (“Like you’ve been wrung out . . . this lump in your guts like you’ve killed someone”).

“Electricity” takes pains to work epilepsy into the fabric of the text -- blurred onomatopoeic grunts in a mishmash of type sizes fill entire pages, little drawings of pills separate one section from another.

But epilepsy seems to burst from the margins of the novel without the aid of fancy typesetting. It becomes more than just a disease and something like a metaphor. Epilepsy, Robinson tells us, is electricity, misfirings in the temporal lobe. “Electricity is life but electricity is an invisible fist punching up your spine, knocking your brains right out of your skull.”

Epilepsy comes to stand in for all the blinding fragmentation of postmodern British life and the panic it inspires: “The mad rush. The traffic noise. . . . Sky full of engine noise. The colour of people’s skin, foreign voices, the funny get-up people wear. The argy-bargy of footpaths and buses, on the tube, the aggro of it all.”

This is the other (poor, monocultural, decidedly freaked-out) side of the multi-culti England we’ve seen in the novels of writers such as Zadie Smith and Monica Ali. For Lily, brown faces are of a piece with crowded subways and urine-stinking alleys. Fortunately, she’s a resilient sort, and she takes her fits -- both medical and metaphorical -- in stride. “Thrash, get up, get on with it. That’s what I say.”

Amen. *