THE VOIDS

Ryan O’Connor

(Scribe, £8.99)

When all the lists are totted up at the end of the year, it would be a little disappointing if Ryan O’Connor’s remarkable debut hadn’t scored a respectably high placing among the best Scottish novels of 2022. Already, O’Connor has found a voice: one which is convincingly authentic, and yet mercurial enough to chart both the transcendent highs and soul-destroying lows of alcoholism, shifting smoothly between comical substance-induced blunders, deep introspection and crushing emotional blows.

Its unnamed 30-year-old narrator lives on the fourteenth floor of a condemned Glasgow high-rise. Since the announcement of its demolition, nearly all of the occupants have moved out. Almost alone in this rapidly-emptying mausoleum for the dispossessed, he breaks into the Voids – the flats that have been vacated and will never be occupied again – and takes items left behind by the departed residents, rearranging them in other empty flats like art installations. And, just as he tries to divine some meaning in the random objects others have abandoned, this failed journalist and novelist is compelled to do the same with his own life.

“I’d been leaving home in a roundabout way since I was twelve years old. Alcohol became my primary escape route quite early on, but it wasn’t the only one, and not the first,” he confides. His discovery of the transformative power of drink more or less coincided with an interest in mystical literature, particularly Castaneda, and the Glasgow we see through his eyes is as much a psychic and symbolic landscape as a geographical one. A grim backdrop of windowless, bunker-like pubs and decaying tower blocks becomes an expressionistic cityscape charged with meaning, where every addict like himself is playing parts to disguise their true selves. Not for nothing is our narrator nameless. His abortive attempts to visit his dying father, a former nightclub singer, are steps in a reluctant search for himself.

Whenever he thinks he’s hit bottom, he finds he can sink lower still, and his chaotic life unfolds in a series of picaresque vignettes, frequently punctuated by blackouts. This results in some great, skilfully-crafted set-pieces, from the hilarious hairdressers’ promo event which gets him sacked from a local paper, and a memorable scene in a Chinese restaurant where he and his wasted companions end up with a table groaning with food they forgot they’d ordered, to the powerfully moving memory of the coach journey on which his father abandoned him and the moment one of the high-rise’s last residents soft-shoes off a parapet to his death.

Rejected by his parents, convinced he will never experience happiness and weighed down by the kind of self-loathing that comes from being told by an ex-girlfriend, “You are the darkness”, he sees a lonely majesty in the concrete tower that resonates with a lifelong sadness of his own. But there’s a little misdirection going on here. More often than not, his gaze is actually fixed above the high-rise, appraising the ever-changing heavens, where the sun might be rising “like a glaucomic eye” or “sinking slowly into a pool of blood”. And, despite his unstable and short-lived relationships, he rarely fails to find brief moments of comfort amidst the chaos, with other damaged people who, like him, exist in the margins.

Knowing the comparisons (such as Ballard, Burroughs, Welsh and Gray) it would invite, O’Connor set himself a high bar with this book, but he has the skills to clear it, satisfyingly tying up his protagonist’s emotional arc as he faces his demons and seems finally within touching distance of the peace he’s craved all his life.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT