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MY FAVOURITE REVIEW OF START!

 

 

Start, A story of life under a compulsory community treatment order by Graham Morgan. 

 

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Orla Broderick

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I received this novel as a pdf, having sent a call out on social media for a book for my Mlitt book review. It is essentially a memoir and autobiography written by Graham Morgan following his years of poor mental health. It is a beautifully told story, with accessible language, self deprecating humour and superb flashes of poetry.

From the opening lines I was fully engaged in the honest simplicity of the author’s basic life needs and his small joys of a beach walk with friends. The accounts of his alcohol consumption combined with the reasons why he drinks are easy to empathise with, being delicately depicted snapshots of a flawed human in pain. 

The extent of Graham’s mental health issues are revealed gradually. There is no self indulgence or self pitying in his words. He tells it like it is, in a matter of fact, life is for the living type of way, with his family history, his own personal achievements and his sadnesses clearly drawn. As a protagonist, we can immediately identify with him, and indeed, fall a little bit in love with his vulnerability.

 

In the chapter The End Of The World, Graham discloses his greatest fear - that he is a form of malevolence and evil.

‘When I think nothing would be there, when I am in a room with my CPN or psychologist and we get talking of the evil, I can feel it rising in me, washing out in waves of malevolence and I want to suck it back in. I want  to protect these nice people from me.’ 

 I found this quite shocking, as up until this statement, Graham’s easy manner and gorgeous ordinariness was compelling. From the candid accounts of the way he left his wife to the authenticity of vulnerability in managing somehow to find new love, Wendy (to whom the book is dedicated), the reader  is convinced that the author is a reliable narrator of life’s struggles, and a decent bloke. His utter hatred of himself, of the very essence of himself, is the most aptly timed reveal of any novel I have read in recent years. It is a dramatic plot twist. It is this beautifully executed insight into one man’s inner world of torture and confusion which leads the rest of the novel. Morgan’s story now becomes an addiction, a gripping unputdownable book loaded with language of the heart.

 

It was in the chapter ‘Why Have You Forsaken Me?’ that I began to weep for the strength of humility in this man. His grace of being is depicted without blame in a world where he feels utterly abandoned to a system which does not really accept or care for him. His Christmas spent on a hospital ward being closely monitored with ahis one gift of a bottle of shampoo, donated by the hospital, is heart stoppingly painful to read. But it is this chapter which makes me feel this book should be prescribed reading for every school child, every teacher, every nurse. The separateness and sense of isolation from the world of happy successful people is shown with impeccable honesty. These scenes of what we as a society do to those suffering from poor mental health must be read by everyone working with other people. There is no other text, that I am aware of, quite so matter-of-fact and brutal about how one human endures as an outsider, devoid of any loving connection to anyone. I challenge anyone to not weep tears of hot lava after this chapter. His love and respect for his son, from whom he has been alienated, is beyond any level of everyday compassion. The reader fully understands the deep never ending pain and sense of loss Morgan feels and Morgan allows us full access to his heartsore debilitating grief, without ever causing offence or deriding his ex-wife for her actions. His decency, his temperance, his restraint and true pure virtue shines through the pages of persecution. In all his distress, he does not lash out at those who have hurt him, but affords the reader the greatest gift of all - and that is the demonstration of how to truly forgive yourself and others for our flaws, weaknesses and bad behaviour. This is how to endure immense wretchedness with a grace akin to what I imagine is enlightened. If you only ever read one chapter of this book, read ‘Why Have You Forsaken Me’ and read it to your partner, your children, your friends and never stop reading it. May Morgan’s words burn in my soul for all eternity. May I never ever shy away from or dismiss another Earthling in pain. May I aspire to be as truly merciful as this beautiful haunted man. And thank God, Goddess, Buddha and all the angels for Wendy and her children, and the love and acceptance they brought him. Together they found joy in the green green of a blade of grass, or the simple wonder of wading in cold water. Morgan’s deepest gratitude and appreciation for the simple beauties and pleasures of Nature is not only a relief to him, but also for the reader. Without his regular interjections of the stuff of life which keeps him alive, such as the poetic-prose told tales of adventures in the Highlands with wonderful friends who love and care for him, this book might have been quite a grim read. ‘Surrounded by a myriad droplets from the recent rain, all of them with their own refracted rainbows, and I want to touch each one, smooth the fresh clear water on our lips and smile and smile and smile. ’And that is the testament to the man and author, that despite the horror he thinks he is - he still sees and knows love and beauty. This is a must read, a book to be studied in schools and no doctor should ever practice medicine without it.

 

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