brisk and well-realized portrayal of the experience of being the kind of delusional and unappealing cluster B leech of a child who offers nothing to others in love's give-and-take, unable to make even the creepy teacher love you because your vulnerability is the kind that repulses rather than attracts, desiring to do good when you witness good but never doing it because there's no conviction in you but the wound of everybody always doing you grievous wrongs both real and imaginary, and all you have going for you (and it's not going) is a rigid parrotlike "intelligence" totally untempered by good personality traits, made even uglier by your dogmatism and lack of creativity, your sky-high ambitions and total inability to realize them
the very close narrative voice is still at a remove from the protagonist, sympathetic to him as a listening ear but knowing he's usually wrong--as bildungsromans go, this style strikes me as more teutonic than anglo (less go-between, more törless) with its reduced emphasis on nostalgia and greater emphasis on unanswerable philosophical and moral questions common to the protagonist's age (another teutonic quality: unresolvable dualities abound) but permanently unresolved even after the thought-terminating clichés of adulthood set in
Thank you for posting this. I went ahead and read the book, and I really enjoyed it. I think the water motif might be simpler than you think— a sort of metaphor for emotion, ebbing and flowing and consuming and surrounding Daniel at all times. I see the lack of control he has in his life in the uncaring tide flooding and invading the land. And of course his mother, leaving to end her life, choosing the water to drown in, resigning herself to those uncaring motions that push and pull the novel. It reminded me of a more modern Denton Welch. I think this is one of the best contemporary novels I've ever read. I was looking at going to see Michael Amherst at his Bristol event this month, but it looks like it's already sold out.
i agree with was a good one. i've been disappointed with a lot of contemporary lit over the past decade but not in the least with this book. hopefully this is not the only novel amherst has in him---i'm in awe of how much he makes the reader consider in such a slim volume regarding the water motif, you make a solid point and i'll bet i was overthinking it. it's appropriate that water represents emotion---daniel comes off like empty vessel, trapped in his rigid immutable shape but still easily 'filled' by the people around him the unmanly, impotent, almost degendered portrayal of daniel's father seems to reflect daniel's own lack of agency in anything, even his innermost world, but at least his father has the balls to directly tell daniel "not everything is about you" just before the end. he's quite a bit like what we see of his mother: empty, sensitive, changeable, needy, failed creative, boundary issues. i think he's also the type to attempt suicide halfheartedly without really intending to die, but wanting things to be different and lacking the agency to change them expressing feelings and needs in the ways natural to him makes other people sad or angry or annoyed, so he is not learning how to achieve the bildungsroman goals of developing an identity and integrating into respectable society. he uses academic achievement as an anchor for his selfhood, but it's more annoying to others than impressive. it's like his deepest core belief is that he is special and everything he tries to do is a post hoc attempt to justify this. there's just no way to have a good school life or good adulthood when this is how he directs his life, at least when he's not being swung around by other people or by his own emotions. he is setting himself up for failure, but how much responsibility can you really assign a child for the ways their own maladaptive programming cut them off at the knees? it's really remarkable that amherst built and explored this mind so closely without falling too far into maudlin pity or too far the other way into revulsion. ironically i think daniel's depth of feeling _is_ special, certainly worthy of cultivation, but his gaze is always fixed inward, always too critical and rigid to let himself be truly creative. he's like a kid version of the fin de siècle decadent young man archetype who thinks too much, is never more than fleetingly happy, and somehow feels both numb and overstimulated all the time
Your point about the novel not falling into self-pity is very good and one I hadn't thought about. I think I could write a similar version of this book, but I fear it would be guilty of that self-pitying trap. It is so hard to avoid plain sentimentalism when writing about a bully child, but somehow he did it.