The Red Arrow
John Murray
DAYDREAMERS often love train journeys. When it comes to navigating a maze of fancy and reflection while hurtling at high speed from A to B, few do it with such deft eloquence as William Brewer鈥檚 introspective protagonist in The Red Arrow.
The novel is named after the train Frecciarossa, on which the protagonist is travelling for the whole course of the novel, although most of the time his mind is elsewhere. His mission is to find the 鈥淧hysicist鈥� because he owes him a story: he is halfway through ghostwriting the Physicist鈥檚 memoirs, a commission that will relieve him of a significant debt.
The nameless Physicist bears many parallels with the theorist Carlo Rovelli, who also works on theories of quantum gravity, one of the grand but vague and hypothetical ideas that the storyline hangs from. While some passages are rich in physics references 鈥� 鈥渢he water around me exploded in fractals, in quantized sparkle鈥� 鈥� the physics in the novel is more of a relish, adding flavour rather than substance. In terms of detailed science, The Red Arrow is more about mental health.
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The protagonist has a history of suicidal depression, which Brewer relates vividly, investing readers in his character鈥檚 plight and running through a whole gamut of emotional responses to mental illness, from the greater closeness he has with his partner after he confides in her, to 鈥渟nap out of it鈥� and 鈥渂uck up鈥�.
For all it is a close-up look at depression, The Red Arrow isn鈥檛 a cheerless read, and the protagonist does find a treatment that helps him. The narrator finds salvation in taking the psychedelic chemical psilocybin, a drug that is currently attracting a lot of research as a potential treatment for a range of mental health issues.
For those with no vested interest in theoretical physics or mental health, the language throughout The Red Arrow is a delight. The protagonist didn鈥檛 just chat about past experiences with the woman of his dreams on their first date, they 鈥渟huffled through our decks of personal history鈥�.
Brewer makes a craft of braiding his storylines, which helps prevent his many tangential musings 鈥� and they are legion 鈥� from drifting into tedium. Describing the landscape on his honeymoon as 鈥渟epia鈥� at one point, the protagonist digresses into a comparison with 鈥渢he burnished hue that lights the opening scene of The Godfather: Part II鈥�, from which point he starts recalling the Christmas when he first watched it, then begins to reflect on the views his father voiced on the film and what they meant for their relationship.
With a pacier plot, such detours might be more annoying, but for all its crescendo to a big reveal at the end, The Red Arrow is mostly about the side alleys on the way. Despite meandering at a profoundly pedestrian pace, it is a surprisingly compelling read.
