November 2020. The Insult by Rupert Thomson
By: Oren Raab
Tags: Rupert Thomson, Blindness, Novel

1996, Bloomsbury, 406 pages. Written in English, read in English.

When distilled to its very essence, storytelling is a fairly simple endeavour. Take a person, put them in a situation, give them a conflict, and show them the path out of the conflict (or not). Over the thousand or so years that authors have written fictional chronicles of characters, this has been expanded and enhanced in a myriad of ways, the culmination of which requiring multiple people, with multiple situations and multiple conflicts, all intertwining to resolve eventually in a satisfactory manner to the reader (or not). What, then, can still be novel in a novel? Take an author; put them in a situation, give them a conflict — and they will find their way out (or not).

Rupert Thomson, in his novel The Insult, gives himself a hefty conflict to deal with — his protagonist, Martin Blom, is shot — apparently randomly — and is blinded, his eyes capable of seeing but his brain incapable of processing that visual information due to the trauma he receives. Within just a chapter or so, Thomson discovers, through Blom, the path out of his conflict. Blom realizes that he can still see perfectly well, but only in darkness. Or can he?

That would be the premise of the novel if you’d read the back cover and made a decision to read it based on it, and that would be sufficient (the back cover treatment does not indicate that the “something miraculous” that happens is that Blom can see in darkness, but it is something that any reader of some experience would intuitively presume, and I feel comfortable revealing that information, as it’s conveyed in the very first chapter of the book) — but it’s not even the beginning of the overall arc of the novel.

On top of the first conflict that Thomson throws Blom into, and resolves, he heaps another one — a love interest that goes missing, taking Blom and a motley crew of friends, and a detective, on a search that carries them to a very dark past, and a very dark future.

Thomson is not content with just these narrative conflicts and adds several mechanical conflicts to his work — the story is a first person narrative, which means that we see the world through the eyes of Martin Blom — a person who is supposed to be blind, but can see, and has to hide that fact from other people. Thomson carries us through that ambivalence so nicely, that by the end of the novel you will discover that the type of narrative has changed, and you had not noticed. In addition, Thomson determines to place the story in a nondescript country, providing enough descriptions and landmarks to make it commonplace to the reader, but not too recognizable that it can even be placed in a section of the continental map of Europe — and all of the characters have names that may be local or immigrant. It does not interfere with the narrative at all, but it is curious to see the amount of effort Thomson invests in blurring the story’s locations.

As the novel comes to a close, and we realize it cannot end in any other way then the well-versed reader has seen coming for a while, one feels sorry for Martin Blom, but also hopeful, as his story finds the conclusion it needs, but also the hope it needs to push through.