“It’s a small thing, to spoon egg into the mouth of another, but it never fails to encourage tenderness,” observes the delectably deadpan narrator of Lloyd Jones’s horrifying new novel as he feeds breakfast to two men, Doctor and Mole, whose mouths are pressed up to the mesh hole of a wire cage.
“I have to say,” our narrator continues, “the smell of human shit is unpleasant at this hour. When it’s my turn to feed out I will usually wait until I know they have finished.” He adds, in a disquieting touch that will set the tone for the whole novel, that the men have been provided with a “short-handled spade and plenty of soil to cover over their mess”.
It’s a sign of what’s to come. Human excrement – its relentless presence, its stink, not to mention the dehumanising effect of forcing two men to perform their bodily functions in a cage on full public view (for plenty of visitors come by to gawp) – pervades this entire novel. Indeed, the word itself appears on almost every page. Feeding, “shitting”, sleeping and occasionally, when a hose is poked through the wire, washing – the nightmarish ablutions of these “strangers” are constantly and sickeningly detailed by our watchful narrator/jailer. But what’s going on and however did we get here?
Two men, one young, one older, fetch up at a small hotel in an unnamed country town and at first are made cautiously welcome by the hotelier, his nephew (our never-named narrator) and the townsfolk. But something isn’t right: the strangers won’t talk much, and they appear to have fled a disaster that they will not – or cannot – name. Besides which, as our narrator observes, “they look the same as us and, as far as we can tell, display all the usual desires and appetites, but their smell is not like ours”.
Great novels make their own rules and, if the writing’s properly, authoritatively alive, it will never once occur to you to question them. And quite how this pair make the transition from hotel guests in a normal double room to a specially constructed cage in the backyard with a “feeding hole” and the human equivalent of a litter tray is the first in a series of imaginative sleights of hand that Jones – whose earlier novel, Mister Pip, won the Commonwealth prize and was shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker prize – roguishly pulls off.
The cage simply – chillingly – seems to come about, almost a physical manifestation of the townsfolk’s kneejerk fear and prejudice. The pair, as the latter will later reassure themselves, seem to almost voluntarily “put themselves there”. The key is conveniently “lost”. A “trust” of local men is set up to “manage” the prisoners’ “wellbeing”. And, in a further effort to make it all humanely organised, our young narrator is employed to observe and take notes. “They are not incarcerated, they are temporarily caged,” he finds himself (only slightly doubtfully) remarking to his co-jailer. “We did not ask them to come here,” the members of the trust unceasingly remind themselves. “We did not say, You may pitch your tent here.”
It goes without saying that all of this makes for uneasy reading in these blisteringly xenophobic times. The world of the novel, with its fusty, self-congratulatory townsfolk, their relentless fear of the “other” (“we wanted them to be, well, more like us if they could”), the slow slide into physical and moral degradation, is both vivid and meticulous.
Which is perhaps why the odd small detail began to bother me. How come, for instance, a boiled egg needs to be “spooned” straight through into the men’s mouths and yet later a cup of coffee and later still, an entire bowl of pasta, can be “passed” through the same hole? And I suppose you can’t criticise Jones for being entirely successful in his evocation of horrific monotony, but more than two-thirds of the way through, it was getting hard to read yet another description of bowel evacuation and I began to long for something – anything – to change.
Comparisons have been made to The Road, but for me this novel lacks Cormac McCarthy’s heartbreaking sense of an emotional normality that’s been lost. Instead, I was reminded of the eerie, desolate beauty of Jim Crace or the bald and claustrophobic lyricism of Emma Donoghue’s Room, for this is fantastically, blandly effective prose, the tone pitch perfect, not a stultifying word wasted, not a dark idea out of place. In fact, by far the most impressive thing about this deeply disturbing fable is the vast and deadening landscape of language that seems to spring up around it. Jones has forged a piece of poetry of the most uncanny and macabre kind – a timely reminder to us all that humanity cannot ever be taken for granted, that it hangs, always, and all too terrifyingly, by the very skin of its teeth.
• The Cage by Lloyd Jones is published by Text Publishing (£10.99)
