A great demolition is also an act of creation, so long as its execution is bold and impressive enough, so long as it clears out the dead wood and opens up the terrain. It’s the ethos that links Pablo Picasso to 1970s punk, Shiva the Destroyer to the anarchist hero of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. Rip it up and start again. Or rip it up for the pure thrill of the ripping. In Graham Greene’s short story The Destructors, the schoolboy vandals of the Wormsley Common Gang systematically unpick a Christopher Wren-designed London house, working from the inside out so that it dissolves into rubble the moment a supporting post is pulled down. The crime’s one adult witness, a lorry driver, guffaws at the sight. “I’m sorry, I can’t help it,” he tells the home’s distraught owner. “There’s nothing personal, but you got to admit it’s funny.”
Raf, the angel of destruction who haunts the wings of James Meek’s graceful, death-haunted domestic drama, is likewise drawn to the work of Wren – although his project is conceived on a much grander scale. Raf is a professional demolition man, a gifted young engineer and natural born radical, easily moved to laughter or tears and effortlessly dazzling everyone in his orbit. For his PhD project, he has been granted free run of St Paul’s Cathedral in order to test the old building’s resistance to modern traffic vibration. He drills discreet holes in the masonry to install movement censors. But he also packs the cavities with Semtex.
It’s no spoiler to reveal that Raf never actually completes his masterpiece. At the start of Meek’s novel he’s confined to Belmarsh prison, held without charge and refusing to speak with the authorities, while the narrative doubles back and pitches camp next door, viewing the ripple effect of this would-be terrorist on his unofficial adoptive family. Why does Raf want to blow up St Paul’s Cathedral anyway? He suggests it is because the building gives shape to the city and ennobles its worst excesses. Also because it is obsolete, a tired prop, an unquestioned symbol of virtue and grace. Removing it would be liberating, he thinks. People would mourn it, appreciate it, and then go and build something fresh and new in its place.
Maybe more institutions would benefit from a visit from Raf, the cab driver’s son from smalltown Lancashire who swings his metaphorical wrecking ball through the home of the respectable Burman family. Middle-aged Mr Burman (we are never told his first name) was Raf’s English teacher and a surrogate father of sorts. He now worries he may have inadvertently sent Raf down the wrong path, fired the kid up with his idle Marxist chatter to the point where Scotland Yard might even view him as an accessory. But it is clear that Raf’s crime is part of a wider, quieter family tragedy. Burman is still reeling from the death of his charismatic wife, Ada, while his adult daughter, Leila, is burning with resentment over a lifetime of slights, perceived or otherwise.
Confoundingly, with a neat narrative sleight of hand, Meek reroutes the drama of Raf’s terrorist plot to the comfortable rooms of the Burman family home. He makes the house feel fraught and hazardous, a shell of its former self, with broken glass under every anxious step. Burman longs to speak to Leila as though they are a pair of normal human beings. His daughter is having none of it. She says: “Talking like human beings isn’t how human beings talk.”
Meek – the Guardian’s one-time Moscow bureau chief – is best known for his lightly allegorical historical fiction: the 2005 Booker-longlisted The People’s Act of Love and 2019’s exhilarating To Calais, in Ordinary Time. Despite the modern-day setting, Your Life Without Me is just as interested in the past’s vexed interplay with the present, gliding along the family timeline and across differing viewpoints (Mr Burman, Leila, Raf) to weigh the merits of conservation and demolition, obligation and freedom.
The narrative floorplan is that of a high-concept thriller or a state-of-the-nation epic. But the tale unfolds like a magic eye trick, an experiment in psychogeography that makes St Paul’s a proxy for the absent Ada and observes how the landscape is changed by her loss. It’s a neat marriage metaphor that slowly but surely comes into focus; teasingly at first and rather too explicitly near the end. Because for all its precision plotting and insurrectionist flurries, Your Life Without Me works best as a compelling, compassionate portrait of an English family in flux. Meek builds us a beautiful set of protagonists in Burman and Ada, Leila and Raf. His people are intricate and compromised, complex, flawed but durable, and look solidly three-dimensional right up until the moment that they’re not.
• Your Life Without Me by James Meek is published by Canongate (£18.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
