Book review: ‘In the Dark Room’ by Brian Dillon

Having enjoyed Brian Dillon’s later books Essayism, Suppose a Sentence and Affinities, I very much looked forward to reading his first book, In the Dark Room—even though the subject matter was significantly different.

In this book, a compelling, erudite blend of memoir and meditation, Dillon describes his experience losing both parents as he was entering adulthood and explores how memory and emotion recall and are affected by heirlooms, places, photographs and other remnants. These were topics often explored by the late W. G. Sebald, and a couple of wonderful sweeping passages in this book could almost have been written by Sebald. For example:

In the winter of 1997, without, initially, giving much thought to the significance of what I was doing, I began spending my nights poring over a selection of photographs from the family hoard. For some months, l had been huddled deep inside the folds of a depression that had lately made it almost impossible for me to engage by day with the postgraduate research I had left Dublin to complete at a provincial university in the south of England. In truth, I had made scarcely any headway with my work since arriving two years earlier. My ill-concealed lack of productivity was beginning to tell against me in every respect: academic, financial and personal. I felt myself constantly in flight from all those who might notice some sign of the new vacuousness of my being, the dull ache at the centre of my chest that denoted my absconded hopes, plans and talents. As deadlines passed and the promised doctoral thesis failed to materialize time and again, I cast about desperately for some prop to shore up my slowly spalling sense of self, but succeeded only in adding to the confusion of a mind long past hope of being cleared by its own efforts. By this time, my second winter away from home, I had made a comprehensively tangled mess out of all ties to the world around me. During the summer of that year, there were days when—having lain awake most of the night, adrift between the vicious reality of my situation and my increasingly fantastic notions of how best to end my torment—I could hardly raise myself from my bed before mid-afternoon. Once up, I was a frantic wreck before the awful challenge of the day, quickly debilitated again by the panic that overtook me when faced with the simplest decision. Eventually, I was persuaded (it was already autumn, and I realized that I had no memory of the sun shining at all that summer) to drag myself, emaciated and, so I am told, actually grey in the face, to a doctor.

As with Sebald’s works, In a Dark Room is difficult to describe. Also as with Sebald’s works, In a Dark Room is a wonderful book.