William Smith*
The very first page of A Short history of Richard Kline contains the words that describe his life up to middle age: boredom, discontent, detachment, depression, disappointment.
A sense of something lacking in his life shadows him from childhood. Life is never quite good enough and from early manhood, Richard has weeks of feeling “oppressed by the sheer ordinariness of life” … times when it is an effort to just get out of bed in the morning.
Things fail to live up to expectations. When sent by his firm on a team-building exercise in the Blue Mountains, he takes part in abseiling but realises half-way down the descent that, not only does he feel no fear, but he is bored with the whole exercise.
Troubled by his reaction, he returns later to the rock platform and thinks “how easy it would be to jump.”
Soon afterwards, he does jump, figuratively, into a new job, a new country, moving to London and a new girlfriend.
New experiences stop him being bored, for a while, but after a few years he is wondering what is the point of it all. After one of the dreams that play an important place for him, longing for home, he hears his brother has a brain tumour and he flies home immediately.
Gareth dies but at his funeral, Richard is very detached from his family, observing his parents’ grief from a distance.
When he tells his cousin that he has never cried, even as a boy, she advises him to seek professional help. By now, he is “ increasingly … unwilling, or unable, to communicate.” He has become “almost catatonically unable to speak to anyone much about anything” but talking to Sarah does stop him from “drifting heedlessly over the edge.”
He marries Zoe because she is the “sanest person he has ever met” and when they have a son, he is the only person Richard loves more than himself and finds a reason for getting out of bed in the morning.
But this feeling of equanimity doesn’t last. The recession hits and Richard is under a lot of pressure at work. He is 42 and feels as though he has hit a brick wall. His brooding turns to smouldering aggression, which bursts out at times in violent acts against strangers.
As happens often in life, at his lowest ebb, his life turns a corner. He attends a meeting, on a bit of a whim. The hall has become a temple for the purpose of the meeting, presaged in the first line of the novel. “until I met her, I confess that for most of my life I was bored.” “She” is Sri Mata, a spiritual teacher from India, a Hindu saint and in her presence, he cries uncontrollably for the first time in his life.
Gradually, in meditation, his defences are broken down and he begins to experience a real joy in life, an appreciation of the little moments like posting a letter. He becomes more caring about his relationships, less judgmental about other people.
Amanda Lohrey expresses all of this … Richard Kline’s internalising does not always make him a sympathetic character, but there is much to identify with.
His journey is a very familiar one to many. That search for meaning that drives us on; the feeling that there must be something more to life than this. It’s a timeless journey with the modern panaceas of anti-depressants, psychotherapists encountered along the way …
*William Smith is a retired former teacher
