READER'S REPORT

READER’S REPORT
Title: Bounce
Author: Jude Redmond

Bounce is an aptly titled autobiographical work that revolves around the author’s attempted suicide – a cliff-top leap that he survived, hence the book’s rather amusing title – and his experiences before and after that momentous event. It is an examination of one sometimes ill-lived life, an exploration of friendship and the state of the modern world, and an analysis of the pain and pleasure of drink, drugs and family relationships.
The book opens with a brief but shocking, no-holds barred suicide note, in which the author expresses all his despair and sense of nihilism about his life. So it is a somewhat pleasant surprise that parts of the rest of the work, while flowing from a deeply serious vein, can also be quite brimming with humour, even if it is often of the gallows variety. There is a very anecdotal flavour to the book, especially in the earlier chapters. Jumping off a cliff as a method of killing oneself might seem fairly reliable, but it was clearly not Julian’s time to go. As he says with a wonderfully deadpan tone: ‘Within the group of friends I knocked around with, I was known as Tigger. Twenty years later I throw myself off a cliff and fucking bounce.’ The account of the build-up to Julian’s ‘flying lesson’, as he so drolly calls it, is pacy and colourfully-related, and his constant shifting in and out of reality whilst in hospital make for some fascinating dream-sequences, and tales that are sometimes bizzarely real, sometimes utterly surreal (eg going clubbing in his PJs, Rachel Stevens as a Mossad agent, fox-breeding on the ward, etc). The way in which the author deals with his post-jump disablement is never maudlin – it is matter of fact, sometimes achingly funny, always poker-faced (eg his way of getting attention when he is moved to ‘Inconsequential Corner’) – and there is real pathos in his musings on some of the other patients and their plight, such as confused, incontinent Ken. The section dealing with his homecoming to his parent’s house, reunion with old friends and a return to the booze is quite perky, and the part in which he calmly discusses his abusive childhood and traumatic schooldays with the psychiatrist Des is gripping stuff, although the dialogue can seem a bit stilted due to lack of contractions, here as elsewhere (eg ‘I do not know’; ‘If you do not mind’).
But Bounce does lose some of its courageous appeal. The writing can at times lapse from its tone of wry black humour and perceptive observations about the human condition, and verge on the embittered, and there is at times, perhaps inevitably, an air of indulgent self-pity that might alienate some readers (eg ‘I managed to remain outwardly respectable until Rachel decided to kill our child’ the part about his treatment by Coven). The problem may be that the topics become too narrowly personal, with their minutiae about specific people, work and pubs; while the suicide/rehabilitation themes are also very intimate, they strike a more universal and provocative note that readers may respond to.
That said, Jude Redmond is quite a gifted raconteur, with a sometimes jaunty narrative style that belies its bleak subject matter, and a knack for turning a memorable, often witty phrase (eg ‘that gulag of a school’; ‘the sun began seething in to the sea’; Georgina is ‘Tutankhamun’s granny’; a runaway truck agreed ‘whole-enginely with gravity etc).
Jokes can be a little lame, but one can’t help but chuckle at some of his offerings (eg ‘I learnt a lot in hospital but most of all patience, please excuse the pun’; he plans to call his embryonic novel about a brown Labrador raised in Columbia ‘Chocolate and the Charlie Factory’), and his later tales of women he has known, such as the sexy but seemingly crazy KT Krackers and the luscious Tasha, call to mind the writing of Sean Thomas.
On a minor note, some misspellings and missing/misused punctuation would need correction (eg ‘ils ne passerent pas’; ‘its got a pulse’; ‘the bones of my heal’, etc), as would odd typos (eg ‘being caught my overzealous nurses’; ‘No more noisy tantrums form Lady Spewalot’; one of the last generation of children would were told what to do’, etc).
This might not be the most obvious choice of subject matter for a venture into commercial publishing, as its themes of mental illness, dysfunctional families and substance abuse are hardly upbeat. But it is still a tale of survival – always popular – and there is a certain buoyancy about the author’s persona and his writing style that makes this to some degree a readable and curiously enjoyable tome. I feel, though, that the hospital-based part is by far the best, with its feel of a ‘black sit-com’, and this could be turned into a more extensive sketch-type piece.