'Noah's Compass' by Anne Tyler - Book Review

I really loved this book and was hooked from the beginning. Liam is a sixty-one year old teacher who has been recently made redundant and has downsized to a smaller apartment opposite a shopping mall on the Baltimore Beltway. Unfulfilled, and unneeded by his family he is at a loss as to how to fill his days. One fears at this point that the novel will sink into the heaviness of depression but it then takes a surprising turn. Liam wakes up to find himself in a hospital and doesn't know why. It turns out that he had been attacked the previous night by an intruder but he has no recollection of the incident. He becomes obsessed with wanting to fill the gap in his memory. You wonder if the novel is going to be about trying to uncover what happened that night, almost in the style of a 'whodunnit'. It doesn't take that direction however. It becomes more of an attempt by Liam (and us) to understand all the other gaps in his life ( Why is there so little contact with his three daughters? Why did he end up teaching fifth grade if he was capable of something more enjoyable to him?). He connives to 'bump into' the personal assistant of a local businessman suffering from dementia in the illogical hope that she can jog his memory too. He feels a “sudden flood of affection” for Eunice in spite of her “errant bra strap... and the headlamp look of her eyes behind her big glasses”. He enters a relationship with her and experiences a lovely, sweet connection that leads him to remember previous connections and to recognise that not only was he not present to the events of the night of the attack, but that he was not present to most of his own life. Ernest Hemingway once wrote : “If a writer knows what he is talking about he may omit things he knows. The dignity of the movement of an iceberg is due to only one-ninth of it being above the water.” The dignity of this novel owes a lot to the power of omission. Absence permeates the novel and is a major theme– the writing style is minimalist and Liam has lost his job, his memory and has little connection with family and friends. Ms. Tyler has done a wonderful job of capturing the emptiness and barely concealed despair of many modern day lives without creating a depressing read. This is a touching, gently humorous and ultimately optimistic book . It is the first Anne Tyler book I have read - I look forward to reading the rest.

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