At the Edge of the Solid World

by Daniel Davis Wood

In a snowbound village in the heart of the Swiss Alps, a husband and wife find their lives breaking apart in the days and months following the death of their firstborn. Meanwhile, on the far side of the world in the couple’s hometown of Sydney, a man on the margins of Australian society commits an act of shocking violence that galvanises international attention. As the husband recognises signs of his own grief in both the survivors and the perpetrator, his fixation on the details of the case feeds into insomnia, trauma, and an obsession with the terms on which we give value to human lives. At the Edge of the Solid World is a compulsive, compelling and lyrical novel, told with extraordinary empathy and emotional intelligence. It is the story of a child’s life cut short after just one day. Of a mother and father bereft at the loss of the future they’d imagined. Of an unspeakable crime, public outrage, anguish on the streets and a media frenzy that engineers heroes and villains, martyrs and scapegoats. Most of all, it is a profound meditation on the nature of loss, the resilience and fragility of the family unit and the stories we tell to explain the world. Praise for Blood and Bone by Daniel Davis Wood ‘[Blood and Bone] fulfils two shedding light on a dark past, and exploring intellectual and aesthetic problems that the writing of such a story might create. The story is grounded in factual material and Wood has filled the gaps with imagined scenes and conversations, but the tale is made seamless by a tight structure and a hypnotic style that seems to owe something to the work of Gerald Murnane.’ —Kerryn Goldsworthy, The Sydney Morning Herald

Genres: Contemporary, Fiction, Novels, 21st Century

333 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 15, 2020

About the author

Daniel Davis Wood is a novelist and essayist based in Scotland. He is the author of BLOOD AND BONE, which won the 2014 Viva La Novella Prize in his native Australia, and AT THE EDGE OF THE SOLID WORLD, as well as the shorter works UNSPEAKABLE and IN RUINS. He is also the founder and editor of Splice, a small press and online review of contemporary fiction.

Reviews

[Neale · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shortlisted for the 2021 Miles Franklin Award.

The father feels impotent, more than useless, as his wife screams and wails through the excruciating pain of childbirth. He ponders why he is even present. Problems are found and the doctors decide to induce the birth. However, the induction fails and when a third specialist Doctor enters, the father knows all is not well. This cannot be happening he thinks, they have already been through the horror of a miscarriage. The miscarriage had almost destroyed them as a couple and Wood’s writing describes the devastation and desolation after the miscarriage vividly.

So, when their child, a daughter, is born but passes away through the night, the nightmare that they thought they had escaped captures them again. The explanation for their baby’s passing is given, but it fades to insignificance as the parents are destroyed. This passage of the book is gut-wrenching, the pain that both parents are feeling is unbearable, visceral, palpable, you can feel it. Horrible and yet beautifully written.

“I saw myself as a man hollowed out, literally scraped clean on the inside, vital organs ripped from my sternum and replaced with something dense and heavy, some fluid dragging me into myself, as if the cavity inside me slushed about with tar.”

Their marriage starts to dissolve, a life raft where the parts are slowly breaking apart.

"The loss of the life we’d conceived was, we knew, a tinder to the life we’d made together and now we were waiting, just waiting, to wake up strapped to the pyre.”

The novel is about the father who narrates the story, and his pondering, his ruminations about the life that he and his wife were expecting, compared to the life that has unfolded after the loss of their daughter. Grief, how to live with it, how to move on from it.

While grieving himself, he explores the grief of others. He checks the news on the internet and becomes obsessed with different stories, stories that involve the value of life. Crimes where life has been taken, and the inevitable change to the families and loved one’s lives. One of these crimes is the Port Arthur massacre where Martin Bryant shot and killed 35 people in 1996. How did the people’s families deal with such unimaginable grief? He thinks about the levels of grief that holocaust survivors and the succeeding generations carry with them.

At times, the novel is quite philosophical. He tries to compare his level of grief with the grief experienced in the news stories he is following. How do you compare levels of grief? Do the circumstances of the death change the level? How do you put a value on a human life? Is the value of his daughter’s life measured by its length? Can a father forgive his daughter’s killer? How do you explain to a child that their mother is dead because the pilot of the plane she was on decided to fly it into a mountain?

The problem is that with these crimes, tragedies, there is a guilty party. With the guilty party there is the possibility of confrontation, explanation, and perhaps forgiveness. He does not know who to blame for his daughter’s death.

The writing is exquisite and lyrical, but this is no easy read, and is quite dark and claustrophobic. But this is what Wood wants you to feel. There are multiple narratives, and many switches. But this book will have you pondering the same problems the narrator does. So, to sum it up in a sentence, this is a brilliant novel, beautifully written, about a father exploring grief.

[Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

2021 Miles Franklin Shortlist
At the Edge of the Solid World is the best novel I’ve read this year.
Intense, compelling and epic at times in it’s scope. So much to think about.
My top pick so far for the win and it should be included on the Booker list, it's just that good.

[Michael Livingston · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm still working my way through my feelings about this - it's beautifully written and delves into grief and the way it fractures people's lives. Wood draws fascinating parallels between his main character's grief and the suffering of people who've been through other, awful experiences. It's thoughtful and beautiful. Unfortunately, the narrator himself is hard to like - he's a bit smug, frankly awful to his wife and at times I found his obsessions a little unbelievable. Obviously the point of the book is the way that grief fucks people up, but I would have loved this unconditionally if I could have warmed to the narrator just a smidgen.

[Peter Mathews · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the Edge of the Solid World was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2021. Quite frankly, it should have won. It is not only one of the best Australian books published in the last year or so, I consider to be one of the best books I have read, ever.

The book begins with quotes from Virginia Woolf and John Berger, and a very brief preface in which the narrator affirms his lack of belief in the supernatural. We are already thus firmly established in an experimental mode of writing.

The opening chapter begins with the unnamed narrator and his wife, both Australians teaching at a Swiss school, driving through the Alps to a hospital, so that she can give birth. As this process unfolds, the narrator reflects on their previous attempts to conceive, in particular a shattering miscarriage a few months earlier. This pregnancy thus feels like a kind of redemption. The wife gives birth to a baby girl after an exhausting labor, and the narrator falls asleep with his new daughter clasping instinctively onto his hand. When they wake up, tragedy has struck: the girl was born with a terminal condition that pumped her life-blood out of her veins. The girl's body is cremated and the couple return to their home, devastated. Both sets of parents come to try and comfort them, but the narrator finds himself melancholic and detached, even as he writes down his thoughts and feelings. He admits to making many mistakes that eventually led to divorce from his wife.

Part 1: Demirović

The narrator and his wife encounter endless bureaucratic hurdles in the attempt to obtain a death certificate for their daughter. The couple are alienated from each other, inhabiting separate emotional worlds. The narrator sees a story on the news about a killing spree in Sydney: four children and two adults stabbed to death at a daycare center. The narrator is particularly drawn to Hassan Demirović, whose daughter was murdered, and notices how Demirović appears to be similarly detached from his wife, Jessica.

An immigrant from Višegrad in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Demirović's story is framed by suffering he suffered during the Bosnian war. The narrator recalls the beauty of Višegrad, but then recalls a story of how, in 1992, the local power station had been shut down because of the enormous number of corpses dumped in the river by the military.

More to come

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Despite the author’s off-the-charts ear for prose, this novel manages to have a much better first half than second half, but not for the usual reason that good authors tend to set up better than they run a plot. Here the writing becomes, for the most part, simpler and less interesting, and the switching around between various aspects of the novel (more complicated than the usual present and pasts) becomes, at times, practically frantic. For me, this study of extreme grief became painful to read without the perfection of Daniel Davis Wood’s first-half prose. But I’m glad I discovered his work and his publishing house, and I look forward to reading more of both.

[Tess Carrad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing writing. Despite relating one catastrophe after another.

[Sandy Sexton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this novel may help me to have a better understanding of people who cling to sorrow and grief for dear life, something I rather disapprove of, so I'm not sorry I read it. The character believes that if he moves on from the grief he feels at the loss of his daughter, it is proof that his love was not strong enough. After this tragic event he immerses himself in news stories and historical events which are tragic, examining each one in detail. Yes, around him the sun is shining and there are people who care for him, people he tends to treat badly as he chooses to focus only on his grief. Poor me syndrome.
I was reminded a bit of Peter Goldsworthy's novel "Maestro" where the Jewish refugee spends a large portion of each morning adding to his scrapbooks any articles he can find demonstrating human cruelty and folly.
"At the Edge of the Solid World" was longer than it needed to be to reveal the philosophical and psychological ideas relating to grief. I didn't feel very much sympathy for a character who invested so much time feeding his own unhappiness while spreading his blanket of grey misery over everyone he was connected to. In saying this, I confess my way of coping is very different, so for much of the 477 pages I was thinking, "For Heavens' sake, Man, give your wife a hug and get on with living". Perhaps this is what the author intended.

[David McDonald · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book requires serious commitment from the reader. Daniel Davis Wood provides a dense examination of consciousness itself - in the context of tragedy, love, history, recompense, relationships, desperation, resilience, bureaucracy, morality, folklore, loss, grief, and existential inquiry. Delivered poetically with lyrical expertise.

I can definitely see why people abandon this work. Much effort is required to stay focussed on the difficult content, and tangential threads. There are impossibly dark landscapes to traverse. It doesn't surprise me that many hang up their boots prematurely.

Ultimately, this work is about one man's search for order amongst fathomless depths of chaos. One man's uncertainty about how to map out ineffable territory left by a child's absence. A battle for peace in the face of anger and despair. A recognition of connection to everything that once was, and everything that will ever be. A humbling return to love, despite it all.

To say this book is unique would be underselling it. To call it a masterpiece would be closer to the mark.

[Babarella · Rating 2 out of 5]

started out well…

Sample was probably all I needed! After purchasing, it just became a rambling of thoughts without a storyline to pull me in. I lost interest @ 16% in!

[Wendy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really struggled to finish this book. I found the narrator unlikeable and whilst the language used in the book was evocative the book itself was way too long.

[Lisa Burling · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book yanked me into a multiple narrative maze that I found equal parts enticing, emotional, boring and frustrating.

It was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2021 and I get why. From a structural perspective, it’s faultless.

Interweaving the main character’s grief following the loss of a newborn baby with moments of collective grief (one fiction, the rest real), if I was a book award judge I’d pick this as the winner for this author’s sheer dedication to such a gargantuan task.

As a reader though, I really wanted him to strip back all the clever links, as his genius lies in describing loss and grief to the point where I felt it in my body. My heart ached and my stomach turned as he dove head first into the human experience. The honest rawness of his prose in these parts of the narrative are simply brilliant, and why I ended up only reading that part of the story and skipping the other clever literary parts. He could have easily lost 200 words and I wouldn’t have noticed.

The author’s style reminded me of the chef that wants to show off everything he can do in one dish; simplicity is always better.

Would I recommend this book? I’m not sure as I’m still figuring out how I feel about it. If I was rating it based on the author’s talent I’d give it 5 stars. But on my scale, which is enjoyment-based, it’s a solid 3 stars.

[Tracey Washington-lacy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author when talking as the narrator kept my interest. To a point. The many other stories when he wandered off into them were too much. I skimmed over them. Some trigger warnings for the obsession with the main characters imaginings of well known murders might have been helpful when deciding to read this book.
I’ve read many books about grief. I found ‘At the edge of the solid world’ difficult. The narrator unlikeable. Self absorbed and his disappointment in how ‘ordinary’ another grieving father was enhanced that.
I wrote a lengthy review (for me) as I read the story but will leave this instead.

[Staci · Rating 2 out of 5]

So. Many. Words.

This was my book club Christmas book, and I admit that I found the size daunting. But, I determined to read it so that I can report back at the end of the month.
While most books will focus on the outer life of a person with glimpses of their inner life, this book was all about the inner life with some glimpses of the outer world. It is a journey of grief, but with numerous digressions from the main storyline to gaze at other stories of sorrow. If you like a book that feels like a leaf slowly fluttering back and forth to the ground, then this is the one for you. I have to say, the title is spot-on!

[Maureen · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is not for the faint-hearted, at times it is harrowing, not least when he describes the labour and birth of his child. But as the narrator works through his own particular grief he becomes emotionally enmeshed in various tragedies like the Port Arthur massacre and other mass killings. He explores the parallels between his own grief and the grief of those affected by these events, so the book has plenty of tangents and none of them pretty. However as a depiction of how intense grief can drive us to the edge of sanity it works very well.

[Julie Seidel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this a complex and intricately detailed narrative on grief and mourning . It is both lyrical and poetic and jarringly violent and angry within the same paragraph. As the novel progresses it becomes entangled in multiple stories historical and contemporary which makes for disciplined reading. The narrator is so consumed he hinges on pathological mental illness and at times is so emotionally wrought to be hard to empathise with. A thought provoking read

[Mirna · Rating 2 out of 5]

An extremely interesting book to review. I struggled to get through it but I could not make myself stop reading it. It’s very character driven and introspective, which is a very acquired taste and I don’t think I enjoyed it. I also didn’t appreciate how events like Port Arthur were taken to be used in this book, and how it relied on stereotypes of criminals without depth. But I read it, so I can’t make myself give it one star. A very very confusing read.

[Ally Van Schilt · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is no doubt that this book is powerful, intense, highly intelligent and somber. It tells of grief and relationships and mental health and philosophy and everything in between. I found it hard to read more than a few chunks at a time as it was just so much. Ultimately it is brilliant, but the only reason I hold back a star is that it may have lost me in its philosophical ramblings from time to time.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I gave this book 4 stars because of the quality of writing. There are passages of brilliance. The remainder of the writing is exemplary without doubt. But I found the novel disjointed and difficult to wade through. Its scope is simply too wide and the various tales of tragedy just detract from the central concept of a couple dealing with the loss of a baby.

[Monika Johnston · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a tough book to read. The writing was very dense and the subject matter was tough. Its focus on grief and the recounting of mass tragedies was difficult to read at times. But ultimately it was a very rewarding read.

[Karin Pearson · Rating 3 out of 5]

DNF. I tried with this book.. I really did but gave up about three quarters through. It's a great book just not for me, or it's not the right time for me to be reading this. Graphic violence and too much grief and sadness. I couldn't continue any further.

[Nola Hancock · Rating 3 out of 5]

The depth of feeling passing from the author to the reader should elict more than 3 stars. But, when I find myself skipping over pages of text, it means that the author has lost me. Loved the title though!

[Olivia · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well written. Logical.
Very dark. Angst ridden. If never experienced perhaps it offers insights. Expunging. Cathartic. Raw

[Vicki · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautifully written but a difficult, long and depressing read.

[Arthur · Rating 2 out of 5]

A challenging read. I reckon I searched dozens of meanings, and definitions for words within the pages of this novel. Nevertheless, a pleasurable experience. Looking at the words on the page, and reading them out loud, I could clearly see the poetry. I could hear the lyrical quality within DDW's style. I'd say it's worth reading, for sure.