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Live; Live; Live
The lapping of the sea was a lesson in mortality...'Live,' he heard, with each whisper of the water. 'Live; live; live.'
Through Lucas Judd, the dead make contact with the living, or so he believes, or professes to believe. He is a man of such penetrating insight and empathy that many have faith in his gift. They confide in him, and find consolation. Even Joshua, his sceptical young neighbour, seems drawn by his compassionate sophistry. But when Erin, a much younger woman, shadowed by recent grief, moves in with Lucas, the focus of Joshua's fascination begins to shift.
Such are the surface ripples of this poignant and precisely attuned novel. Its depths reveal the largest of themes - mortality and love, and the way in which the souls of those with whom we shared our experiences inhabit our memories. Characters appear and recede, to reappear once again as the narrative shifts direction. Living voices merge with the multitudes of the dead, leaving their trace or fading away, for now.
Live; Live; Live is a beautiful, deeply resonant work by a novelist at the height of his powers.
Through Lucas Judd, the dead make contact with the living, or so he believes, or professes to believe. He is a man of such penetrating insight and empathy that many have faith in his gift. They confide in him, and find consolation. Even Joshua, his sceptical young neighbour, seems drawn by his compassionate sophistry. But when Erin, a much younger woman, shadowed by recent grief, moves in with Lucas, the focus of Joshua's fascination begins to shift.
Such are the surface ripples of this poignant and precisely attuned novel. Its depths reveal the largest of themes - mortality and love, and the way in which the souls of those with whom we shared our experiences inhabit our memories. Characters appear and recede, to reappear once again as the narrative shifts direction. Living voices merge with the multitudes of the dead, leaving their trace or fading away, for now.
Live; Live; Live is a beautiful, deeply resonant work by a novelist at the height of his powers.
- GenresFiction
272 pages, Paperback
Published February 2, 2021
7 people are currently reading
160 people want to read
About the author
Jonathan Buckley
76 books54 followersJonathan Buckley was born in Birmingham, grew up in Dudley, and studied English Literature at Sussex University, where he stayed on to take an MA. From there he moved to King’s College, London, where he researched the work of the Scottish poet/artist Ian Hamilton Finlay. After working as a university tutor, stage hand, maker of theatrical sets and props, bookshop manager, decorator and builder, he was commissioned in 1987 to write the Rough Guide to Venice & the Veneto.
He went on to become an editorial director at Rough Guides, and to write further guidebooks on Tuscany & Umbria and Florence, as well as contributing to the Rough Guide to Classical Music and Rough Guide to Opera.
His first novel, The Biography of Thomas Lang, was published by Fourth Estate in 1997. It was followed by Xerxes (1999), Ghost MacIndoe (2001), Invisible (2004), So He Takes The Dog (2006), Contact (2010) and Telescope (2011). His eighth novel, Nostalgia, was published in 2013.
From 2003 to 2005 he held a Royal Literary Fund fellowship at the University of Sussex, and from 2007 to 2011 was an Advisory Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, for whom he convenes a reading group in Brighton.
He went on to become an editorial director at Rough Guides, and to write further guidebooks on Tuscany & Umbria and Florence, as well as contributing to the Rough Guide to Classical Music and Rough Guide to Opera.
His first novel, The Biography of Thomas Lang, was published by Fourth Estate in 1997. It was followed by Xerxes (1999), Ghost MacIndoe (2001), Invisible (2004), So He Takes The Dog (2006), Contact (2010) and Telescope (2011). His eighth novel, Nostalgia, was published in 2013.
From 2003 to 2005 he held a Royal Literary Fund fellowship at the University of Sussex, and from 2007 to 2011 was an Advisory Fellow of the Royal Literary Fund, for whom he convenes a reading group in Brighton.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
April 3, 2022
What I liked most about this novel is the narrator’s unyieldingly rational voice, including his insistence on questioning his memory. What I liked least about it is the jumping around in time. Sometimes I love this; increasingly more often I hate this; I think the biggest difference is how manipulated I feel. If it’s play, I tend to like it; if it's integral to the way the novel’s frame works with its content, I feel it’s appropriate; but if it’s about feeding and withholding information, I tend not to like it. It nearly ruined this novel for me.
The most exciting thing about this novel, for me, is how Buckley deals with dialogue. In fact, he uses just about every possible means of presenting people’s verbal and nonverbal interactions. There are actual dialogues, mostly short and full of short pieces of dialogue, back and forth, but there is also narrated dialogue, snippets in quotes, things told by others, sometimes even to others, that the narrator hears and passes along, as well as he can recall, and sometimes “quoted” statements told without any quotes, so the accuracy (and who’s responsible for what is “said) is ambiguous. One of the things that characterizes this novel is how ambiguous things can be in a story told with such apparent care, honesty, and sincerity by someone who, although sometimes (and increasingly as the novel goes on) part of what happens, is, for the most part, an observer (and often second-hand or more). The few other reviewers (and why so few? why hasn't Buckley found an audience?) note (negatively) that the narrator is unreliable, but I found his unreliability especially interesting.
And then there’s the semicolon, which is so unusually presented in the novel’s title, and occasionally in the novel. It’s great to see punctuation paid attention to, especially in a fresh manner, and without making too big a deal of it. The other thing notable about this novel's title is that a large part of the novel is about death and the effects of others’ deaths, with a deep sadness (multiple kinds of sadness).
The most exciting thing about this novel, for me, is how Buckley deals with dialogue. In fact, he uses just about every possible means of presenting people’s verbal and nonverbal interactions. There are actual dialogues, mostly short and full of short pieces of dialogue, back and forth, but there is also narrated dialogue, snippets in quotes, things told by others, sometimes even to others, that the narrator hears and passes along, as well as he can recall, and sometimes “quoted” statements told without any quotes, so the accuracy (and who’s responsible for what is “said) is ambiguous. One of the things that characterizes this novel is how ambiguous things can be in a story told with such apparent care, honesty, and sincerity by someone who, although sometimes (and increasingly as the novel goes on) part of what happens, is, for the most part, an observer (and often second-hand or more). The few other reviewers (and why so few? why hasn't Buckley found an audience?) note (negatively) that the narrator is unreliable, but I found his unreliability especially interesting.
And then there’s the semicolon, which is so unusually presented in the novel’s title, and occasionally in the novel. It’s great to see punctuation paid attention to, especially in a fresh manner, and without making too big a deal of it. The other thing notable about this novel's title is that a large part of the novel is about death and the effects of others’ deaths, with a deep sadness (multiple kinds of sadness).
July 31, 2025
I find it a challenge to attempt writing a review for this book, not because of the type of novel it is, not because of its literary conventions, not because of the style Jonathan Buckley employs within it, but because, on so many levels, it's not good; much like its anecdotal, fragmented style of writing, there's not a preferred entry point or a place to begin when it comes to reviewing this work--I feel that I must begin this review with a critique of the things that factor into this being an underwhelming, and, overall, unenjoyable, novel, but the thing is: I have no idea where to begin--so my best bet is to rely on my journal as a guide, a framework for this review, and that'll be fun, it'll be like displaying my progression as a reader throughout the 20 or so days I spent reading this: I initially begin my reading with high hopes--there're frequent references and critiques of and to the occult, Western occultism, to be more specific, such as Helena Blavatsky, the New Age movement, Aleister Crowley, and the skepticism behind their practices--I believed that I might've found the right book for me, as I've been doing my own personal research regarding the occult, not Western occultism, but occultism in general, not to practice it, but as a special interest on the side apart from everything else I love, and I started devising a reading path that would stem from this book onward: after reading Live; Live; Live, I could begin Rene Guenon's the Crisis of the Modern World, it only makes sense, after all, Buckley's book was promising to be a highly metaphysical novel, so why not?
That'd changed with the proper introduction of the most-named character in the novel, averaging between 5 mentions or more per page: a middle-aged man by the name of Lucas, who happens to be able to interpret what could be described as signals from the dead, who happens to wear a suit in the most casual spaces in public without actual reason, who happens to be, according to the narrator, one of the best people he's ever met, if not the best, very much so, that he essentially pulls a Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) and sucks his dick throughout the entire book, from the opening page to the back cover, but unlike Heart of Darkness, this doesn't resolve in anything, though it had made me appreciate the mild tedium I'd experienced with Conrad's book much more, because at least the book (Conrad's) was written well--there's no character progression, apart from the narrator, in a sense, but that wouldn't exactly work out, as he continues to refer to his narration as a 'report,' which implies that he's narrating from his present time, so we've no idea what he was actually like when these things transpired, only his thoughts and words as of now and what he tells us was happening, all whilst questioning his memory, from time to time, but still taking most of these events as exactitude.
This takes me to the fundamental structure of the novel itself--it's anecdotal in style, nonlinear, fragmented, vignette-like, with segments of nonfiction, or purported nonfiction, interspersed between--and I did like the supposed nonfictional elements, it helps create the effect of this novel being closer to the reader than it just being a novel alone, becoming something somewhat rooted in reality, according to the story; the narration is referred to as a report, constantly, but the thing I noticed a hundred or so pages in was: what's the justification behind Joshua's (the narrator) reporting and mode of narration if it doesn't become anything by the end of the book--nothing tells us why he's narrating it, nothing tells us why his report is out of chronological order, nothing supports it, there's no actual justification present in the story behind his way of telling it other than to provide the author some much needed leverage to avoid telling something cohesive--and of course, it isn't always necessary, but for a novel that frequently references reality, I do believe it'd be much better if there was an outside influence to the narrator's mode of narration, it'd feel a lot more grounded and worthwhile--what I'm saying is, two narrative threads, one nonlinear, one on the outside of the nonlinearity, would have been much better and would even make this a more gratifying experience as a reader, as well as a proper novel with some much needed depth to the story itself.
And now that leads me to focusing further on his use of nonfictional events: these events have next to nothing to do with the story, Buckley makes no use of them, they add nothing to the atmosphere past the twenty-thirty-page mark, they take up space, they aren't referred to later in the text, but these nonfictional spurts may as well be that second narrative I refer to in the above sentence, and if it is, it's flat, it's merely an aesthetic in the book to give it an air of research; the only way he somehow utilizes the nonfictional sequences is in pushing forward the medium-séance clichés that this novel would (sarcastically) be incomplete without; the opening half began so well, he didn't need to resort to this--it was almost unique.
Live; Live; Live has constant moments of exhaustive pseudo philosophy that never has proper elaborations or sit on a solid ground to actually exist within the text; in fact, it happens in more ways than one: if it isn't the narrator delving into his pretentions, it's him delving into Lucas', and if not Lucas', then it's a direct quote lifted off Lucas himself, all whilst throwing in a blowjob or two his way; any dialogue from this Lucas is pompous, I've never read anything that would prompt me to call a book pretentious, I wasn't at all aware I'd had that kind of bone in my body, I'd always assumed that people resorted to that descriptor when they're faced with something they didn't understand, but I've been made aware, I suppose this is an instance where that is genuinely a reason to say it; Lucas, as well as the narrator, frequently employ similes they frequently mislabel as metaphors:
"His repertoire of similes and metaphors was extensive. They were presented to me like jewels on cushions. 'Words pass through these mysteries like bullets through fog,' he told me. 'When I try to explain these things, I misrepresent them, necessarily. They require a language that none of us could speak.' Or: 'This is like trying to draw a diagram of the universe.' Or: 'I am not transposing these ideas into words - the ideas are the creation of words. The truth lies above the words, outside them.' [. . .] 'We are slaves to words and the reason that proceeds from them,' he said." [Page 87]
This exhaustively florid language does nothing but splash dashes of faint blue throughout the text, it isn't even florid enough to be purple, and many of the metaphors or similes don't fit the narrative or the circumstances surrounding certain vignettes at hand; take, for instance, this excerpt taking place during the prelude of a funeral, the planning of a speech that has to meet a character's controlling sister's requirements:
"Her sister watched her walk out of the room, as one might watch a person who is washing her hands for the tenth time in a single hour."
It doesn't fit the actual setting of being at a funeral for a loved one, it doesn't even serve as comedic relief which would too be completely unorthodox, it's just out of place, uninspired.
This takes me to another problem in the text which connects the aforementioned criticism together into a bubbling mush: Buckley writes with the idea that every sentence he pens will wow, stump, or confound the reader--he severely underestimates his audience's intelligence--and with a thorough read, you become aware that it isn't the character or the narrator's doing, it's Buckley's; after employing a simile, he will instantly explain it either in the same sentence or in the proceeding sentence, and it isn't a single-sentence explanation, but an entire paragraph, brushing shoulders with excess in the process--depending on the reader, this could be interpreted as condescending, or, in my experience, as irritating and a sign of his being out of touch with readers in general; for this reason alone, it feels that this is a YA book meant to push first-time readers out of their usual mold of simple narrative structures and topics that reside within that area of literature; it feels like Buckley is incapable of writing a sentence without the use of 'as,' or 'like,' or without Lucas' name for that matter.
"Bereavement is a perpetual earthquake, Lucas had said, said Erin; the aftershocks go on and on, becoming weaker, but never ceasing." [Page 220] exhibit Z of another one of the 2025 Booker Prize longlisted author Jonathan Buckley's redundant mode of writing disguised as a superficial pearl of wisdom that we're meant to feel ourselves moved by; as written in my journal: "the only movement this'd stirred in me is the overturning of thoughts uncovering my deeply-nestled urge to toss the book away and pick up something more worthwhile [. . .] I'm chasing the back cover so that I position myself in a place of authority to critique and judge this novel, to ultimately make an example out of it."
There're passages on boredom that I couldn't help but feel needlessly underwhelmed, by not just the book, but by this excerpt about boredom itself: it's superficial, unconvincing, arbitrary (it feels as though it was tossed into the story to add more words and to the pompous nature of Lucas [it doesn't contribute to any overall themes or recurring motifs, unless this was to be a metafictional moment of authorly self-awareness; all in all, Live; Live; Live is dependent on expectations it refuses to deliver, all whilst underestimating the readers' intelligence for reasons that elude me; I might not be intelligent enough to understand and will be needing Jonathan Buckley to explain this for me.
Buckley's physical descriptors concerning these characters aren't too bad, some feel a little too 'poety' for my own taste, but that's fine--my only problem with it is when it feels as though he's imposing on the reader a secret hair fetish he's imposing further on a character; apart from this, he goes into semi-great detail with most characters, apart from the narrator, and the pacing around these moments is pretty spot on, it doesn't drag on too much, but the hair thing appears a few times throughout the book, and there're some illogical inconsistencies where a character sees someone for a brief moment and could immediately relay the details of their face as well as their interpretation of their expression, and it's just odd--the entire book feels alien.
My favorite moments border on scarcity, but they exist--one of them happens about two times in the entire book: a proper conversation--I'm not sure what it is, but when character's have an actual discussion, with actual dialogue, it makes sense; every other instance of dialogue is a single sentence or a paraphrasing meant to make Lucas look better; another instance was a fictional account of Wittgenstein and his encounter with something supernatural; another being a few sentences that I thought were actually written pretty well; and for the record, Buckley doesn't write like shit, he's capable of proper sentences, he relies far too much on literary devices that don't do anything but exacerbate my patience.
Lovely; this review may sound angry, but I'm just glad to be sinking my teeth into something, in more than one way.
[40/100]
I'm not sure what I'll read next, but it might be a book by Yoko Ogawa--the 'Housekeeper' one; and for the record, I feel that more could've been said in my review, especially since I've dedicated several pages to this book alone, especially since it became a bit of a dreadful detail for a few days in my life that I had prolonged by means of procrastination, stemming from my AuDHD nature (I've also wrote a couple other positive things about the book, but I'm keeping them safely in my journal, it'll be here for archival purposes now,) but I rather leave my review as is, unfinished, structureless, unsatisfying, it's the closest you'll get to the act of reading Live; Live; Live without actually reading it.
That'd changed with the proper introduction of the most-named character in the novel, averaging between 5 mentions or more per page: a middle-aged man by the name of Lucas, who happens to be able to interpret what could be described as signals from the dead, who happens to wear a suit in the most casual spaces in public without actual reason, who happens to be, according to the narrator, one of the best people he's ever met, if not the best, very much so, that he essentially pulls a Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) and sucks his dick throughout the entire book, from the opening page to the back cover, but unlike Heart of Darkness, this doesn't resolve in anything, though it had made me appreciate the mild tedium I'd experienced with Conrad's book much more, because at least the book (Conrad's) was written well--there's no character progression, apart from the narrator, in a sense, but that wouldn't exactly work out, as he continues to refer to his narration as a 'report,' which implies that he's narrating from his present time, so we've no idea what he was actually like when these things transpired, only his thoughts and words as of now and what he tells us was happening, all whilst questioning his memory, from time to time, but still taking most of these events as exactitude.
This takes me to the fundamental structure of the novel itself--it's anecdotal in style, nonlinear, fragmented, vignette-like, with segments of nonfiction, or purported nonfiction, interspersed between--and I did like the supposed nonfictional elements, it helps create the effect of this novel being closer to the reader than it just being a novel alone, becoming something somewhat rooted in reality, according to the story; the narration is referred to as a report, constantly, but the thing I noticed a hundred or so pages in was: what's the justification behind Joshua's (the narrator) reporting and mode of narration if it doesn't become anything by the end of the book--nothing tells us why he's narrating it, nothing tells us why his report is out of chronological order, nothing supports it, there's no actual justification present in the story behind his way of telling it other than to provide the author some much needed leverage to avoid telling something cohesive--and of course, it isn't always necessary, but for a novel that frequently references reality, I do believe it'd be much better if there was an outside influence to the narrator's mode of narration, it'd feel a lot more grounded and worthwhile--what I'm saying is, two narrative threads, one nonlinear, one on the outside of the nonlinearity, would have been much better and would even make this a more gratifying experience as a reader, as well as a proper novel with some much needed depth to the story itself.
And now that leads me to focusing further on his use of nonfictional events: these events have next to nothing to do with the story, Buckley makes no use of them, they add nothing to the atmosphere past the twenty-thirty-page mark, they take up space, they aren't referred to later in the text, but these nonfictional spurts may as well be that second narrative I refer to in the above sentence, and if it is, it's flat, it's merely an aesthetic in the book to give it an air of research; the only way he somehow utilizes the nonfictional sequences is in pushing forward the medium-séance clichés that this novel would (sarcastically) be incomplete without; the opening half began so well, he didn't need to resort to this--it was almost unique.
Live; Live; Live has constant moments of exhaustive pseudo philosophy that never has proper elaborations or sit on a solid ground to actually exist within the text; in fact, it happens in more ways than one: if it isn't the narrator delving into his pretentions, it's him delving into Lucas', and if not Lucas', then it's a direct quote lifted off Lucas himself, all whilst throwing in a blowjob or two his way; any dialogue from this Lucas is pompous, I've never read anything that would prompt me to call a book pretentious, I wasn't at all aware I'd had that kind of bone in my body, I'd always assumed that people resorted to that descriptor when they're faced with something they didn't understand, but I've been made aware, I suppose this is an instance where that is genuinely a reason to say it; Lucas, as well as the narrator, frequently employ similes they frequently mislabel as metaphors:
"His repertoire of similes and metaphors was extensive. They were presented to me like jewels on cushions. 'Words pass through these mysteries like bullets through fog,' he told me. 'When I try to explain these things, I misrepresent them, necessarily. They require a language that none of us could speak.' Or: 'This is like trying to draw a diagram of the universe.' Or: 'I am not transposing these ideas into words - the ideas are the creation of words. The truth lies above the words, outside them.' [. . .] 'We are slaves to words and the reason that proceeds from them,' he said." [Page 87]
This exhaustively florid language does nothing but splash dashes of faint blue throughout the text, it isn't even florid enough to be purple, and many of the metaphors or similes don't fit the narrative or the circumstances surrounding certain vignettes at hand; take, for instance, this excerpt taking place during the prelude of a funeral, the planning of a speech that has to meet a character's controlling sister's requirements:
"Her sister watched her walk out of the room, as one might watch a person who is washing her hands for the tenth time in a single hour."
It doesn't fit the actual setting of being at a funeral for a loved one, it doesn't even serve as comedic relief which would too be completely unorthodox, it's just out of place, uninspired.
This takes me to another problem in the text which connects the aforementioned criticism together into a bubbling mush: Buckley writes with the idea that every sentence he pens will wow, stump, or confound the reader--he severely underestimates his audience's intelligence--and with a thorough read, you become aware that it isn't the character or the narrator's doing, it's Buckley's; after employing a simile, he will instantly explain it either in the same sentence or in the proceeding sentence, and it isn't a single-sentence explanation, but an entire paragraph, brushing shoulders with excess in the process--depending on the reader, this could be interpreted as condescending, or, in my experience, as irritating and a sign of his being out of touch with readers in general; for this reason alone, it feels that this is a YA book meant to push first-time readers out of their usual mold of simple narrative structures and topics that reside within that area of literature; it feels like Buckley is incapable of writing a sentence without the use of 'as,' or 'like,' or without Lucas' name for that matter.
"Bereavement is a perpetual earthquake, Lucas had said, said Erin; the aftershocks go on and on, becoming weaker, but never ceasing." [Page 220] exhibit Z of another one of the 2025 Booker Prize longlisted author Jonathan Buckley's redundant mode of writing disguised as a superficial pearl of wisdom that we're meant to feel ourselves moved by; as written in my journal: "the only movement this'd stirred in me is the overturning of thoughts uncovering my deeply-nestled urge to toss the book away and pick up something more worthwhile [. . .] I'm chasing the back cover so that I position myself in a place of authority to critique and judge this novel, to ultimately make an example out of it."
There're passages on boredom that I couldn't help but feel needlessly underwhelmed, by not just the book, but by this excerpt about boredom itself: it's superficial, unconvincing, arbitrary (it feels as though it was tossed into the story to add more words and to the pompous nature of Lucas [it doesn't contribute to any overall themes or recurring motifs, unless this was to be a metafictional moment of authorly self-awareness; all in all, Live; Live; Live is dependent on expectations it refuses to deliver, all whilst underestimating the readers' intelligence for reasons that elude me; I might not be intelligent enough to understand and will be needing Jonathan Buckley to explain this for me.
Buckley's physical descriptors concerning these characters aren't too bad, some feel a little too 'poety' for my own taste, but that's fine--my only problem with it is when it feels as though he's imposing on the reader a secret hair fetish he's imposing further on a character; apart from this, he goes into semi-great detail with most characters, apart from the narrator, and the pacing around these moments is pretty spot on, it doesn't drag on too much, but the hair thing appears a few times throughout the book, and there're some illogical inconsistencies where a character sees someone for a brief moment and could immediately relay the details of their face as well as their interpretation of their expression, and it's just odd--the entire book feels alien.
My favorite moments border on scarcity, but they exist--one of them happens about two times in the entire book: a proper conversation--I'm not sure what it is, but when character's have an actual discussion, with actual dialogue, it makes sense; every other instance of dialogue is a single sentence or a paraphrasing meant to make Lucas look better; another instance was a fictional account of Wittgenstein and his encounter with something supernatural; another being a few sentences that I thought were actually written pretty well; and for the record, Buckley doesn't write like shit, he's capable of proper sentences, he relies far too much on literary devices that don't do anything but exacerbate my patience.
Lovely; this review may sound angry, but I'm just glad to be sinking my teeth into something, in more than one way.
[40/100]
I'm not sure what I'll read next, but it might be a book by Yoko Ogawa--the 'Housekeeper' one; and for the record, I feel that more could've been said in my review, especially since I've dedicated several pages to this book alone, especially since it became a bit of a dreadful detail for a few days in my life that I had prolonged by means of procrastination, stemming from my AuDHD nature (I've also wrote a couple other positive things about the book, but I'm keeping them safely in my journal, it'll be here for archival purposes now,) but I rather leave my review as is, unfinished, structureless, unsatisfying, it's the closest you'll get to the act of reading Live; Live; Live without actually reading it.
August 15, 2025
Many of the things that have been said and are still being said are not true. People have arrived at conclusions without knowing enough. It has been said that I have misrepresented certain situations and incidents. We all misrepresent; we misperceive and we misremember. This goes without saying–which is not to say that truthfulness is never possible. I want to be truthful; I try to be truthful, and Lucas knew this. I did not dissemble. We were on good terms, though I could not be persuaded to believe. I made no attempt to refute him; beliefs such as those of Lucas are not refutable. I was intrigued, and this pleased him. I was interested in what he said and what he did, and in the people who turned to him. There were many conversations, some of considerable length, some revealing, on both sides. He was aware that I might write about our discussions. In fact, he encouraged me. This is to his credit. He knew that I would not be convinced, yet he confided in me. The modesty of Lucas should also be noted. He would not have wanted me to advertise his achievements, because he did not think of them as achievements. He simply happened to possess an unusual faculty, he thought. Having been blessed with unusually acute eyesight, likewise, would be nothing to boast about.
For more than thirty years Callum had been her companion; more than ten thousand days. And of all those days, just one of them now occupied the foreground of her memory. A single hour of that day stood like an insuperable gate in her mind–the hour of his disappearance. Beyond that gate lay all that could be remembered of their life together. There was much that could be remembered, but in order to see it she had to open that gate, and the door was so heavy that she was unable to push it aside.
Instruction now began. In a game of chess, you begin with the two armies facing each other; here, however, you begin with emptiness, and the potential for any number of games, Kathleen explained. ‘The possibilities are infinite,’ she said, gazing into the board, as if through a window, onto a landscape of thrilling wildness and extent. ‘You play not so much to win as to learn, to become a better player,’ said Kathleen. ‘You endeavour to create an interesting thing, with your opponent. The game is more important than the players.’ Whereas each piece in chess has a specific role to play, a particular way of behaving, in go every stone is equal. There are no hierarchies of kings and queens and foot soldiers. At one point in a game, a stone might be strong; later, the same stone might be weak. ‘Every stone is vulnerable, and every stone can cause damage,’ she explained.
For a while, a few years after my father went, a young couple lived at number 17. An attractive pair, as I recall. She had an old-fashioned grey-green gabardine coat, and I have an image of them walking arm in arm in the rain, with the man–Gareth?–holding the umbrella, like a stylish couple in an old film. They were often to be seen arm in arm; their happiness was remarked upon. Then the baby arrived, and every Saturday morning the glum husband could be seen, steering the pushchair around the streets; he had the face of a bolt-tightener on a production line, six hours into his shift. Some men do not like the idea of no longer being the sole beneficiary of a woman’s affection, my mother remarked, after we had passed him. This I took to be an allusion to my father, just as I had taken the husband of Belinda to be an envied paragon of love and patience and success.
‘This is the living, breathing man–the man in full,’ Lucas recited, from the back of the biography he was reading. It was a good book, he told me, but it was not ‘the man in full’. Though the subject was not long dead, and the writer had interviewed many people who had known him, the book was no more than a portrait, and a portrait is not a person. A portrait, he instructed me, was an image of the portraitist as much as it was an image of the person portrayed, no matter how ‘accurate’ it might be.
‘Sometimes,’ Lucas said to me, ‘I look at the words that have come to me, and I cannot work out what they might mean. Sometimes nobody in the room can make sense of it. It happens,’ he said, opening his hands in acceptance of the mystery. There were several ready explanations: playfulness on the part of the deceased; obstructiveness; or Lucas might have misconstrued. ‘And sometimes,’ he said, ‘the message really isn’t worth reading.’ The deeply obtuse do not suddenly become perceptive people after being translated to the beyond. ‘With some people, you could send them on a tour of China, and when they got back you could ask them what they had made of it all, and they’d say: “Big place. Didn’t much like the food.” And that would be it, pretty well. Nothing to say. Same with some of the dead,’ he said, laughing. ‘Being dead is lost on them.’
Another photograph prompted him to make reference to ‘the lifeboat road’. This gave Erin a shock, because ‘the lifeboat road’ was the name that Tom, aged eleven, and Erin, six, had used for a particular road in a town where they had once stayed on holiday; Erin had been fascinated by the gleaming lifeboat that perched at the summit of the slipway, and had needed to see it every evening, before going back to the cottage. The photo that made Lucas utter that phrase had been taken during that holiday, but did not show the lifeboat, Erin reported. Her naivety was radiant.
She brought in the laptop, and we watched the video. A donkey lay upon a mat of straw, in a corner of a barn; one could readily attribute dejection to this animal. Subtitles informed us that the donkey had for a year shared its stall and the yard with a horse that had belonged to the daughter of the family; when the daughter had left home, the horse had been sold. The horse had been collected by its new owners three weeks ago, and since then the donkey had not left its corner; it had eaten almost nothing; it was in mourning. And so, we read, the horse had been bought back, and we were about to see what happened when it returned to its true home. We hear a truck approaching and stopping, then the unfastening of a tailgate, then hooves on a ramp. At the sound of the hooves, the donkey lifts its head; it listens; it stands up, shakily. The camera follows the donkey to the stable door, so we see, in the moment that the donkey sees it, the horse standing in the sunlit yard, at the water trough, drinking. Slowly the donkey crosses the yard; horse turns, and the donkey trots the last few yards, to press its muzzle to the muzzle of the horse. Minutes later, both are eating, side by side; an hour later, horse and donkey are running together in the paddock. Erin, having pressed the heel of a thumb to each eye, said to me, as if she were a nurse conducting some sort of health check: ‘Do you think this is sentimental?’ Before I could answer, she went on: ‘OK. You could say it’s a tear-jerker. It is. But you have to ask yourself what’s going on here.’ To dismiss the video on the grounds of sentimentality was to excuse oneself from addressing the issue. ‘Only one question matters: Can it suffer?’ she told us. The vehemence was new and irresistible. Lucas said nothing, but a small smile expressed something like pride. At home, my mother professed admiration for Erin’s strength of feeling, even if it had not perhaps been entirely appropriate to start ‘preaching’ to one’s guests at the end of the evening. She had things to say about Lucas. As one gets older, there is a general loss of mobility, in the mind as much as in the body. ‘Your mind settles,’ she said, ‘like the contents settling in a sack.’ This, she thought, was what the ‘thing with Erin’ was ‘all about’–Lucas needed her to shake him up a bit, she said. ‘Just to be clear, though,’ she concluded, going up to bed, ‘I have no intention of living on potatoes and cheese for the rest of my days. You can forget about that idea.’
The beneficial effects of boredom were underestimated, Lucas informed me. Boredom was a powerful solvent: even in moderation, it could be effective in dissolving the ‘detritus of thought’ with which the mind is often clogged; in a stronger dose, it could dissolve much more–the self itself can be reduced to almost nothing by boredom, for a while, and the mind, thereby unobstructed, can become receptive to impressions and ideas to which it has previously been resistant.
Boredom sometimes was nothing but boredom, I countered; it was not always a balm. I was often overcome by a boredom that was only deadening. This was why, I revealed, I had considered removing myself to a town in the depths of France or Spain or Italy, a town with which I had no connection. It would not be picturesque; it would be a place of no immediate charm; only with effort would any attachment be formed, and the attachment could never be strong. Every day I would be learning; I would have to pay attention to everything; I would be freed from habit.
No relationship of hers had ever lasted more than half a year, she had told me, at the outset. This was not to be regarded as failure; she was not in any sense unfulfilled. After a few months the voltage dropped too much for her. It was not just the intensity of the sex that made those early months the best of life–it was the unruliness, and the acceleration of getting to know the lover. She never wanted to know everything about anybody; life was much too short for marriage. Miriam knew what Erin had been thinking when they were talking. ‘“ This girl is just not his type”–that’s what she was thinking,’ said Miriam, who had no patience with any talk of types. ‘I’m not that type of person’ was a sentence that made her want to scream. It reduced the complexity of the whole individual to a caption. When she was in her teens, and teachers kept singling her out as a disruptive element, her parents forced her to undergo the attentions of a psychologist. Now she had an ineradicable loathing of psychology and its classifications. ‘Who knows why people do what they do?’ she would ask. ‘The point is, they do it. That’s all we need to know.’ And once, sounding like Lucas, she reminded me that electrons were not entities that existed in themselves–they existed as charges, as relationships. It should be the same with people, Miriam argued. Only in relationships do we fully exist; every relationship changes us; but the charge can never be of prolonged duration.
Consciousness is likewise a mystery, as he pointed out. None of us–well, none but a few crackpots–has any doubt that we are conscious, yet there’s not a person on the planet who can explain how it comes to be that the body can have an awareness of itself. ‘How does mere meat come to think?’ he enquired, looking down on his hand with distaste, as if decomposition had already begun. No scientist can explain it, but its reality is undeniable, because we have proof of it everywhere, just as Lucas and his clients had experienced proof, many times, of the life of the disembodied spirit.
There was no signal, Lucas told me. But the woman was suffering, and he liked her, and he could tell that she had an illness that soon would kill her, and so he had decided to simulate a success–but only a limited success. As a man in the depths of a cavern sees only darkness for a long time, but at last something becomes visible, even if it is nothing more than a patch of lighter darkness, because no darkness on this earth is absolute, so he had detected a minimal quantity of information, the weakest of messages. A denial was what he claimed to have extracted from the air; a fading protest of innocence, from a voice exhausted by the effort of protesting, over and over again, unheard until now.
Lucas seemed ashamed by his duplicity, more ashamed, I thought, than was warranted by the story he had told. Then, for a moment, I imagined a deathbed scene of cinematic grandeur–a total confession. It had all been a pretence, he was about to tell me. I prepared myself to receive it, and in preparing myself I realised that the disappointment would be intolerable, for me almost as much as for Erin. I wanted Lucas to see it through to the finish. Had there been such a confession, would I, eventually, have told Erin about it? No, I would not. I would have committed that sin of omission, of course, to protect her.
While I spoke, my self-accusation was suspended. The speech was not insincere; the words were being spoken sincerely by a version of myself who had come into existence for the occasion.
A scene. Every Wednesday, I take my seat at the same small corner table. I arrive on the stroke of 1.15, and what I eat is always the same. The routine has long been an aspect of the character. I am wearing the white shirt, of course. The summer plumage. My table is by the window, so that I can distract myself with the spectacle of the street, such as it is. The invariable choice of dish signifies a certain austerity, perhaps; or a lack of imagination. At 2pm I depart, whatever the weather. A menu is taped to the window, facing outward, close to my seat. I become aware that a woman is standing outside, scanning the list; I look up, and at that moment a girl, perhaps already a teenager, steps out from behind the woman; the girl is Kit; the woman, Erin. A mime of astonishment is performed. A minute later, an embrace. It is a tentative manoeuvre; Erin receives me as though taking hold of a parcel of unwieldy dimensions. In her face there is evidence of anxieties of some duration. But the smile, as she reintroduces Kit, is the smile of many years before. We are walking on the seafront. The loss of Lucas is no longer acute. The sadness has been accommodated. It has become a foundation. We walk side by side. Inevitably, we talk about Lucas. He is with us. We sit on the shingle. Erin has much to say, about Lucas, about Kit. At last she has emerged fully into herself. I will not say that I love her. Words are too precarious. I could place a hand on hers. Everything is forgiven. But the moment must not be momentous. This is important. It must be light, and I must have patience. But things would go from there. It could happen. If not as I have imagined, in another way. Or this may be all I have. I don’t know.
For more than thirty years Callum had been her companion; more than ten thousand days. And of all those days, just one of them now occupied the foreground of her memory. A single hour of that day stood like an insuperable gate in her mind–the hour of his disappearance. Beyond that gate lay all that could be remembered of their life together. There was much that could be remembered, but in order to see it she had to open that gate, and the door was so heavy that she was unable to push it aside.
Instruction now began. In a game of chess, you begin with the two armies facing each other; here, however, you begin with emptiness, and the potential for any number of games, Kathleen explained. ‘The possibilities are infinite,’ she said, gazing into the board, as if through a window, onto a landscape of thrilling wildness and extent. ‘You play not so much to win as to learn, to become a better player,’ said Kathleen. ‘You endeavour to create an interesting thing, with your opponent. The game is more important than the players.’ Whereas each piece in chess has a specific role to play, a particular way of behaving, in go every stone is equal. There are no hierarchies of kings and queens and foot soldiers. At one point in a game, a stone might be strong; later, the same stone might be weak. ‘Every stone is vulnerable, and every stone can cause damage,’ she explained.
For a while, a few years after my father went, a young couple lived at number 17. An attractive pair, as I recall. She had an old-fashioned grey-green gabardine coat, and I have an image of them walking arm in arm in the rain, with the man–Gareth?–holding the umbrella, like a stylish couple in an old film. They were often to be seen arm in arm; their happiness was remarked upon. Then the baby arrived, and every Saturday morning the glum husband could be seen, steering the pushchair around the streets; he had the face of a bolt-tightener on a production line, six hours into his shift. Some men do not like the idea of no longer being the sole beneficiary of a woman’s affection, my mother remarked, after we had passed him. This I took to be an allusion to my father, just as I had taken the husband of Belinda to be an envied paragon of love and patience and success.
‘This is the living, breathing man–the man in full,’ Lucas recited, from the back of the biography he was reading. It was a good book, he told me, but it was not ‘the man in full’. Though the subject was not long dead, and the writer had interviewed many people who had known him, the book was no more than a portrait, and a portrait is not a person. A portrait, he instructed me, was an image of the portraitist as much as it was an image of the person portrayed, no matter how ‘accurate’ it might be.
‘Sometimes,’ Lucas said to me, ‘I look at the words that have come to me, and I cannot work out what they might mean. Sometimes nobody in the room can make sense of it. It happens,’ he said, opening his hands in acceptance of the mystery. There were several ready explanations: playfulness on the part of the deceased; obstructiveness; or Lucas might have misconstrued. ‘And sometimes,’ he said, ‘the message really isn’t worth reading.’ The deeply obtuse do not suddenly become perceptive people after being translated to the beyond. ‘With some people, you could send them on a tour of China, and when they got back you could ask them what they had made of it all, and they’d say: “Big place. Didn’t much like the food.” And that would be it, pretty well. Nothing to say. Same with some of the dead,’ he said, laughing. ‘Being dead is lost on them.’
Another photograph prompted him to make reference to ‘the lifeboat road’. This gave Erin a shock, because ‘the lifeboat road’ was the name that Tom, aged eleven, and Erin, six, had used for a particular road in a town where they had once stayed on holiday; Erin had been fascinated by the gleaming lifeboat that perched at the summit of the slipway, and had needed to see it every evening, before going back to the cottage. The photo that made Lucas utter that phrase had been taken during that holiday, but did not show the lifeboat, Erin reported. Her naivety was radiant.
She brought in the laptop, and we watched the video. A donkey lay upon a mat of straw, in a corner of a barn; one could readily attribute dejection to this animal. Subtitles informed us that the donkey had for a year shared its stall and the yard with a horse that had belonged to the daughter of the family; when the daughter had left home, the horse had been sold. The horse had been collected by its new owners three weeks ago, and since then the donkey had not left its corner; it had eaten almost nothing; it was in mourning. And so, we read, the horse had been bought back, and we were about to see what happened when it returned to its true home. We hear a truck approaching and stopping, then the unfastening of a tailgate, then hooves on a ramp. At the sound of the hooves, the donkey lifts its head; it listens; it stands up, shakily. The camera follows the donkey to the stable door, so we see, in the moment that the donkey sees it, the horse standing in the sunlit yard, at the water trough, drinking. Slowly the donkey crosses the yard; horse turns, and the donkey trots the last few yards, to press its muzzle to the muzzle of the horse. Minutes later, both are eating, side by side; an hour later, horse and donkey are running together in the paddock. Erin, having pressed the heel of a thumb to each eye, said to me, as if she were a nurse conducting some sort of health check: ‘Do you think this is sentimental?’ Before I could answer, she went on: ‘OK. You could say it’s a tear-jerker. It is. But you have to ask yourself what’s going on here.’ To dismiss the video on the grounds of sentimentality was to excuse oneself from addressing the issue. ‘Only one question matters: Can it suffer?’ she told us. The vehemence was new and irresistible. Lucas said nothing, but a small smile expressed something like pride. At home, my mother professed admiration for Erin’s strength of feeling, even if it had not perhaps been entirely appropriate to start ‘preaching’ to one’s guests at the end of the evening. She had things to say about Lucas. As one gets older, there is a general loss of mobility, in the mind as much as in the body. ‘Your mind settles,’ she said, ‘like the contents settling in a sack.’ This, she thought, was what the ‘thing with Erin’ was ‘all about’–Lucas needed her to shake him up a bit, she said. ‘Just to be clear, though,’ she concluded, going up to bed, ‘I have no intention of living on potatoes and cheese for the rest of my days. You can forget about that idea.’
The beneficial effects of boredom were underestimated, Lucas informed me. Boredom was a powerful solvent: even in moderation, it could be effective in dissolving the ‘detritus of thought’ with which the mind is often clogged; in a stronger dose, it could dissolve much more–the self itself can be reduced to almost nothing by boredom, for a while, and the mind, thereby unobstructed, can become receptive to impressions and ideas to which it has previously been resistant.
Boredom sometimes was nothing but boredom, I countered; it was not always a balm. I was often overcome by a boredom that was only deadening. This was why, I revealed, I had considered removing myself to a town in the depths of France or Spain or Italy, a town with which I had no connection. It would not be picturesque; it would be a place of no immediate charm; only with effort would any attachment be formed, and the attachment could never be strong. Every day I would be learning; I would have to pay attention to everything; I would be freed from habit.
No relationship of hers had ever lasted more than half a year, she had told me, at the outset. This was not to be regarded as failure; she was not in any sense unfulfilled. After a few months the voltage dropped too much for her. It was not just the intensity of the sex that made those early months the best of life–it was the unruliness, and the acceleration of getting to know the lover. She never wanted to know everything about anybody; life was much too short for marriage. Miriam knew what Erin had been thinking when they were talking. ‘“ This girl is just not his type”–that’s what she was thinking,’ said Miriam, who had no patience with any talk of types. ‘I’m not that type of person’ was a sentence that made her want to scream. It reduced the complexity of the whole individual to a caption. When she was in her teens, and teachers kept singling her out as a disruptive element, her parents forced her to undergo the attentions of a psychologist. Now she had an ineradicable loathing of psychology and its classifications. ‘Who knows why people do what they do?’ she would ask. ‘The point is, they do it. That’s all we need to know.’ And once, sounding like Lucas, she reminded me that electrons were not entities that existed in themselves–they existed as charges, as relationships. It should be the same with people, Miriam argued. Only in relationships do we fully exist; every relationship changes us; but the charge can never be of prolonged duration.
Consciousness is likewise a mystery, as he pointed out. None of us–well, none but a few crackpots–has any doubt that we are conscious, yet there’s not a person on the planet who can explain how it comes to be that the body can have an awareness of itself. ‘How does mere meat come to think?’ he enquired, looking down on his hand with distaste, as if decomposition had already begun. No scientist can explain it, but its reality is undeniable, because we have proof of it everywhere, just as Lucas and his clients had experienced proof, many times, of the life of the disembodied spirit.
There was no signal, Lucas told me. But the woman was suffering, and he liked her, and he could tell that she had an illness that soon would kill her, and so he had decided to simulate a success–but only a limited success. As a man in the depths of a cavern sees only darkness for a long time, but at last something becomes visible, even if it is nothing more than a patch of lighter darkness, because no darkness on this earth is absolute, so he had detected a minimal quantity of information, the weakest of messages. A denial was what he claimed to have extracted from the air; a fading protest of innocence, from a voice exhausted by the effort of protesting, over and over again, unheard until now.
Lucas seemed ashamed by his duplicity, more ashamed, I thought, than was warranted by the story he had told. Then, for a moment, I imagined a deathbed scene of cinematic grandeur–a total confession. It had all been a pretence, he was about to tell me. I prepared myself to receive it, and in preparing myself I realised that the disappointment would be intolerable, for me almost as much as for Erin. I wanted Lucas to see it through to the finish. Had there been such a confession, would I, eventually, have told Erin about it? No, I would not. I would have committed that sin of omission, of course, to protect her.
While I spoke, my self-accusation was suspended. The speech was not insincere; the words were being spoken sincerely by a version of myself who had come into existence for the occasion.
A scene. Every Wednesday, I take my seat at the same small corner table. I arrive on the stroke of 1.15, and what I eat is always the same. The routine has long been an aspect of the character. I am wearing the white shirt, of course. The summer plumage. My table is by the window, so that I can distract myself with the spectacle of the street, such as it is. The invariable choice of dish signifies a certain austerity, perhaps; or a lack of imagination. At 2pm I depart, whatever the weather. A menu is taped to the window, facing outward, close to my seat. I become aware that a woman is standing outside, scanning the list; I look up, and at that moment a girl, perhaps already a teenager, steps out from behind the woman; the girl is Kit; the woman, Erin. A mime of astonishment is performed. A minute later, an embrace. It is a tentative manoeuvre; Erin receives me as though taking hold of a parcel of unwieldy dimensions. In her face there is evidence of anxieties of some duration. But the smile, as she reintroduces Kit, is the smile of many years before. We are walking on the seafront. The loss of Lucas is no longer acute. The sadness has been accommodated. It has become a foundation. We walk side by side. Inevitably, we talk about Lucas. He is with us. We sit on the shingle. Erin has much to say, about Lucas, about Kit. At last she has emerged fully into herself. I will not say that I love her. Words are too precarious. I could place a hand on hers. Everything is forgiven. But the moment must not be momentous. This is important. It must be light, and I must have patience. But things would go from there. It could happen. If not as I have imagined, in another way. Or this may be all I have. I don’t know.
September 13, 2020
This is an unusual book - I chose it because someone I know (can't remember who) was raving about it on Twitter. Lucas Judd is a medium who may, or may not, be genuine. He knows whether people are alive or dead, helps with murder cases, passes messages on to the bereaved. The story is told from the point of view of his young neighbour, Josh, who describes first Lucas' life with Kathleen, an older sculptor with whom he lives, and then with a mysterious younger muse-like woman called Erin. Josh falls for Erin, which adds another dimension to the story. Live; Live; Live (interesting punctuation!) is full of anecdotes about the cases Lucas is involved with and sometimes the narrative doesn't seem to flow as one story ends rather abruptly and we don't know exactly where we are in the story. It has a dream-like quality, with the seaside setting adding to the atmosphere, and is beautifully written, even though some readers might find it a bit slow...
February 9, 2021
Just once, I'd like to encounter a reliable narrator.
December 18, 2025
tl;dr buckley explores his usual themes of truth, memory, and grief with a hazy, peripatetic chronology that revels in the mystery of life itself
Jonathan Buckley explores questions of life and death with a great sense of curiosity; Live; live; live, the oddly-titled eleventh novel in Buckley’s oeuvre of truth and memory, the third I’ve read from him, is possibly his most opaque so far. Whereas the absolutely breathtaking One Boat opens the reader up to the expansive possibilities of asking these questions, and Tell makes a show of telling someone else’s story, Live; live; live shrouds its characters, relationships, and chronology in heavy layers of subtly chilling ambiguity.
Our narrator Joshua opens the novel with an almost brash declaration of unreliability: “Many of the things that have been said and are still being said are not true. People have arrived at conclusions without knowing enough. It has been said that I have misrepresented certain situations and incidents. We all misrepresent; we misperceive and we misremember.” (1). Bold to start off any telling with a statement: not so much a disclaimer as it is a stated rule, a theorem, of the act of recollection. Then, Joshua takes us on a slow, foggy stroll through various episodes of his life. These are presented in a seemingly spontaneous order; there are no chapter breaks or numbers in Live; live; live, only double-spaces indicate that we’ve transitioned into a new memory.
Live; live; live centers around Lucas, who is a medium – or at least, is really fucking good at convincing others that he has such powers. We learn that, early on in Lucas’ clairvoyant career, he had used such powers to solve a murder. Who’s to say that any of what Lucas told Joshua is true? And yet, Lucas accepts it (seemingly) as fact. Does this make Joshua unreliable by proxy? Joshua never bore witness to these events.
The chronology is anchored to events in Lucas’ life: the “accident”, the “move-in”, Kathleen and Callum, Erin, and in the present timeline, his funeral and beyond. Despite the slow-seeming pace of the prose, we flit through various stages in Lucas and Joshua’s relationship with striking grace and ease, reminiscent of the inherent entropy in the atoms that we’re made of:
But Buckley isn’t mainly concerned with existence on a purely molecular level, he revels in the mystery. A mystery that Buckley obviously isn’t the first to want to solve; peppered throughout the narration are musings from other philosophers that provide thematic emphasis on the events of Joshua’s life. These come-and-go, like passersby on the same promenade, the start of which is just as unknown as the destination.
The craft of Live; live; live is remarkable; for a book that holds us at arms length, it has a strangely inviting quality to it. Buckley’s prose is measured and precise, lucid in the fact that we’ll likely not find answers to the core of existence. Notably, his paragraphs consistently end with a breathtaking sense of closure and purpose. The journey, though seemingly aimless, is not without movement or momentum.
Much like One Boat, there is a sense of conjuration, a summoning of sorts, with the narrator’s use of memory. Live; live; live concerns itself with ghosts, like, actual spirit stuff, and transmissions from realms beyond, to try to seek comfort in the living now. Buckley doesn’t grapple with the reality of grief, he opts not for emotional histrionics, he doesn’t prescribe a path forward from it. He is a keen observer, and in Live; live; live, a curious one. The spirits of our past, be them actual ghosts or just memories, are here in one moment, gone the next.
If the very essence of what we are hinges on uncertainty, what in this world can we possibly be sure of? The search for truth only begets more questions, more uncertainty. The only thing, which is certain, then, is to live; live; live.
In spirit form, he was still alive, and would always be alive. She knew this. But she knew it, she said, in the same way that she might know that a certain star is so many trillions of miles away, or that this room is filled with billions and billions of particles that cannot be seen. (219)
Jonathan Buckley explores questions of life and death with a great sense of curiosity; Live; live; live, the oddly-titled eleventh novel in Buckley’s oeuvre of truth and memory, the third I’ve read from him, is possibly his most opaque so far. Whereas the absolutely breathtaking One Boat opens the reader up to the expansive possibilities of asking these questions, and Tell makes a show of telling someone else’s story, Live; live; live shrouds its characters, relationships, and chronology in heavy layers of subtly chilling ambiguity.
Our narrator Joshua opens the novel with an almost brash declaration of unreliability: “Many of the things that have been said and are still being said are not true. People have arrived at conclusions without knowing enough. It has been said that I have misrepresented certain situations and incidents. We all misrepresent; we misperceive and we misremember.” (1). Bold to start off any telling with a statement: not so much a disclaimer as it is a stated rule, a theorem, of the act of recollection. Then, Joshua takes us on a slow, foggy stroll through various episodes of his life. These are presented in a seemingly spontaneous order; there are no chapter breaks or numbers in Live; live; live, only double-spaces indicate that we’ve transitioned into a new memory.
Live; live; live centers around Lucas, who is a medium – or at least, is really fucking good at convincing others that he has such powers. We learn that, early on in Lucas’ clairvoyant career, he had used such powers to solve a murder. Who’s to say that any of what Lucas told Joshua is true? And yet, Lucas accepts it (seemingly) as fact. Does this make Joshua unreliable by proxy? Joshua never bore witness to these events.
…to enumerate the visible qualities is to miss the essence; the essence is outside the words, always.(113)
The chronology is anchored to events in Lucas’ life: the “accident”, the “move-in”, Kathleen and Callum, Erin, and in the present timeline, his funeral and beyond. Despite the slow-seeming pace of the prose, we flit through various stages in Lucas and Joshua’s relationship with striking grace and ease, reminiscent of the inherent entropy in the atoms that we’re made of:
The world in which we live our lives seems to obey certain rules. It is dependable. Tomorrow morning, our surroundings will look much the same as they do today. Houses will still be standing; trees will not have disappeared; our neighbours will not have vanished into another dimension. But on the smallest scale, nothing is stable. Within the atom, uncertainty reigns.(52)
But Buckley isn’t mainly concerned with existence on a purely molecular level, he revels in the mystery. A mystery that Buckley obviously isn’t the first to want to solve; peppered throughout the narration are musings from other philosophers that provide thematic emphasis on the events of Joshua’s life. These come-and-go, like passersby on the same promenade, the start of which is just as unknown as the destination.
The craft of Live; live; live is remarkable; for a book that holds us at arms length, it has a strangely inviting quality to it. Buckley’s prose is measured and precise, lucid in the fact that we’ll likely not find answers to the core of existence. Notably, his paragraphs consistently end with a breathtaking sense of closure and purpose. The journey, though seemingly aimless, is not without movement or momentum.
Much like One Boat, there is a sense of conjuration, a summoning of sorts, with the narrator’s use of memory. Live; live; live concerns itself with ghosts, like, actual spirit stuff, and transmissions from realms beyond, to try to seek comfort in the living now. Buckley doesn’t grapple with the reality of grief, he opts not for emotional histrionics, he doesn’t prescribe a path forward from it. He is a keen observer, and in Live; live; live, a curious one. The spirits of our past, be them actual ghosts or just memories, are here in one moment, gone the next.
If the very essence of what we are hinges on uncertainty, what in this world can we possibly be sure of? The search for truth only begets more questions, more uncertainty. The only thing, which is certain, then, is to live; live; live.
March 17, 2021
Buckley set himself quite a task here: not only is this title almost uniquely unfriendly to the search engines at amazon/goodreads/bookstore/library thing; not only is it likely to bring back memories of (Saint) Henry James' lamentable attempt to introduce 'philosophy' into the otherwise greatest English language novel of the century, The Ambassadors, but it's also a nearly perfectly sympathetic book about a medium who hears dead people. The algorithm unfriendliness can be remedied by ISBN numbers. The Henry James philosophy is given a decent enough twist (guy who is most comfortable with the dead is also a kind of vitalist type). The sympathy for a manipulative, self-deceiving charlatan is impeccably carried out for most of the book. But ultimately, it's just not as well done or as interesting as Great Concert. That may just be my dislike of unreliable narration, which I find dreadfully tedious by this point of history. It's hard to do well; Buckley does it well; that doesn't mean it's worth doing. Very much looking forward to his next book, or to unearthing some of his old books at a decent price on bookfinder. Their titles make that a little easier than this one.
October 22, 2023
A young man recants his interactions with his neighbor over decades while skeptically analyzing the man's self proclaimed ability to commune with spirits. Through their many interactions they develop a deep friendship amongst an atmosphere of unspoken contention, stemming both from their discord around the supernatural and a building competition for attention from a shared love interest.
I really enjoyed the non-linear, stream of consciousness style narrative of this work. The book is effectively one large chapter separated into disconnected excerpts where the main character describes interactions with his neighbor over his lifetime as he remembers them. This untraditional structure makes peicing together the narrative enjoyable and the interactions feel more intimate as if you're hearing a long unrehearsed story from someone in person as he tries to remember relevant details while providing commentary.
The characterization and plotting is also quite compelling and the interactions between the characters are intriguing to analyze. The pacing can be a bit plodding at times and some of the excerpts feel a bit extemporaneous but if you like character studies and / or books with unique structure I'd recommend giving this a shot.
I really enjoyed the non-linear, stream of consciousness style narrative of this work. The book is effectively one large chapter separated into disconnected excerpts where the main character describes interactions with his neighbor over his lifetime as he remembers them. This untraditional structure makes peicing together the narrative enjoyable and the interactions feel more intimate as if you're hearing a long unrehearsed story from someone in person as he tries to remember relevant details while providing commentary.
The characterization and plotting is also quite compelling and the interactions between the characters are intriguing to analyze. The pacing can be a bit plodding at times and some of the excerpts feel a bit extemporaneous but if you like character studies and / or books with unique structure I'd recommend giving this a shot.
February 15, 2023
A somewhat inventive narrative structure and a mildly wistful tale of love and loss. Nothing groundbreaking, but Buckley’s writing is readable and enjoyable.
March 3, 2024
the only thing i’m certain about in life is that i didn’t fully understand this book.
November 11, 2024
this took forever to finish and for the most part i don't think i liked it... but it was interesting and opened my eyes and made me feel a little more at peace with death. the final act was bad.
December 28, 2024
I am not sure what to think but I enjoyed it. A slow burning story about wanting what you can not have.
March 12, 2025
found this last year and just opened to read it. Wow, wow, wow
August 8, 2024
DNF. The prose was interesting enough but this book just plods on. The pace is a feat of lethargy, languid and dawdling. No chapters make the feeling that you’re listening to someone two beers deep prattle on about their mundane life even more acute. Simply couldn’t get through it.
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