The Supplement
Product Description
When Luke Joseph is asked to write his own newspaper column his suspicion is finally justified: greatness awaits him. For too long now his true worth has been kept hidden by the ignorance and apathy of those lucky enough- or otherwise- to know him. All that is set to change. Finally he has found something he might just be able to stick around for. A country boy in love with the city of Dublin, Luke works for a struggling newspaper and lives alone in a shabby bedsit with only a cracked ceiling and the caws of the crows outside for company. Company, though, is nothing more than a distraction for Luke, a distraction from his favourite pastime of pacing back and forth, shaking his pen at an invisible brat and scribbling down his next ground-breaking opinion piece. Determined to distinguish himself, Luke ignores his editor’s advice and writes piece after provocative piece in his near hopeless quest for recognition.
Tags: supplement
April 14th, 2010 at 11:34 pm
When Luke Joseph is asked to write his own newspaper column his suspicion is finally justified: greatness awaits him. For too long now his true worth has been kept hidden by the ignorance and apathy of those lucky enough- or otherwise- to know him. All that is set to change. Finally he has found something he might just be able to stick around for, the “…explosion of approving guffaws and mumbles from double-chinned godfathers of the media world…”
A country boy in love with the city of Dublin, Luke works for a struggling newspaper and lives alone in a shabby bedsit with only a cracked ceiling and the caws of the crows outside for company. Company, though, is nothing more than a distraction for Luke, a distraction from his favourite pastime of pacing back and forth, shaking his pen at an invisible brat and scribbling down his next ground-breaking opinion piece. Determined to distinguish himself, Luke ignores all advice and writes piece after provocative piece in his quest for recognition, much to the annoyance of his editor.
Luke’s solitary existence is interrupted from time to time by three female work colleagues, known only to him as `the gaggle’, who “manage to fit in a talk show’s worth of gossip each day.” The four of them trek to a pub almost every week, forcing Luke to endure the “handbag perching and endless fixing of clothes.” He finds an unlikely friend and mentor in Hugh, the newspaper’s editor in chief. Although they appear to be the polar opposite of each other- the fat, bald fifty-six year old and the twenty-two year old “pale skinned bone sack,” Luke soon discovers he has found a distorted reflection of himself in the man: foul-mouthed, heavy drinking, world-weary and vain.
Hugh confides in the young man he has taken under his wing, allowing Luke to discover that his new best friend is a man of contradictions, small on morals yet raked by guilt about the disappointment his deceased war hero father, the newspaper’s previous editor, had in him.
Despite initial attempts to dislike Hugh’s wife, not without influence from the editor himself, the pair begin to develop a friendship around the same time Luke’s own bond with Hugh is beginning to show cracks. It is through this friendship that Luke begins to discover secrets about the editor which, despite his low opinion of humanity, still manage to shock him.
While the young columnist struggles to keep alive an awkward secret affair with salacious co-worker Aine, he could not possibly know that yet more secrets, closer to home this time, are about to be revealed, secrets which will change everyone’s lives irreversibly. Luke soon finds himself having to make decisions he has spent his life avoiding, questions of loyalty and morals from which he cannot escape.
Powerless to stop the downward spiral that each new day brings, Luke can only stand muted and watch as the castles of pride and self-importance he has built for himself crumble as quickly and without reason as they appeared.
It is a one-person story, and Luke is central to the development. It is largely an examination of the character, the relationships and the history of the protagonist.
A core theme of the novella is the passing of time. The main character is still very young, in his early twenties, yet is beginning to notice that the past is becoming an ever-increasing mass lying in his wake while the present remains a mere indefinable flash, almost immaterial compared to the solidity of events that have already happened, saying at one point that “..the present is always an anti-climax, a watered down version of the past.” Luke finds it baffling that he is so tantalisingly close to his beloved past yet always outside of it, going so far as to convince himself that there is a seminal flaw in the passage of time, that “We as a species seem to be a year or two ahead of where we truly should be. Some minute little cosmic glitch put us a nose in front of our true place in the line of time. So now we spend our lives looking behind ourselves, just over our shoulders at the misty bliss. The left-behind happiness.”
His frustration at this unapologetic forward movement becomes evident later in the book as he begins to become aware of his own ageing, noting that with each new day he is older than he has ever been, “..the baldest, palest, fattest version yet.”
As the story develops, Luke `jumps ship’ as it were, shifting loyalty from his editor Hugh- “You remind me of myself a little bit Luke”- to the editor’s wife Catherine- “In that moment I could’ve embraced her and held her until one of us died.” Around the first half of the novella the reader could be forgiven for thinking that Luke is a misogynistic, self righteous young man whose outspokenness can be attributed to narcissism rather than wisdom of the world. However, his slight softening of character which is witnessed as his friendship with Catherine blossoms suggests that his initial tough attitude is based more on an imitation of the personality he is exposed to rather than any solid conclusions he may have come to on his own.
The Book of Evidence
The Infinities
The Catcher in the Rye
The Secret History
The Great Gatsby
Rating: 5 / 5