If there is any sadomasochism in Purdy (and surely there is) it is in this strangely condescending behavior, in this mute resignation to the curse of the world, not in the sexual excesses or in the tortures. “He already in his heart is guilty of it,” says young Brian McFee, the renderer’s slave, about his master. It’s not the physical punishment which makes the sadomasochistic statement, it’s the mind. And the mind is not free: some evil spirit controls it, and the renderer has a name for this spirit haunting him, and it’s not Satan or any other personal natural or supernatural being, it’s hatred. Narrow Rooms is a study of hatred. Purdy describes hatred and anger as natural forces like hurricanes or earthquakes. It is staggering how we delude ourselves in thinking that we may tame hatred or anger. We tame what we are able to tame, but we can’t put the lid of self-­control or education or whatever on the erupting volcano. Purdy leads his readers closer to the rim of the volcano than any other writer of his generation has done, and with no complacency or artificiality. Complacency and artificiality you will find, and in spades, in many contemporary novels about emotional pain and suffering, long-winded pieces of sentimental literature in which the characters are shattered and vivisected by the writer’s sadistic impulses without ever having been alive in the first place. They were already hopelessly corrupted and actually dead from the beginning. When they kiss, it’s just necrophilia. When the renderer, or Brian, or Sidney, or any other of the characters in Narrow Rooms kiss, they move something deep in the reader because they are alive, because they have been in the same places of the heart where the reader, or any living human being, has been or will be sooner or later. Their bodies act and react to stimuli with wild unpredictability – it seems like the bodies of the characters have been gifted with greater liberty than their minds, as if the curse is less effective on flesh than on thoughts – but it is this unpredictability which is uncannily alive and familiar. We recognize the groping in the dark, the flailing, even the madness that it’s inherent to all our actions, equally shaped by confidence and despair.

In fact, the plot may end in catastrophe, and the atmosphere of the novel is gloomy, but any sensitive reader will be able to glimpse the fleeting conjunction of night and day that extends like a deliverance on all the characters. “I have written my name in hell,” says Brian, but he has done so through love, a love of an intensity and freedom only a few have experienced. Certainly not angels. Therefore, his doom is the reverse of a story of redemption.