How do we deal with the loss of a life never lived? As with her first two novels, Night Blue and The Sitter, Angela O’Keeffe’s latest book uses an unconventional narrator to tell a beautifully layered story about human creativity, connection and longing.
At the centre of Phantom Days is Isabel, a woman in her mid-30s. She’s child-free, single, unambitious and working the same arts job she’s had for a decade. She has a few close friends and a loving but complex relationship with her mother, Maggie, who is recovering from chemotherapy. Though her mother thinks she’s going nowhere, Isabel is outwardly content with her life. But something is missing. “If I were to create a thing outside of myself, what would it be?” she asks herself.
This gap leads Isabel to fly from Sydney to London with her new boyfriend, Lewis, a man she barely knows but to whom she feels a strange pull. In London, they have sex, walk along the river, visit restaurants. But they struggle to bond. They eat in silence or bicker. They avoid eye contact when they’re together, as though craving solitude. They fail to see one another as whole people.
Photograph: UQP
Following a tradition of “it-narratives” – stories that follow the fortunes of an inanimate object – Phantom Days unfolds partly through the eyes of “Book”, a seemingly sentient object whom Isabel bought from its author at a book signing before her trip.
Book has its own voice, origin story, cosmology; “In the beginning,” it says, “the sky was yellow and did not change for years on end.” As Book is handed from its author to Isabel, it feels a “bright and all-consuming” connection; Isabel brings colour, life and meaning. What significance does this relationship between reader and Book have? And how can that connection be understood?
In some ways, this is a story about love. Not just human love, but also a love letter to books – and to readers. As Isabel and Book take turns narrating Isabel’s story to one another, the relationship between them becomes deep and intimate. The pair speak to one another tenderly, conspiratorially. “Even then I felt an affinity with you; we were fellow travellers …” Isabel says. But as they travel together, something sinister begins to unfold.
Lewis, neat hair, ears gleaming, smelling of “washing detergent and the sun”, is in turns golden, childish, innocent, menacing. Isabel studies him “for a clue as to the strange way” she feels. Is there something wrong with him? Or is the problem with her? The two are constantly watched by Book. But is Book a friend? A protector? Or something else? “I knew that I was capable of self-deception, of editing a narrative to suit my own ends,” Isabel says. But who are she and Lewis when they believe no one else is watching?
As we learn more about Lewis and Isabel, we begin to see the reverberations of childhood, and the ways in which connections shape people. Each of them brings with them a world of assumptions, beliefs, experiences and attachments. “No life is entirely its own; each is layered onto other lives,” O’Keeffe writes. The intricate layering of relationships throughout Phantom Days shows a deep and practical understanding of this statement.
When Isabel leaves Book behind in a taxi, Book’s world and understanding of itself and of human life begins to expand. It becomes clear that the ways in which stories are told is also part of the complex networks of relationality. The act of narration – and of observing – becomes a medium through which lives are connected. Relationships are, in part, built upon stories. “We never know the sum of ourselves, not when we are born, and not when we die,” Isabel thinks to herself. But maybe Book does.
At times, Phantom Days lacks subtlety. Some of the practical elements of the work remain unexplained. How, exactly, does Book see, hear and smell as a human does, despite being “made without eyes”? Hints at a bigger secret come across as melodramatic, while other aspects of Isabel and Lewis’s behaviour seem understated. They seem to deal with bizarre or dangerous events with calm underreaction. These details could strain for some readers, but I found O’Keeffe’s characterisation charming enough that I was willing to suspend disbelief.
Phantom Days is intensely physical and rich with detail: colours, sounds, processes, movements. Everything is noted, mapped out and understood in connection to the wider world, and described in O’Keeffe’s lovely lyrical sentences. This specificity creates a strange and marvellous realm in which inanimate objects become sentient and bodies manifest miracles.
Though it is told through the “eyes” of a book, Phantom Days is a wonderfully human story about the act of creation.
