Patience by Toby Litt review a yearning to connect – The Guardian

Toby Litts novel begins with its narrator staring at a white wall, studying the various blemishes in minute detail. It is 1979; Elliott has cerebral palsy and lives in a home for sick and disabled orphans. Stuck in a wheelchair, unable to speak except in grunts, his is a life spent stationary and largely ignored, starved of stimulation. A group outing to a shopping centre is such a rare thrill that he deliberately vomits in order to prolong it. His primary companion is the radio, from which he has gleaned a large vocabulary and an impressive knowledge of classical music. A keen logophile, Elliott will occasionally pause his narration to express satisfaction at having used a particularly pleasing word (marvellous word festooned; lovely word transubstantiated); he is an opera buff and knows his rallentando from his mezzo forte.

The most immediately striking thing about Patience which is the latest publication from the small press behind Lucy Ellmanns Booker-shortlisted, single-sentence epic Ducks, Newburyport is the almost total absence of punctuation. Each paragraph comprises a single very long sentence, with neither a comma nor a colon anywhere in sight. The reader has to feel their way unaided into the rhythm of the prose; the force of concentration required to do so has a kind of straitjacketing effect that aptly evokes the narrators constrained situation. His rich inner life notwithstanding, Elliott is desperately lonely and prone to bouts of despondency. The orphanage is run by nuns, and he struggles to reconcile their religious teachings with the reality of his plight. Wasnt it clear, he asks, that the most that could be extrapolated or deduced from our spastic and mongoloid and mental and other conditions was not divine love but divine indifference or rather non-divine non-existence?

Enter Jim, blind and mute but alive vividly alive full of mischief. The new boy is plucky and recalcitrant, pushing against the authority of the Sisters and standing up to the wards resident bully, a precocious psychopath called Charlie. Elliott is instantly won over by his spiritedness: The sound of Jims laughter was round like the plastic bowls and it did not fly away from itself like a broken thing but turned always back in to gurgle and restart as a giggle and thus I knew for certain Jim had known love. The two boys strike up a friendship and devise a language based on sounds that enables them to communicate with one another in a rudimentary way: Vroo I said Vroo and at the same time I wriggled my bottom from side to side to make the wheelchair shake and Jim answered using the strength of his hands to shake me in my wheelchair and so for the moment Vroo meant Shake which was wrong but at least another word.

Patience can be read as a meditation on morality and dissidence. Here the orphanage stands in for the church, or authority in general, as a thing that crushes your spirit for your own good. Elliott likens his suffering to that of the Israelites in the wilderness for 40 years, and observes that Jim is too much of a martyr and really really above all too much like Jesus. Like many before him, Elliotts understanding of Christian values leads him to fight against the very institution that instilled them. He hatches an elaborate plan which he describes with droll grandiloquence as a conspiracy of unprecedented sophistication and magnitude to have Jim wheel him out of the orphanage and away to freedom. Perhaps the path to grace lies not in being docile and good, as the Sisters would like, but in a single, glorious act of defiance.

But to reduce this novel to a philosophical allegory would do a disservice to its emotional depth. It is as much a story about the innate human need for friendship: the intensity of Elliotts yearning to connect, and his unbridled happiness upon doing so, speak to something universal. Now that he has secured an ally in the world, life takes on a new and overwhelming vividness: there was always more gorgeous detail than I had time or senses for and every caterpillar-of-a-When immediately became a butterfly-of-a-What and flew off into the flock of a thousand interplexing Whats whose air-dance of now being like this and now being like that was too delicate for anybody to remember but a god. The vibrancy of Litts narrative voice at times heartbreakingly plaintive, but also clever, funny and suffused with tenderness carries the persistence of hope in circumstances of deep despair. This is a very beautiful book, and deserves to be widely read.

Patience is published by Galley Beggar (9.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over 15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99.

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Patience by Toby Litt review a yearning to connect - The Guardian