Roughly halfway through Switzy by Emma Cline, a nine-year-old boy sits on the edge of his bed in a house in Marylebone and plays a symphony off his phone for his grandfather, who has asked to hear it. The orchestra is learning it for a showcase. The boy calls it the farewell symphony.
It starts gently. The old man lies down with his eyes shut and it is lovely, it is springtime, and then somewhere a drum comes in and the whole thing tilts and starts to hurry, and he sits up and says enough, enough, turn it off. There's thirty minutes left, the boy says, puzzled.
That is the eleventh chapter, and it is also, structurally, the entire book.
Where Switzy by Emma Cline Is Taking You
His name is David Hastings. He is somewhere in his seventies, a retired chief financial officer, and he has Alzheimer's. He is on a borrowed private jet, and the destination is a Swiss clinic with a bitter drink and an appointment already paid for in advance, VAT not included.
He has two errands to get through first. One is a farewell dinner with his daughter, who does not know he is ill and will find out by email afterwards. The other, the real one, is a village over the French border where a man he has not spoken to since school now lives.
Everybody in this book knows exactly where it ends. So does the reader, from about page five. That turns out not to weaken it at all.
Switzy by Emma Cline Is Frighteningly Good Inside a Broken Mind
I have read the dementia novels. This is not that.
What Cline does is refuse to make it atmospheric. David's decline is a series of concrete equipment failures and he meets each one like the executive he was, with a workaround and a straight face.
He has a small leather notebook with his own full name in it. He has a smile he deploys when a response is expected and he has no idea what the response should be. He has learned that if he says something mild about an object in the room, the conversation will politely follow him down that side street. When his assistant takes his arm on a staircase, he lets him, and privately calls him El Jefe.
The most upsetting scene in the book is two lines long and involves a pair of shoelaces.
None of this is narrated to you from a safe distance. You are inside the workaround, and when a word goes missing, the sentence just stops.
Switzy by Emma Cline Is Also, It Turns Out, Very Funny
I did not expect to laugh. I laughed a lot.
There is one road sign in Switzerland that David can reliably decode and it is AUSFAHRT, which he reads phonetically, with delight, every single time they pass one. He calls the clinic liaison Ghoul. He calls the driver Meatball. He mishears the name of the protein clogging his brain as a woman's name and conducts a small private feud with her.
The comedy is not warm. It is the humour of a very sharp man whose only remaining audience is himself, and Cline uses it the way you would use anaesthetic: it lets her go somewhere she otherwise could not take you.
What Switzy by Emma Cline Is Actually Writing About
Not death. That part is handled, wired to a bank in Bern, a receipt somewhere in the paperwork.
It is about an apology, and about the discovery that an apology is something you want rather than something you can hand over.
The man across the border shared a room with him for four years. He was cleverer, kinder, and much worse at hiding his feelings, which at a boys' boarding school is a diagnosable condition. His mother took David in for the school holidays and then the summers, and had the tact never to ask why he was so reluctant to be at his own house.
Then came the last spring, and a prank, and a decision about who it should happen to, and David was one of the boys standing in the woods with his mouth shut. Emma Cline withholds all of that for two-thirds of the book and then sets it down in short flat paragraphs with no music underneath, and the flatness is what does the damage.
What happens when he finally reaches the house is the best fifteen minutes in the novel. The man is not cruel. He is not even angry. He simply will not agree to be the last item on somebody else's checklist, and he goes back inside.
Where Switzy by Emma Cline Loses Its Grip
The one strand that lost me is David on modern life. Four or five times he goes off on the young and their higher-order thinking, their blank eyes, the phones, the world grown as addled as his brain. The first time it is bracing. By the fourth it stops sounding like a character and starts sounding like an essay somebody has parked in his head.
The daughter is a problem too. In her second scene David sees something about her life, just for a second, and buries it and never speaks of it to anyone. It is four lines and it is the only genuinely alive thing about her. The rest is supplements, worried emails and a voice that goes up an octave, and the novel is not interested in finding out more.
And there is a long sequence in a hotel bar and then a hotel bathroom, with a much younger woman, a bathtub and a stolen jumper, that says one thing about desire in five pages and then keeps going for twenty.
Also, plainly: almost nothing happens. If that is a dealbreaker for you, it will be a very long two hundred pages.
A note on content, since this one needs it: an assisted death shown in full, step by step, including the room and the paperwork and the video camera. Dementia written without any softening at all, including incontinence and the smell of a body ageing. A school assault involving a gun. Heavy drinking. If you are anywhere near this territory yourself, Samaritans answer the phone at any hour, and this book will keep.
If You Finish This and Need Something Else
If it is the buried school material you want more of rather than Emma Cline's sentences, then Julian Barnes did a compressed version of this in The Sense of an Ending: retired narrator, one friend from sixth form, and a recollection that turns out to have been tidying up after itself for forty years. Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day is the other obvious neighbour, for the long drive taken in order to say something and the failure to say it. Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey is the gentler way into all this, because it gives you a mystery to hold on to. And The Things We Never Say, from this same longlist, is about relatives who have collectively decided which subject stays closed.
Where Switzy by Emma Cline Leaves You
The last three pages stop using his name. They switch to you, and they simply inventory what one body got up to over seventy-odd years. Writing a Christmas list of everything you did not have. Pretending your homework was done so you could play, then waking yourself at midnight to actually do it, because even at nine you were looking for a way to steal time back. Swallowing a warm mouthful of your own nosebleed. Laughing so hard you wet yourself. Going to a nightclub alone, once, and being brave there.
I read them, then read them again, then put the book down and did not pick anything else up for the rest of the evening.
Emma Cline has written four books now and this is the one where the coldness she is known for turns out to have been holding something.
I should be straight about the cost, though. Those three pages are doing an enormous amount of work that the hundred before them could have shared, the daughter never becomes a person, and the running joke about phones and rich people is made several times more than it needed to be. Switzy by Emma Cline is a very fine novel with a great one buried in its last chapter. I would be surprised if it misses the shortlist, and I would not put money on it winning.