Idiopathy - Sam Byers

Something has happened to Britain’s livestock. In fields across the country, cows stare uncomprehendingly into the distance, not eating or responding to stimuli. The condition swiftly acquires a name – Bovine Idiopathic Entrancement – and, with echoes of the 2007 Foot and Mouth epidemic, whole herds are despatched in great rural bonfires. The greatest fear is that the disease will cross the species boundary. This epidemic, a form of collective madness, forms the backdrop to Idiopathy, Sam Byers’s scathing satire on (amongst other things) misery lit, smoothie-makers and pop psychologists.

Idiopathy takes the Thatcherite doctrine that ‘there is no such thing as society’ and exposes the gaping void at the heart of this ideology. His characters revolve around one other, each floundering with no effective support mechanism. Each figure represents the betrayal of a lifestyle choice. Katherine is a Heart of Darkness inversion of the single woman trying to have it all cliche, Bridget Jones gone Colonel Kurtz, masking her insecurity with cynicism and a series of unfulfilling fucks with unsuitable office colleagues. Her ex, Daniel, uses his past in the eco-protest movement to find work as a PR for a controversial environmental research centre, to the scorn of his partner’s hippy friends. Nathan, a mutual friend, symbolises for Daniel and Katherine a vision of possible happiness – the spontaneous hedonism of the rave scene – but finds himself abandoned after a breakdown, his trauma monetised ruthlessly by his mother in a brilliant parody of the Julie Myerson controversy.

Too dysfunctional to support one another, the three are also failed by the friends and relatives who are supposed to nurture them. Katherine’s harshness is in part a rejection of an upbringing in which ‘she had seen her mother in almost every degrading situation in which it was possible for a mother to find herself in the presence of her daughter’. Daniel is the best-adapted of the three to normal life, but his existence is rather empty – abandoned by his mother at a young age, and raised by a father whose life revolved around the office, he is unable to muster passionate attachments. Instead, he tells his partner he loves her to avoid awkward silences, and politically, ‘like any liberal, he wanted less to change the world than simply to be around people who wanted the world to be different in the same way’. His inaction and perceived lack of integrity is a bone of contention with his partner’s best friend Sebastian, who is himself a merciless caricature of middle class new age aspiration.

Nathan’s betrayal is the most grotesque. Bored by the empty hedonism of rave, he confides in Katherine, only to be shot down. After a horrifically literal attempt to strip away the counter-cultural iconography he had adopted, he convalesces in a psychiatric ward only to discover that in his absence, his mother has written a book about the pain he has caused her. Reinventing herself as Mother Courage, she has become a media campaigner with a handy command of psychobabble and an overpowering sense of martyrdom: ‘You could say I’ve shown a callous disregard for your dignity and feelings. It’s nothing that hasn’t been said by certain bleeding-heart columnists already. But you could look at it as me putting myself on the line for you.’

In this portrayal of modern Britain, individuals ‘co-exist, interact at times, but consistently fall short of cohesion’. Instead, they psychologise and scheme without ever being instinctive or natural. In amongst the characters’ self-laceration, Byers finds time to dissect the language of pop psychology (‘sur-thrival’), the pointlessness of vast sections of the economy (‘MacGuffin jobs in which the supposed thrust of the company had little impact on the work of whole teams of employees’) and fruit juicers ‘powerful enough to wring nectar from a breeze block’.  Although Idiopathy criticises the damage done to society under Thatcherism, the left does not fare much better, being represented by a Greek chorus of aimless protestors wandering from one deserted car-park to another and bickering over ‘control of the means of coffee production’.

As the narrative progresses, Nathan, Katherine and Daniel are gradually bought back into one another’s orbit, like the unstable elements within an atom.  This paves the way for a final showdown which combines farce, tragedy and escaped cows, as Daniel finds his carefully constructed shell of normality under threat from Katherine’s controlling mind-games and Nathan’s nihilistic hedonism.

At times, it feels as though Byers deliberately twists his sentences to avoid turning his writing into a series of epigrams, rejecting the course of least resistance, but Idiopathy is well-paced, propelled along by the author’s satirical rage, which rarely fails to hit its target, and the set-piece ending is extremely memorable. He also writes about contemporary relationships, their highs, lows and complications, with wit, tenderness and insight. Idiopathy is an indictment of a society which reacts to horse-meat lasagnes and triple-dip recessions with shrugged shoulders and apathy. It also marks the emergence of an exciting new voice, and it will be interesting to see what Byers targets next.