This discourse is striking, and were it to have been written two centuries ago it might have been sub-titled ‘The long trek of a walking wounded towards civilization.’ It is about a young man’s struggle to achieve an at least viable equilibrium that he hopes shall enable to him to live with something approaching peace with himself and those close to him, and sometimes with those near him too. But it hasn’t been easy, and is described in what is in effect a journal that casts its net wide to include, for example, a dialogue with religion and faith as a leitmotiv that carries on throughout a startling story. The writer is a raconteur, and the book is written with a breezy candour that makes De Quincy’s ‘Confessions of an English opium eater’ look the model of self-effacing reticence. Which it wasn’t. Progressing through the book one finds himself exclaiming. ‘He said what? To whom? Really? Oh, wow.’ But yes, the reader goes back and, sure enough, he really did. We all have what Wolf Mankovitz called pillow-biters: recollections of things one has said and done that still, down the decades, occasion exquisite mortification in their unwilling recollection. Most of us do what we can to dig a deep hole in which to bury those memories, and heave a heavy slab over the top. Not, of course, that this ever works: out they climb, ready to ambush at the next opportunity that presents itself. But Justin has enough of these moments to shred an entire department store of pillows, and has had the courage to lay these out in etched, vivid, detail.
There is a very human inconsistency in his internal debate about religion: he perfectly correctly describes the history of the latitude that organized religions allow their believers to engage with complete self-righteousness in the most appalling fashion, on a massive scale, towards their fellow human beings, and correctly decides he’ll none of it. But then he tells us that, this notwithstanding, faith in a christian god has helped him. But he has needed to find strength to recover, and well, whatever works. Again, there’s honesty there.
And the people in his story! But then, he is writing about San Francisco.
Justin’s journey continues but, walking wounded as he remains, his account shows how far he has his peregrination has taken him. His discussion of what he has read along the way invites, though I do not know if this in intentional, his readers to consider its applicability to their own lives. The book will certainly prompt one to consider his own life and its realities in comparison with his. I am confident that it is very unlikely you will come across another book like this one.
