24 November 2006
We’ve all known boys who drink too much, like it’s the manly thing to do, and then there are the usual men that we avoid at parties or look the other way when they have to have a nip at nine in the morning and they accidentally fall flat on their face in the evening, but what’s really shocking is when you’re older and almost all the men you know are quietly drinking themselves to death like it’s the thing to do, like the Morris Magellan in Ron Butlin’s book, The Sound of my Voice. Morris is a good man with a nice job and a family and wife who love him. He is not in mid-life crisis, whining about everything he didn’t get to do, he is not a failure, he is not a depressive in love with his addiction, nor is he some cowboy jockeying on the edge.
Morris is just a man doing what we expect men to do, pretend everything is all right when of course it isn’t, it never was, not from the very beginning, but don’t let on - got to cover up that weakness. So after a certain age it’s OK to drink yourself to death saving yourself from the humiliation of old age, from going into the home you can’t afford in an effort to leave something of a monetary inheritance. In America where we live forever we trade one hard shell for another, the coffee and cigarettes of AA, where you recount the memories of your alcoholism like an endless rosary. I have friends who were addicted to everything under the sun but none of them were brave enough to attempt what Morris tackles, the real problem of listening to their wounded heart instead of turning up the good old deaf ear. Perhaps it is because Mr. Butlin is also a poet and his touch is so gentle that he can dig so deep into Morris and rescue the child from it’s prison of masculine trappings and time-honored drinking. No one helps Morris, least of all his patient and loving wife. Morris rescues Morris, alone like he has done everything.
The brilliant way Mr. Butlin uses one voice to trap us inside Morris’s crafty and at the same time clumsy struggle and then another voice to pull both Morris and us out step by painful step is one of the most effective devices I have come across. Instead of pounding the dark side, glorifying the drink, and wallowing in the shame until we are completely desensitized he takes us on a journey that is both humorous and painful. He looks for the feelings men are not supposed to have, much less discuss, so that when we finally find those feelings it is like a collision course narrowly missing a cement wall. This is a book of discovery more than conquest, but the conquest is there and it is valiant – the knight achieves his difficult task of uniting the feminine (emotional) side with its masculine partner.