Lenore Rowntree Reviews Ed O'Loughlin's The Last Good Funeral of the Year
Ed O’Loughlin. The Last Good Funeral of the Year. House of Anansi Press. $22.99, 196 pp., ISBN: 9781487010607
A month before lockdown, author and journalist Ed O’Loughlin learned of the death of an old love, impelling him to reconsider his life and write a memoir. Immediately, my mind went to — what did his wife think when he decided to do this? Only a handful of pages in and O’Loughlin is telling his wife he’ll get over it, but he feels very sad about the death. “She stared back at him, mistrustful. She would have to believe him, though he’d let her down before.” It’s clear then the memoir will not be about his former flame’s death: it’s been written because of it, along with many other poignant life events. O’Loughlin wanders around in and through time in The Last Good Funeral of the Year, putting salve on old wounds — a brother’s suicide — examining mistakes — a failure to catalogue his best writing as a journalist in Africa —reappraising memories, sometimes with regret, but always recognizing the fleeting beauty of family and his current life.
The topics, with the exception of events in Africa when O’Loughlin was a foreign correspondent, are not that unusual for someone the writer’s age. He’s a past middle-aged man experiencing shock that he’s getting old, not ready to let go of the notion he isn’t special. But it’s not the content here that is intriguing, it’s the variable and skillful writing styles.
The piece on his brother’s suicide begins like a Rolling Stone magazine profile. He describes his brother’s customized Nokia cell that opens to say Good Morning, Doctor Chandra, a joke referring to the movie 2001:A Space Odyssey. The detached coverage turns heartbreaking, when with a reporter’s detail, he recounts using a Stanley knife to take up the carpet where his brother’s blood had pooled: “Some of the blood there was still red and wet, though it had been over a week since Simon had shed it. It looked like it was still alive.” O’Loughlin had been in the habit of powering up the phone to visit his brother’s welcome message, until the day during the first March lockdown the Nokia wouldn’t take a charge, and that was the end of that.
The pieces set in Africa conjure the most vivid images. In Rwanda, he’d stood watching “the livid green banana grove north of the city, sunlight red from the dust of the erupting volcano, and watched them swinging the bodies into the mass grave … He saw the eyes of the young French soldier who was directing the bulldozer, stark above the mask that covered the rest of his face, and he knew it was true, what he’d read as a kid in his war books, that there is such a thing as a thousand-yard stare.” The setting and the events engage, but the power in these chapters is the sly references to the writing life. Journalism itself pales in comparison, newspaper work ultimately resulting in only so much fish-and-chip wrapping.
The chapter entitled someone who writes is his most brilliant. It opens with O’Loughlin saying to his wife if he ever writes about being a writer he wants her to strike him with a five-pound steel lump hammer. She asks, “why wait.” Then he recounts the words of an artist friend who believes writing is the purest art because there’s no hiding behind form, yet still the artist admires an American who won an experimental prize for writing a novel that was one long sentence. When O’Loughlin tells the friend Joyce ran that same experiment a hundred years earlier, you realize his entire chapter on writing is one long sentence, too.
O’Loughlin explains in his memoir that he never wrote news in the first-person singular, except once when he reported on the death of a twenty-three-year-old Reuters cameraman who was killed by a tank shell while filming the tank coming at him: “The story had already turned pretty meta.” And so it is that Last Good Funeral is a metamemoir written with no first person, only a close third, as if whispered to O’Loughlin at night from a bunk bed above him. Yet, there’s no annoying enslavement by form, or self-aware intellectualism, too common in meta writing. He has views, however, on why he does not write in the first person: “Maybe renouncing this I wasn’t such a selfless gesture. Maybe it was just a shedding of baggage, another excuse for hurrying past.” That indeed is the only way some highly personal topics can be approached, in a rush.
Whatever it is, shedding the I works. Mostly because this book has been written by someone who feels so excited when words spill from his fingers that he has to “get up from the chair and walk round the box room just to bleed off some adrenaline … and he’d do nothing else for the rest of his life and he’d do it for nothing if only he could.” A mighty fine way to feel about writing, and definitely the reader’s good fortune to have such a book to read.
Lenore Rowntree is a writer in Vancouver, BC. Her linked collection See You Later Maybe Never (Now or Never Publishing) about aging and sexuality will be out in October 2022.