The Loss Adjustor
Aifric Campbell
Demy Hardback
250 pages
ISBN: 9781846687303

Daniel Hudspith

The Loss Adjustor is a novel about disconnection, about how occurrences in one’s life can cause fissures in relationships, in perception and, ultimately, in oneself. The titular character, Caroline, is haunted by events in her childhood and has retreated to the relative safety of a mundane existence low on the ladder at an insurance firm. Her childhood sweetheart is now a rock superstar, while her mother exists only to read books about history and arctic exploration, abnegating herself from any normal child-parent relationship. Caroline essentially lives in her head, replaying and reassessing her feelings about how her life has panned out. She only experiences some proper human interaction when Tom, an elderly fellow visitor at a graveyard strikes up a conversation with her.

Novels concerning disaffected characters who struggle to connect with the society they find themselves in are not uncommon, but are executed with more control of their material elsewhere – one thinks immediately of Gwendoline Riley – and The Loss Adjustor suffers in comparison. Caroline has flashes of empathy – when one of her clients, desperate, admits to making a false claim, or when following Tom’s wartime reminiscences – but all too often she remains overwhelmingly self-reflexive and shows no real development. Of course, as good modernists, we don’t demand teleological characterisation or tidy resolutions from our novels, but if that is to be the case, the prose must have some kind of purpose and verve in and of itself.  Campbell may be making a statement about the unknowability of other people’s lives and the inherent disjointedness of human existence, but all too often ‘The Loss Adjustor’ reads like an exercise, or, rather, a series of exercises that have been strung together, as though the author had a list of things she wanted to write about – suburban banality, the Second World War, the collective reaction to fame, generational divides – and set about finding a framework into which she could slot them. Not only does this create a confusing amalgam of subject matter where the relevance of one to the other is obtuse, but each is given only cursory investigation. For instance, at one point, apropos of nothing in particular, a conversation between Caroline and her fellow payer-of-respects is interrupted by her recollection of a sexual encounter; the previously studied prose replaced by the vocabulary of pornography.

This over-abundance is a shame because one senses that there is a good meditative novel about grief and its various forms that could have been written here, but it is obfuscated by the scatter-shot approach. Campbell is capable of some interesting turns of phrase (she describes someone waving ‘as if he was wiping all traces of us clear from a window’), but as often her prose is awkward – why would one describe the word ‘fraud’ as being ‘amphibious’? Furthermore, the ongoing ascription of imagined agency to the actions of dogs is rather wearying and, it must be said that no one other than Greil Marcus has been able to write satisfactorily about rock music.

So, a novel that takes disconnection as its subject unfortunately ends up being disconnected itself.  To a degree, the author (or the publisher) seems to recognise this and has included an explanatory note at the book’s end describing the random confluence of events that led to the writing of the book. However this merely serves to highlight the disjointedness rather than justifying it.