The Enigma of Departure by Nicholas Royle

The Enigma of Departure by Nicholas Royle is a contemplation on death, the “departure” of the title. The narrator, whose name I didn’t catch, is asked by a magazine editor to travel to Venice and write about the British presence at an art show. On the way and in the city, he recalls his grandfather’s death, his father’s, and the relationship he had with a photographer called Xenia Contini, whose work is being exhibited in Venice.

The artist Giorgio de Chirico is at the centre of The Enigma of Departure: the narrator is going to see his work in Venice, and De Chirico’s novel Hebdomeros is part of the narrator’s reminisces—and forms the structure of the novella. In it, De Chirico draws on Nietzsche’s theory of the Eternal Return, which proposes that:

This life as you now live it and you have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh—everything immeasurably small or great in your life—must return to you—all in the same succession or sequence. (from the introduction)

A number of issues and images are therefore motifs. Death and the worry of death frequently occurs in the narrator’s life, specifically death by drowning—in a canal, in a pond, by a heart failure that sucked water into the sufferer’s lungs. He is profoundly affected by and fixates on it. He regularly thinks he sees his dead father in the faces of men and women. Also recurring is the time 1.28, which appeared in De Chirico’s paintings and appears in artifacts and at significant moments throughout the narrator’s life.

The possibility that these experiences are in part imagined is present, but Royle does not expose to what extent (if at all) this is the case. On the flight home from Venice, he is spoken to by his father—except the person is a Japanese woman. Is this a grieving man’s hallucination or is this the slight encroachment of the supernatural? (To what extent real life and the supernatural are mutually exclusive is another unanswered question.) It is not revealed whether the potential tragedy at the novella’s very end is true or paranoia. But it would, perhaps, be false for Royle to offer an easy answer to the enigma; he lays out a story, and the reader must draw their own conclusion.

Working through issues of recurrence and death via the lives of the narrator and those he knows, The Enigma of Departure is an interesting read. The prose is often spare, but occasionally displays beauty, such as in the descriptions of labyrinthine Venice:

Once you leave the main routes, the map is almost impossible to follow and you have to trust to instinct and your sense of direction, both of which are compromised the moment you cross a bridge and start following the line of the canal. WC Fields was right about water. It is not to be trusted.

Disoriented, you hunt for clues in the city’s myriad smells—salt, fish, damp, frying onions, rotting algae—but each one is a false scent.

Venice is an apt location for the narrator to reminisce. If The Enigma of Departure has a marked weakness, it is that the characters are more like vehicles for thoughts than people for the reader to care about. However, the discussion of recurrence taking place throughout the text provides enough engaging substance for the reader who enjoys spotting and examining the meaning of motifs.

Publisher: PS Publishing (Sept. 2008)
Pages: 80
Hardcover price: £10.00 [$18.50]
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1905834204
Jacketed hardcover price: £25.00 [$46.25]
Jacketed hardcover ISBN: 978-1905834211