ash before oak (jeremy cooper)

Is this is a novel? A roman a clef? A journal? Ash Before Oak is billed as a novel but feels like a confessional, with so much of the author’s evident lived history carved into its pages. The autobiographical element becomes all the more fundamental to the narrative when, after opening as a nature journal, it unexpectedly turns darker, about a third of the way through. The narrator’s suicidal urges take over and the journal comes to an abrupt halt for almost two months, after, we later learn, he tried to cut his wrists in the forest and was hospitalised. This event adds a chilling dramatic motor to what might otherwise have been a genial tale of an urban soul settling down in the Somerset countryside. Will the narrator relapse? And what will happen in the tempestuous relationship with Beth, the woman who would appear to have become his lover and soulmate, but also his enemy? These questions pulse through the remaining 300 pages of the book. In the end, it doesn’t matter if this is all a conceit, or not, because the novel succeeds in engaging the reader in caring about the fate of the narrator, with his transparent and privileged concerns, no matter what. Cooper, his father a depressive headmaster at Harrow; an art/ furniture dealer; an insider to the likes of Gavin Turk, Carl Freedman and Joshua Compton, denizens of what would later be known as the YBAs; a Shoreditch pioneer, would appear to encapsulate a lot of the best and the worst of a certain breed of post-Orwellian white British male. Lacking a cause to fight, saddled with the values of another era, struggling to escape from a net of psychological despair, (the black dog), he nevertheless conjures from the very land itself a kind of magic prose, which maybe, just maybe, keeps him alive. It’s an engrossing read, albeit one which feels as though it comes from another Britain, a slightly self-indulgent world of antiques and prep schools, laced with a dose of arsenic.