For Jean-Paul Sartre’s protagonist in Nausea, it was a stone on the beach that prompted overwhelming abhorrence at the nature of existence. For Rupert Thomson’s Phillip Notman, it is the beep of an electronic reader as it registers a travelcard. How to Make a Bomb (published as Dartmouth Park in the US), Thomson’s 14th novel, opens with Notman leaving an academic conference in Bergen, Norway. He is returning to London, where he lives with his wife Anya. Their son, Seth, has recently recovered from a suicide attempt and is now at university. On the Bergen tram, Notman feels that a “hand had wrapped itself around his brain, and it was squeezing”. Everything around him is suddenly “unbearable” because it is “artificial”.
At the conference, Notman met a Spanish sociology professor, Inés Vaquero de Ayala, younger than him and not a mother, who wears a red organza blouse at breakfast and whose lips make him wonder “what it would be like to kiss that mouth”. “Nothing had happened,” he reassures himself, but something has changed. He stays up late, sitting in the freezing garden of his comfortable north London home. He feels that the remedy for what he calls his “nausea” is to distance himself from the people he loves most. He buys a plane ticket to Spain, explaining to Anya: “I need to work something out.”
