Ours is an age of acceleration and dislocation. The pandemic hurtled us from the end of one decade to the early years of another without pause for reflection, and we can’t quite connect who we are now with who we were – or what the world was – in the Before Times. So it’s fascinating that Aidan Cottrell-Boyce’s thrillingly ambitious debut novel, The End of Nightwork, features a narrator who suffers from a rare hormonal condition that dramatically accelerates the ageing process. At 13, Pol finds he has undergone a “heterochronous shock”, ageing him 10 years overnight – and leaving him there. Now in his early 30s, married to teacher Caroline and living in Kilburn with their young son, Jesse, Pol still has the appearance of a sprightly 23-year-old. His fast-forwarded development feels strangely apt for our times.
The details of his sudden teenage transformation are startling: “They had to shave me every day, because the beard and body hair growth was so rapid it was getting in the way of the doctors who were trying to operate on me … They were trying to stop my head from growing too quickly.” The medics were watching “a boy turning into a man before their very eyes”. While tales of metamorphosis are deep in the collective unconscious, shapeshifting myths normally resonate because of their moral framework, or at least act to reinforce the commonplace that everything is subject to change. For Pol, his transformation seems to carry no such reassuring meaning.
Perhaps as a way of coming to terms with this, he looks for meaning in the past. An earnest autodidact, the adult Pol begins to research a book about Bartholomew Playfere, a fictional 17th-century tub-preacher who predicted ecological cataclysm. According to Playfere’s pamphlet The End of Nightwork and the Sundering of the Curtain in Twayn, the end of the world will begin not in the Holy Land but on an island off the coast of Connemara. Pol is so inspired he chooses the island as his honeymoon destination. He also feels a strange kinship when he discovers there are gaps in the prophet’s history: “His life story seemed to leap from his childhood to … his ill-advised pilgrimage to the island where he and his followers lived out the rest of their lives awaiting the coming apocalypse.”
While Cottrell-Boyce is keen to link the millenarian dread of the 1650s with the environmental fears of our own times, the book is far from a campaigning “issues” novel. At its centre is the tender relationship between Pol and his long-suffering wife, and with their son, to whom parts of the novel are intimately addressed. Cottrell-Boyce, whose own father is the children’s novelist and screenwriter Frank, is sharp and funny on early parenthood: the seesawing between weariness and joy, the battles over differing parental approaches and the division of labour. This is showcased during a memorable Italian holiday with other parents Pol doesn’t especially like or know well: “My hungover lungs feel like they are shrinking … I suddenly feel like I am an old building too.”
A counter to this tableau of stable family life is the radical Kourist movement, which Pol discovers on Reddit. Believing the world has always been locked in a struggle between the young and old, the Kourists suggest the “stage is being set for a final battle”. Along with Playfere’s prophecies, their Cassandra voices also provide Pol with meaning: “Because of the pauperisation and disfranchisement of the young by the old … the time for revolution and the restoration of the youth right is nigh.”
Unsurprisingly, with so much emphasis on theoretical contemplation, there’s a lack of narrative urgency for much of the novel. Yet when Pol undergoes a second heterochronous leap, as his doctors had promised, finding himself in the body of a 70-year-old man, the book takes off. The strain of this change threatens to capsize his marriage and separate him from his son, though his powers of perceptive reflection remain undimmed. He realises he has a “Unique Vantage Point” when it comes to the Kourists, finding himself simultaneously old and young. But when their protests turn violent, with a Day of Rage and the blockading of airports, Pol must save himself before he can think about saving the world.
The End of Nightwork is a novel rich in provocative and timely ideas, yet seductively readable. While the fashionable narrative method of short, separated paragraph units sometimes impedes the prose, Pol’s understated wit is fine company. And despite the novel’s complex philosophical and theological underpinning, its characters are always vividly alive. There’s a rare originality here, and a willingness to take risks, that promises great things.
• Jude Cook’s second novel, Jacob’s Advice, is published by Unbound.
• The End of Nightwork by Aidan Cottrell-Boyce is published by Granta (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
