Submarine

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'Submarine'
by Joe Dunthorne
(Hamish Hamilton/ Penguin)

Like most 15 year-olds, Oliver Tate, the protagonist of Joe Dunthorne’s ‘Submarine’, has a restless mind in which anxieties, presumptions and predictions consistently collide. With a precocious intellect and vocabulary, he tries to resolve issues around love, sex, bullying, his girlfriend’s skin complaint, his father’s depression, and his mother’s suspected affair. Unfortunately he’s hampered by a generally fretful disposition and, of course, the absence of any meaningful life experience.

In Dunthorne’s hands, Oliver’s inability to communicate effectively, his limited success with girls, and his parent’s crumbling relationship, are all fertile ground for acute observation. The contents of the middle class fridge, nose hair, fat, moles, the anxieties of old people, teenage saliva, and several other bodily fluids besides, are all perceptively picked apart.

We feel for Oliver’s parents and Dunthorne draws their emotional pain all too plausibly, again through the minutiae - his mother’s narrowing lips when Oliver’s hurt her feelings, his father’s new jeans after he almost loses his wife to a more interesting man.

It is hard to dislike Oliver either; little shit though he can be, as he lies, manipulates, steals and provokes in an opportunistic fashion. He colludes with the school bullies, attempts to poison his girlfriend’s dog, and taunts his religious classmates with Post-It notes from God, but these episodes are at least as funny as they are wicked.

Oliver’s main ‘problem’ is that he loves his mum and dad and doesn’t want them to separate. Unfortunately, he cannot articulate this, so it is only his outrageous, potentially dangerous, behaviour towards his mother’s suspected lover that eventually thrusts his parents together again. One suspects he is simply venting the anger he wished his father felt. Oliver, like his mother, is deeply disappointed in dad, although one presumes that anti-depressants have dulled the poor man’s reactions.

‘Submarine’ is an excellent debut and Joe Dunthorne clearly a talent to be encouraged. I was left wanting to congratulate Oliver and his family for finally getting their act together; particularly his mother, for her courage in the midst of impossible men. Nonetheless, I must also confess to a slight sinking feeling. I fear Oliver may yet turn into his father; the sort of man who ‘has spectacle marks on either side of his nose bridge’ and ‘has memorised the number for the Pothole Hotline.’

- Claire O'Brien