The End of Nightwork by Aidan Cottrell-Boyce
Aidan Cottrell-Boyce's debut novel The End of Nightwork is a witty, deft examination of the body as a site of trauma and change
Pol – the protagonist of Aidan Cottrell-Boyce's The End of Nightwork and sufferer of a hormonal disorder – ages erratically. Told to his son in second person, his story of life with his wife Caroline – "your" mother – would be a fairly recognisable one (for all the ambivalence that such a word implies) were it not for its esoteric poles. At one end, Pol’s condition; at the other, his obsession with the writings of English Civil War Puritan Bartholomew Playfere. Civil and cultural unrest preoccupies Pol, and manages to mirror a fixation no doubt familiar to most of us: our ever-changing relationships with our appearance. A body, like land, is left marked by trauma, by the unrelenting passage of time.
Buried in Pol’s ultra-rare illness is a metaphor for the struggle to mature "appropriately". At 13, Pol looks 23. What would it mean to "act his age?" And when he looks 70 by age 34, should he resent his wife’s lack of desire? Cottrell-Boyce’s debut is witty to the point of masking its own heft. Testament to the quality of the prose is how lines of seemingly little consequence can resonate unexpectedly. Take this one, an observation about humans and snakes’ shared hormones that is purely factual, yet dripping in subtext: "We shed our skin too. We just do it more slowly." The End of Nightwork’s entire thesis is hidden in such axioms.
