Book Review: “I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning” by Keiran Goddard
The Conversations
At its outset, Keiran Goddard’s sophomore novel I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning is light on plot. It is essentially the voices of five different people living in a housing estate somewhere in England, and the novel feels like a series of alternating, extended conversations with each of them. It’s not often that you feel that a book is talking directly to you, but the experimentation of the book makes it feel as though the characters are all sitting at a table, telling you about their viewpoints on life as you try to make sense of it all. This is a book about talking, about addictions, poverty, secrets between friends, and grief. In a sense, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning is a challenging read. It isn’t until the halfway mark or so that the novel begins to congeal and have a point and the characters begin to feel a little less anonymous. That’ll either be an asset or a liability to the reader, but one thing is for sure and that is that I See Building Fall Like Lightning is a book unlike most of what is being published in the crop of British literary fiction today.
So who are the five people who populate this tale? There’s Oli, a cocaine addict and dealer who is only starting to make sense of his life by working on constructing a building that his friend Conor is the foreman on. Conor, in turn, is smarting from the recent breakup of his marriage and is friendly with a man named Rian, a friend who had escaped the town and nighbourhood that all five have lived in only to return with the capital to erect a high-rise. Rian has a secret that could impact the relationship shared by Patrick and Shiv. Patrick is seemingly on the edge of being constantly broke as his job is to bike around town supporting his family by delivering meals to others who can afford it. Shiv, his wife, is a childhood friend of all five and has a deep friendship with Oli. By the end of the book, one of these people — in the vein of a good thriller — will be dead. The others will be left to sort out their feelings and resentments for each other, including the one who has passed away. Without spoiling things, the novel ends with the prospects of new beginnings for some of the characters, though which ones will involve placing bets on who is best suited to survive tragedy when it befalls a community as it has in this case.
I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning is not an easy novel to parse, but it is entertaining. It is a short novel that can be read in a sitting or two, which is something of a liability because the book is mostly surface and doesn’t go deep into these characters’ backstories. As noted, there isn’t too much of a plot or storyline to this book. It simply is a character sketch of sorts. That may make the novel unpalpable to some readers, but those who are a bit daring and don’t mind the book’s relative brevity will find things to enjoy here. For one thing, it’s interesting that this novel exists without any of the characters having conversations with each other — rather, when they do speak to one another, it’s a stream of sentences that are particularly one-sided, as though we’re only seeing the conversation from the perspective of the other person narrating a particular segment of the book. That’s interesting and new. Additionally, the addiction arc of the story is fascinating as Oli can be both addicted to the drugs he deals with and also be the pusher — the man who has a habit of getting high off his supply but is never punished for it somehow. Thus, interesting things are happening within the confines of this book’s pages.
It’s far too easy to get critical with this volume, such as frowning on the fact that Shiv, the sole woman here, doesn’t get much “airtime” and we only get to know various characters’ comings and goings as they are needed to advance the threadbare plot of this story. If I also were churlish, I would note that these characters don’t have much of a different way of speaking from each other, making the reader never forget that this book is written by a singular author. Plus, I could be particularly grumpy and note that it isn’t clear exactly where the setting of this book is taking place precisely in England (before I read the publicity materials, I thought the book was set in Ireland for some reason). Still, having said all of that, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning is certainly a different sort of tale that has been told of this nature. It is highly literary and ambitious for its scant runtime of some 250 pages or so. If you are on the market for something invigorating and refreshing — something different — you will be well satisfied with this novel. It isn’t flawless by any stretch, but it is interesting enough (and I’m not using the “i” word to denote something that I didn’t fully grasp or understand or even outright dislike) to get readers riveted to their seats. I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning could certainly be more fleshed out and more well-rounded, but for certain tastes, this novel might hit the mark. It might have been better had it been more conventionally told and not padded out by extraneous monologues, but if you like walking down a path without being sure of where you’re going, this novel plays with the expectations of what makes a story and is somewhat successful in doing things in a novel fashion. Yes, this is a novel novel, and if that playfulness means anything to you, I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning should be a go-to book for you. It may frustrate but also delight in equal measure, which might be enough of a reason to read it at all to see what the fuss is all about.
Keiran Goddard’s I See Buildings Fall Like Lightning will be published by Europa Editions on February 20, 2024.
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