My Life in Orbit

LoveReading Says

He was the boy in the playground who could not play football, and knew too much about comics. That boy has not moved from where he was, always laden with a sense of fitting nowhere. Yet after a lifetime of misunderstanding, of feeling like an outsider, he has a new label, and a new name which has given him clarity that he has never before possessed. 

Fantasticus Autisticus his best friend, Olly calls him. Alongside the voice inside his head which he early on identified as Daddy, they are the closest thing he has to a companion, a friend. On the day of meeting his daughter for the very first time, Daddy suggests that he tell his daughter his whole story. And so he starts thinking about it all as he waits, and we have front row seats.

The story starts with Atom. Atom Comics. He can tell you a bit about them. Since 1959, there have been 31,284 Atom Comics published and he has read every single one. Nearly all of them contain discrepancies that suggest to the eagle eyed reader that the story has shifted from one reality to another, slightly different one. It's his obsession.

He was in love with any order that consumed him, and the order was his world until another, took him over. We observe him shake and flap his way out of situations, totally dumbfounded by his situation. And we see him trying to squeeze the anger out of his legs (squeezing is the shaking and flapping's irate cousin).

When we meet him, he's routinely travelling with little sense of purpose around the centre of the small town in which he lives. He orbits around the high street until this one day his routine and perfection is disrupted. And everything changes.

He had come from little and was expected to lead to nothing. Growing up an only child of his single mother Lori, they lived on the outside and in poverty. Back poised on the brink of adulthood, a world that was for the other kids a place of jobs, sex and relationships, and yet on fundamental levels relating to these things, he was barely functional. Too uncoordinated for manual labour, too socially inept for an office, unable to make a friend, but still expected to form a romantic bond. From all sides it seemed he was expected to carry on marching into maturity however, badly equipped he was for the expedition. 

Then he escapes in the most unlikely way to the most unlikely place. To University to study Vibratism, to study the nineteenth century mystic Micajah Culp who has a link to the hallowed Atom Comics.  

After a few false starts he begins to find his place in the world. And we as readers delight in this. Such an unforgettable character, never named but always deep in our hearts. A brilliant book full of highs and lows, a rollercoaster of emotion and the power of friendship.

Deborah Maclaren

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