I Read Iain Reid’s ‘We Spread’.

We are only temporary. We are eventually blown apart, annihilated over so many little moments. We have no clue how long this tunnel we traverse will be, how long we get to hover in this menial dark. Across this stretch, there’s no way to choose what we will remember, only getting to live in the stencil that we craft from our experiences, evolving and adapting ourselves to be better tomorrow than we were today. Our greatest ambition is to maintain our passion for the things that brought us joy and to cast a light which others wish to crowd around. The more time we spend living, the harsher the waves crash against the days we’ve accumulated. Every month, every hour of erosion can steal a piece of who we are.

In this book, Iain Reid isolates the protagonist Penny in the harsh spotlight of Age and illustrates the fears of what it means to be Old. Joys simmer in small fires. Scant happiness burns more as a wish on a horizon than an experience to be basked in. The book’s first phase frames a life of reflection on a life which was filled with five decades in the same apartment with the same person. Each of them were living an artistic lifestyle, excited to paint, to capture emotion and raw experiences in their abstract creations. Penny’s nameless partner intrigued her, stirred a love and a coy attention based on the things he would paint, on the way he would talk about what he loved, on the way he would approach and attack things. She would fall in love with the way he treated her. As the man aged, it’s illustrated that he has fallen into a routine of the mind instead of chasing the fire in his heart. As the volume of his passion decreased, the crassness of his character began to show through more. And in a long-term relationship kind of way, Penny began to feel resentment towards him. She no longer felt a longing for the man she lived with. She also couldn’t feel anything for the artists she once loved. For the books she used to love to read.

The blade of life had been dulled.

Going from her apartment filled with memories which are now drained of life to a retreat where she can spend time with a few other older people and a small staff of two caretakers, Penny begins her transition tentatively, but eventually begins to find and then lose her footing.

And this is something that the book examines in full over the course of just under 300 pages. What comforts us as we trudge deeper into our lives? Who do we bring along with us on our journey forward along the axis of time? Why do we continue to engage in archaic routine if they no longer bring us joy? Where is home to us? When have we had enough time?

Reading through this book felt a little bit like we were reading an analogue for something, a parable or a fable of something that was shifted off the rail of reality. Everything began to feel like it stood for something different, something deeper. Somewhere about 10% through Part Two of the book (less than 50 pages in) things started to feel surreal, almost along the lines of Our Wives Under the Sea, where it becomes difficult to see the full scale and scope of the story if you are trying to read the story exactly as it presents. For my interpretation of the book, though, I tend to think that a lot of the way the narrative plays out should be read through the perspective of someone whose mind is rusting, whose perception is simply unable to bear the machinations of life. I have never had grandparents, but I know that my grandfather dealt with dementia towards the end of his life and I was told that it tore my mother and her sisters apart having to watch him go through that. I also know that my father’s mother passed away after many years of her physical body long outlasting the capacity of her mind.

Towards the end, there must be fear. There must be danger. There must be a total lack of understanding of the world as it is around you. No matter the comforts that we adorn our lives with, they forever drag us back to the places where we were the most convenient, us at our most powerful. And it must make us incredibly weak to know that we will never again feel inspiration, we will never again be able to live life to its fullest. We can see a vast forest of options, one that stretches out deep and wide with hundreds, millions of options. Life beyond it, life within it, life above it, below it. But we simply can no longer access it. We get corralled into the safe spaces where we can be trusted with our own safeties, to no longer hurt ourselves.

This book takes old age care and turns it into a thing of terror, if only because it portrays it as an admission of finitude. Reid examines the idea that as we age, we find ourselves in a place where we no longer have agency and we no longer have choice. And when control is taken from us, there are ways that others tend to try to make us comfortable and stretch us out infinitely, even beyond the means of our intuition, even beyond the means of our capacity to understand who, where, and why we are.

Sometimes, the best thing that we can be given is our freedom and our choice and our impermanence.

I definitely recommend this book! It is a quick read and Iain Reid has a way to illustrate his books in ways that get into the corners of our minds where things cast long shadows. He finds ways to shade things with a grounded fear, with admission of reality that causes us to look a bit too deeply into the linings of our mirror. I read this one in a single day, as it was one that can be gobbled up very quickly, despite being 289 pages. It will also keep your mind spinning as you try to separate the reality from the facade. Great quick book.