Angela Brown

In ‘Hypostatis’ Brendan McCarthy uses the storyteller’s gift to hold in front of us a seemingly pedestrian protagonist, Longhorne – then uses the same storyteller’s magic to delve downwards and outwards towards the Profound and Universal. Paradoxically, the ‘Everyman’ or ‘Lone Traveller’ motifs give way to scenarios grounded in recognisable dilemmas of our times, maybe based in the writer’s own sharp but fictionalised observations of societies and dilemmas. Bildungsroman it isn’t. This novel feels like a Magritte painting where one must quarry new realities and revelations, and view existences where no magnolia paint will have a place… To follow Longhorne through the first few chapters requires both an act of faith and a stamina maybe honed by reading James Joyce, Proust or Virginia Woolf. By the climax of the novel, a great many other kinds of faith and science are involved. Dr McCarthy’s precision in delineating consciousness holds the attentive reader: this is Mindfulness colliding with the Trivium of Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic. If Matt Haig’s ‘The Humans’ can be handed to new undergrads at one British Redbrick university, ‘Hypostasis’ deserves, in extract at least, to be handed out for discussion for anyone in training for the Caring Professions, Emergency Services or, where they exist, Philosophy and Theology courses. Readers of Philip Pullman would also do well to read ‘Hypostasis’ in parallel, not for fantasy but the reality which underpins the book. Is McCarthy’s take on ‘dust’ a challenge to Pullman? ‘Hypostasis’ actuates many of its meanings with forensic accuracy: its narrative convinces and jolts; one needs its truths for comfort. Like TS Eliot’s ‘Four Quartets’ I feel that it has another journey to go: out of Novel Genre and into perhaps a meld of Poetry, Music and Dance for a performance which captures its valuable essences with a different kind of soul-power. Its potential for further creativity is immense.