Mar
26
How many of us know someone who has been involved in a car accident? Most? All? Our friend or relation isn’t always at fault; or sometimes they are, and if they’ve survived we’ll tut tut at their stupidity. The point, though, is that car crashes have become a zeitgeist for Irish youth. As Sarah Nevin points out in Mike McCormack’s novel Notes From a Coma, “Car crashes are a right of passage for our generation—broken bones and stitches, our badges of honour.”
Book Review: Impact, by Jenny McCudden
It is clear then that Impact, Jenny McCudden’s treatise on the subject, is long overdue. It is because of this comfortable acceptance of tragedy that not only interested readers should be getting this book: it should be studied in our schools and colleges, required reading for every citizen.
The book begins with a bland enough foreword from Gay Byrne. The problem is not the message, but the lack of variation in the message. We’re used to the ads; we’re used to the press releases. But from the first sentence of McCudden’s own introduction the voice is distinctive. It is personal, serious, almost confessional: “The crash scene has been cleared, but the signs of death are everywhere.”
Something of significance is beginning. The tone is set, plain, passionate, subtly emphatic, at times perhaps even florid (overly so), and it captures the reader in a way that any other book on the subject would have failed.
Impact is laid out in fourteen chapters, each chapter an alternative angle on the general problem. Metaphorically, they resemble fourteen post-event photographs of a single crash scene. The facts are clearer with each snapshot. Many of the chapters tell the story of individual crashes, and are pieced together from witness reports, forensic findings, and, most overwhelming, the testimony of maimed, surviving, or bereaved family members and friends. We all know the seriousness of speeding, drink-driving, lack of care on roads, but we are de-sensitized somehow, switching off as the television advertisement comes on, reaching into the tragedy for some smart comment until the next ad is selling something easier on the eye. But in these terrible chapters we are in dialogue with a bereaved mother, a brain-damaged GAA fanatic, the uncle of a dead nephew. A father brings us back to the scene and reckons on how it went. We are told how a teenage boy climbed from a smoking wreckage with a broken collarbone and, in a severe state of shock, walked a ways up the road and sat down in the grass while his mother and sister bled out in the car. Much like the crash scene you pass on the road, you really cannot take your eyes off the pages in this book, no matter how disturbing the material.
Other chapters take alternative angles. We get a glimpse of boy racing culture in an engrossing interview with speed-addicted youths. McCudden even goes for a spin with them. Former TD Jim McDaid gives a frank interview on the subject, and we hear the voices of Gardaí, paramedics and professionals working in rehabilitative centres. Dr. Gerry Lane in particular speaks well.
With each passing snapshot, the angles clarify, the picture filled a little further. McCudden is expert at relaying the voices of the disappointed, shocked and bereaved. You are shocked, further convinced of the message, and the difference is that this time you’re discovering it yourself, rather than being implored through a gabble of quoted statistics. In fact, on the occasion that statistics are leant on in this book, they seem ludicrous somehow.
McCudden is a very good writer, someone who mythologizes scenes with great empathy, but one of her main triumphs in Impact is her honesty. She is up front about the predatory nature of the reporter in these instances and, without ever impinging on the more important and tragic stories of others, sets herself and her investigation into the book, detailing her own reactions to events and revelations. You are being told this story by a first-hand witness, not a faceless researcher or a rehearsed public servant.
It is also a book of stunning, graphic, almost supernatural images. A car loses control on a dual carriageway and flips over the median strip, spearing a family travelling in the opposite direction. Gulping, you marvel at the bleak timing of it all, the agonizing twist of fate. A man with brain injuries slips into a coma and journeys through a psychologically fraught period of hellish visions and drastic hallucinations. Cows cross a foggy country road in the middle of the night; a boy dies as he sleeps in the backseat. A toddler is flung almost forty metres through the windscreen of a car, the parents trapped while a brave Garda tries to revive her. There were times during the reading of this book in which I had to set the thing aside for fear of weeping.
Neither is the book short on criticism. While it points out the merits of the government’s struggle with the problem, it never muffles a disillusioned voice. Several of the witnesses we meet feel, and rightly so, that the government or justice system has failed them. McCudden doesn’t let these people down, telling their story with forensic detail and strained passion, rebuking wherever they might apportion blame.
Ultimately, in the final chapter and conclusion, the plethora of statistics does arrive. But it is too late, the stark message cannot be diluted or filtered out, and the book is already a significant artefact for modern Irish culture.
Impact, by Jenny McCudden.
Collins Press, 221 pp.
€12.99
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