Paul Dalgarno’s memoir explores some rarely spoken-of anxieties

And You May Find Yourself is a scarifying and blackly comic memoir of emigration.

Finding humour in self-loathing

It is probably about music and its mnemonic power, but there is nothing like song lyrics for locating a person culturally. Feed someone the first half of a couplet of a song from their youth and years or even decades later they will sing the second back to you.

This tendency ensures that for anybody of a certain age And You May Find Yourself, Paul Dalgarno’s scarifying and blackly comic memoir of emigration, immediately invokes the lyrics of what is arguably Talking Heads’ most famous song, Once in a Lifetime.

It is a clever move on Dalgarno’s part, as the second halves of that particular couplet, “in another part of the world”, “in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife”, speak so eloquently to the experience of geographic and ­social dislocation that drives the book, while also foreshadowing the song’s still powerful sense of despairing isolation and alienation, its cry of: “This is not my beautiful house … this is not my beautiful wife!”

More deeply though, it connects Dalgarno’s narrative, which ostensibly deals with his decision to move from Scotland to Australia with his wife and young family, with his real subject, his unresolved and conflicted relationship with his father and his own unstable identity.

The book begins on Christmas Day 2010 with Dalgarno’s wife, Jess, in labour. Newly ­arrived in Australia, the two of them are squatting in the living room of Jess’s mother and stepfather, sharing the space with their 19-month-old son Kolya. As they stumble about in the dark, attempting not to wake the sleeping child, they snipe at each other in frustration, Jess telling Paul (as Dalgarno is known in the book) to hurry up, Paul irritably demanding she be patient as he attempts to adjust the shower in the spare bathroom.

It is an interlude that sets the scene for much of what follows. Having arrived in Adelaide with Jess 35 weeks pregnant, no prospect of a job and the continuing expense of maintaining an apartment back in Glasgow rendered unsell­able by the global financial crisis (“we were subsidising a stranger’s life in our furnished former dream home”), Paul and Jess quickly find themselves struggling, emotionally and financially.

In a time when our screens are filled with ­images of people fleeing their homes in fear of their lives, it is tempting to dismiss Dalgarno’s account of his experiences as a First World indulgence. But that would be a mistake, for a couple of reasons. Dalgarno’s memoir is a reminder of the life-changing upheaval of migration, the degree to which it severs those who undertake it from their pasts and the people and places that ­inhabit them.

As Paul reflects at one point: “To my ears ‘I’m emigrating to Australia’ was shorthand for goodbye — a way of saying you’d never see someone again.”

And he also offers a fascinating and start­lingly frank exploration of contemporary masculinity. Increasingly lost, isolated and sleep-deprived, Paul begins to resent his wife and children, sinking deeper and deeper into self-pity and anger, his inner misery reflected in his rapidly expanding waistline.

This sometimes makes for confronting reading. For while parts of the book are genuinely funny, Dalgarno is extremely effective at capturing the textures of his former self’s self-loathing, or his sense of emotional inadequacy in the face of challenges presented by his family and professional life; and, equally impressively, at communicating Paul’s fear that he is becoming a version of his father, a man whose violence and emotional brutality pervades not just the book but Paul’s unsettled sense of iden­tity: “… since childhood, I’d been swimming away from my dad, kicking free of his undertow … yet here I was in my mid-thirties being dragged back like Jonah into his leviathan mouth”.

Of course these are anxieties many men will recognise. Yet while reading And You May Find Yourself I was struck by just how rarely they are discussed, let alone explored with the self-lacerating honesty Dalgarno brings to bear on his former self.

Certainly there are moments when his ­account feels uncomfortably unresolved, a quality that may well be attributable to the events he is describing being so recent (as may the relative shadowiness of Jess’s fictional ­presence), but this only makes the book more ­interesting.

For by denying himself the illusion of distance, Dalgarno demands we engage not just with the personal immensity of his struggles ­but also their ordinariness and, one suspects, their ubiquity.

James Bradley’s most recent novel is Clade.

And You May Find Yourself

By Paul Dalgarno

Sleepers Publishing, 300pp, $24.95