{"id":13204,"date":"2026-05-08T11:24:45","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T10:24:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=13204"},"modified":"2026-05-08T11:24:45","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T10:24:45","slug":"patrick-charnley-this-my-second-life-reviewed-by-nicola-healey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=13204","title":{"rendered":"Patrick Charnley, This, My Second Life, reviewed by Nicola Healey"},"content":{"rendered":"

Recovery from a severe heart and brain trauma leads to rebirth in the form of a beautifully-narrated renewed appreciation of life.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Patrick Charnley | This, My Second Life |<\/em>\u00a0Hutchinson Heinemann: \u00a316.99
<\/strong>Reviewed by Nicola Healey<\/strong><\/p>\n

After nearly dying from a cardiac arrest, leaving him with a brain injury, twenty-year-old Jago Trevarno, the narrator of Patrick Charnley\u2019s debut novel, goes to live with his \u2018off-grid\u2019 uncle Jacob in Cornwall, where he grew up, to convalesce. His mother died of cancer before his heart attack, and he never knew his father. \u2018Clinically I was dead, and for a long time; forty minutes it took them to get my heart going again.\u2019 The two men live a simple, quiet, old-fashioned existence, governed by the rhythms of Jacob\u2019s farm, the natural world and meals, which gently hold Jago within the days as he adjusts to his new life.<\/p>\n

The very moving backstory of Charnley\u2019s unusual novel stays in the reader\u2019s mind as the book progresses: in an Author\u2019s Note, he states that everything in the book to do with the cardiac arrest and brain injury \u2018is a true representation of my own experience\u2019. Charnley suffered a cardiac arrest in 2021, when he was thirty-nine \u2013 the rest is fictionalised. As Jago tells us, \u2018Most people who have a cardiac arrest die\u2019, while some are left \u2018so badly brain damaged they are in permanent residential care\u2019; so Charnley\u2019s survival and creative new life are extraordinary.<\/p>\n

There is an intense spareness to Charnley\u2019s prose, a crisp clarity. Jago\u2019s casual, straightforward voice has a childlike quality, as if everything is being experienced anew, seen through an uncluttered mind; I found this artlessness (in the best sense) very appealing and engaging. \u2018I can just sit and not think about anything at all\u2019, he says; \u2018before all this I was restless, but now it\u2019s like being a child again, just content in the moment.\u2019<\/p>\n

Charnley skilfully depicts the day-to-day realities of Jago\u2019s difficulties, which include memory problems; cognitive \u2018processing-speed impairment\u2019, making it difficult to follow more than one-to-one conversations; vision difficulties; cognitive overload and anxiety from over-stimulation; fatigue. Everything he does requires conscious effort, leading to exhaustion.<\/p>\n

Unexpectedly, good-humoured Jago isn\u2019t distressed by what has happened to him \u2013 he doesn\u2019t feel extreme emotion, neither great excitement nor devastation (the impairment which worries him most): \u2018It was as if the brain injury had turned off all my emotions like a switch in my head.\u2019 This emotional levelling comes across in Charnley\u2019s controlled, steady, lucid prose, becoming a literary strength.<\/p>\n

There are other positives to Jago\u2019s injury: he is able to wholly inhabit the present moment with greater awareness. Most winningly, he has a heightened appreciation for his immediate surroundings and simple pleasures that we often take for granted. This seems to be a manifestation of post-traumatic growth (as opposed to PTSD). Evocative food descriptions abound \u2013 not a meal or snack passes without it being simply but vividly described, often poetically: \u2018the butter we make from the milk is almost luminous, like buttercups\u2019. I loved the way he describes piccalilli as being \u2018almost as bright as my best T-shirt when I was ten which turned fluorescent yellow when I was hot\u2019. He savours everyday things, his sense-impressions acquiring a gentle radiance, which quickens the reader\u2019s own. The \u2018silver skin\u2019 of a large sea bass \u2018shimmers like a mermaid\u2019s tail\u2019. The fish is cooked in a \u2018salt crust that sparkles in the evening sunlight streaming through the kitchen window\u2019. The prosaic becomes almost transcendent.<\/p>\n

Light suffuses the book \u2013 the different ways it falls, where it lands \u2013 illuminations only someone living at a slower pace would notice, or repeatedly notice. A shaft of light \u2018over the kitchen sink cuts across the heavy oak table, picking out all of the scars and dimples in the wood\u2019. When Jago is tending to the cows, \u2018Their big chocolate eyes reflect the light coming in through the door behind me.\u2019 Stars are seen as \u2018pricks of ancient light piercing the endless darkness\u2019.<\/p>\n

Forced by his limitations to live at this slower pace, every act is done with intention. At one point, a whole paragraph deliberately describes the cooking of bacon. This isn\u2019t boring; it\u2019s more interesting, fresh and enjoyable than a lot of more contrived novelistic \u2018drama\u2019. Its timeless feel makes this book a great antidote for anyone tired of both technology and hyper-contemporary novels. In the first part of the novel especially, Jago\u2019s conversations with his quiet, benevolent uncle are brief, revolving around farmwork, his wellbeing and simple food \u2013 the ritual of buying a cake \u2013 lemon drizzle or fruit. One of the things he most likes about his uncle is that \u2018The smallest things make him happy.\u2019 Their relationship reminds us that convalescence can be an opportunity to learn how to live better.<\/p>\n

Jago is also keenly aware of smells: \u2018the ordinary church smell, which smelled of cool still air that wasn\u2019t exactly stale but not fresh either\u2019; the \u2018homely\u2019 smell of a library, \u2018as if the books have picked up little bits of scent from each home they\u2019ve been in\u2019; and (my favourite) the smell that \u2018bursts out of\u2019 straw bales, \u2018as if the sunshine was rolled up with the straw\u2019.<\/p>\n

The simplicity of Charnley\u2019s observations has a cumulative power, even a hypnotic effect, that deeply moved me: \u2018The sheets are cool and crisp\u2019; \u2018it had been snowing, and the air, the first fresh air I had felt for weeks, was cold and crisp on my cheeks\u2019. Charnley sustains this distinctive atmosphere throughout the book, cool and bright as that snow-fresh air. One nature observation, during Jago\u2019s stay at the neurological rehab centre, when spring arrives, sparks a Derek Mahon-esque<\/a> turning point:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

I lay on the wall in the garden staring up at starlings swirling and the cornflower-blue sky above. They made me dizzy and I held on to the wall below me. It was in that moment, watching the birds, thinking how they had no idea what had happened to me, that I thought to myself: Everything is going to be all right. Different, but all right<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Nature doesn\u2019t care what has happened to him, and that\u2019s a comfort. Charnley writes insightfully on the mysteries of the brain: \u2018the brain is so unlikely. Flesh like the rest of the body, but able to create hopes and dreams, love and desire, ideas and actions. It\u2019s also the great unknown, that much has become clear to me. So much of how the brain works is not well understood.\u2019<\/p>\n

As well as Jago\u2019s daily challenges, narrative tension unfolds through the re-emergence of a past love. Until halfway through the novel, Jago avoids going to nearby St Ives, mainly because he doesn\u2019t like crowds and noise: \u2018I get disorientated and my head starts hurting. Or maybe it would be too much of a reminder of how life was before my cardiac arrest.\u2019 Once there, he bumps into his old girlfriend, Sophie, whom he had left after his mum died, a bereavement which left him \u2018numb\u2019, \u2018distant\u2019 and \u2018in my own world\u2019: \u2018I sort of disappeared into myself\u2019. Charnley writes very effectively on grief: \u2018I think maybe I thought that if I wasn\u2019t in St Ives, not with Sophie, and not around anyone else I knew, it could be like Mum hadn\u2019t died at all. [\u2026] I think grief made me go a bit mad, and I didn\u2019t know how to undo what I had done.\u2019 The passages where Jago recalls their early relationship are charming, his voice coming alive. This reconnection with Sophie provides the novel\u2019s compelling emotional core: he is forced to re-question his future, what he has lost (both before and since his injury), and what might lie beyond the almost idyllic, yet restricted, existence he has built with his uncle\u2019s support. Movingly, through Sophie, he discovers whether or not the emotional blunting he suffers \u2013 which is \u2018like part of [him] has died\u2019 \u2013 is total.<\/p>\n

The shadow plot involving local villain, Bill Sligo, felt secondary to me; Charnley\u2019s careful re-creation of Jago\u2019s inner struggles holds enough drama and interest of its own. And while the book\u2019s dream-like ending might feel sentimental, it is the remarkable qualities of this novel that stay with the reader. \u00a0<\/p>\n

One of this book\u2019s great strengths is that it gently makes the reader much more aware of what people go through with a brain injury. As Charnley states on his website<\/a>, \u2018Every 90 seconds someone in the UK is admitted to hospital with a brain injury\u2019, yet \u2018few people know about brain injury and the enormous impact [it] can have on a person and their family and friends\u2019. Jago says his \u2018second\u2019 life is \u2018so contrary to everything I\u2019ve known so far in my life about illness. You get ill and, if you don\u2019t die, you get better. [\u2026] It\u2019s different with this brain injury\u2019 \u2013 as it is with other, less extreme, chronic conditions or invisible disabilities. Wellness and illness are not binary states.<\/p>\n

It was a further surprise to learn that Charnley is the son of the poet Helen Dunmore, who died of cancer in 2017; this gives added poignancy to what her son has uniquely created out of his life-changing injury.<\/p>\n

The way Charnley\u2019s family, neighbour, paramedics and other medical professionals managed to save him feels more like a resurrection than a resuscitation. This profoundly affecting, memorable novel would be an impressive debut if it was written by anyone, but that it is written by someone enduring the effects of a brain injury, who was clinically dead for forty minutes just five years ago, makes every page feel almost miraculous.<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Nicola Healey<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Recovery from a severe heart and brain trauma leads to rebirth in the form of a beautifully-narrated renewed appreciation of life. Patrick Charnley | This, My Second Life |\u00a0Hutchinson Heinemann: \u00a316.99Reviewed by Nicola Healey After nearly dying from a cardiac arrest, leaving him with a brain injury, twenty-year-old Jago Trevarno, the narrator of Patrick Charnley\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":45,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nPatrick Charnley, This, My Second Life, reviewed by Nicola Healey - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=13204\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Patrick Charnley, This, My Second Life, reviewed by Nicola Healey - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Recovery from a severe heart and brain trauma leads to rebirth in the form of a beautifully-narrated renewed appreciation of life. 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