New year, new you

Content warning, Trigger warning: This article contains mention of suicide and self-harm.

While it’s Charles Dickens who is commonly credited with inventing Christmas festivities as we know them today, the response of novelists to New Year’s Eve and the day after has often been more sombre. These are typically shown as occasions of yearning and regret for opportunities lost. Many times, however, such emotions pave the way for new beginnings.

Consider this to be a trigger warning for the rest of the paragraph. At the start of Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down, four characters meet on the roof of a London high-rise on New Year’s Eve, each one intent on jumping off it. Fortunately, they change their minds, deciding to wait a few more months before taking drastic steps. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth also starts with a character deciding to take his life on the first day of the year. Having been foiled in the attempt, he ventures into a party during which he meets the woman who goes on to become his wife.

More ominously, P.D. James’s dystopian The Children of Men begins with a diary entry dated January 1, 2021, which describes the death of the last human being to be born on earth. Humankind has been stricken by mass infertility and redemption seems beyond reach.

Going further back, tensions roil beneath the surface during a New Year’s Day party at a town mayor’s house in a chapter from George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Gossip is shared, pride is injured, and feelings are ruffled. Venturing even further back, it’s during New Year’s Eve festivities at the start of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that a mighty stranger strides into King Arthur’s court. The titular Gawain takes up this character’s ominous, bloody challenge and, a year later, ventures forth to keep his side of the bargain.

The latest in this line of writers who have set their stories during the start of a year is Berlin-based Juli Zeh. In her New Year, recently translated from the German by Alta L. Price, she deals with the predicament of the anxiety-ridden Henning, who travels with his wife and children from Göttingen to Lanzarote in the Canary Islands for a year-end holiday.

Bright and early on New Year’s Day, he sets off on a rented bicycle for a ride to the top of Mount Atalaya, a “dark, dormant volcano”, clearly meant as a symbol of an inner struggle to be surmounted. For a while, Henning has been beset by undiagnosed and debilitating panic attacks. He’s unable to shake the feeling that a catastrophe is about to occur and, between attacks, wrestles with the dread preceding the next one.

The book is structured as a conversation between Henning’s past and present. As he cycles onward, his mind travels back to events that are recent as well as long past. “New year, new you,” he keeps telling himself, and this affirmation often serves as a way back into the present. Sometimes he thinks that much of his life is off-kilter: “Maybe behind this world there’s another world, one where things have other meanings.”

Thus, in the course of his cycling expedition, we learn of his fraught relationship with his mother, his sister’s waywardness and dependence, and the ups-and-downs of his life with his family. At midnight, he and his wife had clinked glasses together, hugged, wished each other Happy New Year, and yet, “arm in arm they gazed skyward and waited for a shooting star that never fell.”

At the end of his journey, overcome and out of breath, Henning stumbles upon and then into a bungalow at the top of the slope. The owner welcomes him in, and this is when the novel takes on further shades of a psychological thriller. He is confronted by a teeming mass of spiders on a wall, a dangerously deep underground reservoir, and rooms that feel strangely familiar. All this is not only dream-like, but suggestive of internal states.

The effect of all this on Henning is that traumatic childhood events start to surface in recurring flashbacks. Further intrigue arrives with novelistic hints that these repressed memories may not even be true. Such shifts in perspective are deftly handled, with a seamlessness between present and past that creates an expressionistic whole.

As with much of the other work featuring a new year, there are rays of redemption to be found in the darkness. The title, then, isn’t an ironic touch, as one might suppose. Juli Zeh’s novel is a reminder that even Sisyphean burdens, when borne with fortitude, can become lighter. Something to keep in mind as we leave behind a benighted year and welcome a new one.

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