1988 Compared to his namesake, the Anglo-American film director of Insomnia, Batman Begins and The Prestige (2002, 2005 and 2006), this Christopher Nolan was born under a darker star. Deprived of oxygen for two hours at birth, he came into the world with cerebral palsy, paralysed apart from his head and eyes. Forty-three years later he died. A statement released by his family a day later said: ‘Following the ingestion of some food into his airways yesterday, oxygen deprivation returned to take the life it had damaged more than 40 years ago.’
But in between, what a life. He couldn’t speak, but his loving parents sensed the clever, talented personality within. His father used to read to him – excerpts from Joyce’s Ulysses and poetry. When he was eleven, Christopher was prescribed Baclofen, a muscle relaxant that calmed the worst spasmodic movements of the condition, and increased his control over his head and neck. With what he called a ‘unicorn stick’ fixed to his head, he learned to poke the keys of a special computer, but it could take twelve hours to write a page, and his mother had to cradle his head while he did it.
At last his thoughts and feelings could reach the outside world. In his first letter to his aunt and uncle, he wrote: ‘I bet you never thought you would be hearing from me!’ The words came out like water from a burst dam. In fact that’s what he called his first book, a much acclaimed collection of poetry called Dam-Burst of Dreams, published when he was just fifteen.
More followed – Torchlight and Lazer Beams (1988), a play written with Dublin theatre director Michael Scott, a novel called The Banyan Tree (1999) – but the book that won the Whitbread was Under the Eye of the Clock, his autobiographical study written in the free-indirect style – that is, in the third person inside the head of a character – who was in this case an alter ego of the author himself named Joseph Meehan.
Everyone goes through torments of anxiety and embarrassment trying to make friends in an unfamiliar environment. Most suppress or forget the experience; few write about it. Nolan’s disability licensed him to voice, and enjoined his readers to pay attention to, those primal fears, and perhaps be reminded of their own. Here is Joseph on his first day in a new school:
Sally forward Joseph Meehan called an inner nested notion and gently heeding he damn-well forward sallied. Zoo-caged, he cracked the communication barrier by schooling hamfisted facial muscles to naturally smile on cue …
He’s both inside and outside the spectacle, feeling it subjectively, seeing it objectively. But self-pitying it’s not.