The unbroken wave

When someone dies, their absence feels inexplicable.
A trapdoor opens in reality and they are gone. It’s like a cruel conjuring trick.

Humans have always hoped for an afterlife to make sense of this mystery. From grave goods in Tutankhamun’s tomb to poignant whispers around a Ouija board (Are you there, Albert?), we have always wanted to believe in the persistence of a life beyond death. We rightly have a ‘celebration of life’ when someone has gone, but that does little to counter the shock at what has happened.

I first met Ian Marchant when we were students together at St David’s, a bucolic, turreted university snuggled deep in the Welsh hills. We both read philosophy although, to be honest, we focused more on joint-honours in sex and drugs and rock’n’roll. Ian sang in a college band before moving on to Brighton with friends to start another group. This was the beginning of a helter-skelter life described in Richard Beard’s fond obituary of Ian in The Guardian. While I stayed at university to do graduate study, Ian became became a singer and entertainer (proudly bottom of the bill at Glastonbury), bookie’s clerk and bookseller, novelist, writer, and regular broadcaster on the BBC. We lost touch for years. It was only in the 2000s that we made contact again, when Ian was Director of the Arvon Writing Centre in Devon. While I emigrated to Melbourne, he moved on to the Welsh Marches (commuting to teach at Birmingham City University). Every summer, I’ve caught up with him and Bob Machin there –another alumnus from our arcadian university days. I last saw Ian this October in his bed at Newtown Hospital. He gave me a copy of his new book – The Breaking Wave – published a few weeks previously, and a few weeks later he was dead.

He was our very own Dr Johnson, but in a Ramones t-shirt.

Charm is a precious gift. Ian was born with a silver spoonful of it in his mouth. Extrovert, quick-witted, and self-deprecating, his great art was conversation. He was our very own Dr Johnson, but in a Ramones t-shirt. He loved entertaining an audience – in person, at public events, or on the radio or TV – and we loved him back. This was Ian’s other gift – an endless curiosity and affection for other people. There was, too, his disciplined, industrious commitment to the craft of writing, a deep knowledge of philosophy and literature, and his devotion to the Anglican faith.

I’ve read that radio waves pass beyond the atmosphere and fan out through space at the speed of light. I imagine one of Ian’s Radio 4 programs speeding out past the moon. It reaches Mars in just 13 minutes, his enthusiastic voice and chortling laughter echoing through the rocky canyons, bouncing off the moons of Saturn, then travelling on across the universe in a neverending wave.

As an Irishman sang, Rave on, Ian Marchant. Rave on down through time and space, down through the corridors. Rave on, rave on.

Image: Paul Williams