Ray Robinson’s Electricity begins rather slowly, with some quotes—then moves abruptly to a page filled with type some might call blurry while others won’t know what to make of it until they learn it’s supposed to be a typographical representation of a seizure. Then it all makes sense.

Then you fall into a page of reassuring thoughts, half sentences and momentary impressions that are a lull between the electrical pages that stretch to convey the disorientation, confusion and loss of control the main character, Lily O’Connor, experiences when she has a seizure.

Lily lives in the north of England and seems fairly content with her life. She writes notes to herself on the walls of her flat to remind herself of things she needs to do—like take her epilepsy medications—and remind her of who she is, something that is especially important when the police or EMTs have to bring her home after she has a seizure.

Lily’s mother dies, setting in motion a series of events that drive the novel forward. Lily sells her mother’s house with her estranged brother Barry and leaves her adequate life to go in search of her missing brother, Mikey. Her search is reminiscent of her own search for the missing moments in her life—moments lost when she has seizures.

Told in a distinctly British fashion, Electricity uses words like gob, snog and lift; extra U’s in words like colour and favour; em-dashes to start dialogue instead of quotation marks; comments about shows like Steptoe and Son; sentence structures like “I was stood next to his bed,” and “he was crazy-as”; and class and cultural distinctions Americans might miss. Obscenities are liberally sprinkled throughout the book, and seizures are referred to as fits.

Language is important in the book, and the author plays fast and loose with words and structures, throwing in bits of poetry and sliding some words in with spellings altered to better convey his intentions—while using pills and tablets for scene breaks and filling pages with variations of electrified type.

To bring in greater forcefulness and immediacy, Robinson effectively tells the entire tale in first-person present, taking the reader along on Lily’s ride and making the reader entirely forget a man is telling the tale.

The writer’s depictions of Lily’s epilepsy are remarkably accurate, for example the descriptions of Lily’s seizures; her fears of telling others about her epilepsy; her descriptions of her brain flipping off and on; and how she thinks about the days she’s missed due to
seizures.

Lily goes to London and ends up finding a new boyfriend. She puts off telling him about her epilepsy, until she finally has a seizure in front of him. She explains her epilepsy to him—the tonic-clonic seizures, the absence seizures, how she sometimes smells things that aren’t there or walks around like she’s drunk. It is then that she feels he can finally see all of her. At that moment she feels completely naked for the first time with him.

Lily is not shy about having epilepsy. She says, “I’m important. I matter. I can do anything. I’m a sexy, strong woman that happens to have epilepsy. Do you get it? I have epilepsy but it’s not who I am.”

Throughout it all, Robinson realizes how important seizure disorders are in the lives of people who have epilepsy. For instance, when people think Lily’s the victim of domestic violence, she thinks, “Well, it wasn’t any bloke, it was me and mybrain, my electricity slamming me into theground. The stuff that turns the lump of meat in your skull into something alive—it was trying to [expletive] kill me.” Her seizures, the smack downs she receives during them, they’re like when it all started, when her mother threw her down the stairs. Now her entire life is a stuck record of those broken memories.

Electricity is a wonderful story, told with exciting language and feeling. The novel is a deep, complex and thoughtful literary work  about epilepsy.

Purchase this book online and help us ensure not another moment is lost to seizures.