There is an inevitable melancholy to growing old.
Even those who, in the words of Dylan Thomas, “rage, rage against the dying of the light” can’t help but feel a certain chill in the air as the years advance, a sense of regret, of things lost and never found despite the searching.
Otto Laird, the titular protagonist of The Restoration of Otto Laird, understands this elderly state of being only too well.
A once revered architect who found great fame in the ’60s and ’70s as a champion of daring, brutalist architecture and concrete as a form of artistic expression, he is knocking on the door of his ninth decade and suddenly consumed by memories and thoughts of what might have been and possibly should’ve been.
Unwilling though he is to succumb to sepia-toned nostalgia, believing too many hours speeding reliving the past robs the present of the living to be done in it, the overwhelming tide of memories forces him to confront things long left unburied.
An opportunity to confront them arrives in the form of a documentary on Marlowe House, the building Otto has long affectionately viewed as his finest achievement despite its fall into disrepair as a failed housing project, one which now faces demolition.
Otto returns to London for the first time in 25 years from his villa in the Swiss Alps, a home he shares with his second wife Anika, to try to save Marlowe House and while doing so revisit the ghosts of his past, both physical and mental.
“The unexamined life must be placed beneath the microscope; the evidence sifted afresh. It was time for that now. No more romanticising of his own past. If old age brought wisdom, it was because it also brought honesty – the laying aside of the ego, of all mental as well as bodily vanity. It threw its unforgiving light upon the misdemeanours of the past, and demanded a closer inspection.” (P. 166)
It’s a brave move in many ways.
Otto is not a well man physically but also mentally and emotionally, finding himself less-inclined to engage in heated political discourse with his old friend, Pierre, an reconstructed true-believing veteran of the 1968 Paris student riots, and estranged from his son Daniel, and lacking the closeness he once enjoyed with Anika.
Ostensibly he journeys back to London to confront the physical loss of his past, but in reality it is a journey back to the emotional and mental touchpoints of London, a city that sheltered, nurtured and grew him after years spent hiding underground in wartorn Antwerp, Belgium.
He is surprised as any of us would be, by how much is uncovered when you are finally brutally honest with yourself about the state of your life, the things done well, and the many things tinged or soaked with regret, but perseveres on, determined that while there is time, and he assures a worried Anika that much time remains for him, he will revisit the ghosts of his past and reconcile himself to what has gone before.
The joy of this journey into Otto’s past and soul rests largely with Nigel Packer’s decision to make Otto such a winningly, endearingly honest man.
Rather than being militantly honest to a louche degree, Otto very much respects peoples’ boundaries and always keeps in mind that while he might want to deal with some failed part of his past, others might not.
It’s why many of the letters he writes, which appear as disarmingly chapters of the book, are not sent to their intended recipients, and why much of his achingly vulnerable journey, which comes with costs as well some unexpected gains, is taken on an interior level, kept out of the private eye.
It;s impossible not to read the musings of Otto Laird and be struck by recognition that all of us have failed where we would have liked to excelled; on the other hand, by reflecting on the full course of his marriage to his first wife Cynthia, Otto comes to understand that while he may have failed to make the grade in some respects, he also was successful in others, in ways that time and distance have conspired to obscure.
As a protagonist then he is eminently relatable, his willingness to be unflinchingly self-aware and honest to a fault relayed by Packer in ways that are alternately funny, poignant, confronting and inspiring,
Laird is every one of us at vulnerable points in our life, and Packer does a beautiful job of establishing and reinforcing that every person quality right throughout the book.
“There’s always hope, he told himself, as the doors slid open and he stepped over the shards of broken glass littering its floor. Even in the bleakest of surroundings, even when all appears lost.” (P. 246)
The message of course is that it is never too late to make amends, to honestly deal with yourself and come out the other side for better or worse.
While Packer graciously graces Otto some wonderful outcomes from his self-imposed therapy of the soul, not everything is worked through perfectly, and as with so much of life, threads are left dangling, events left unfixable, marooned in the unforgiving, remorseless passage of time.
But by and large, in the most sweet and heartwarming but decidedly un-mawkish and resolutely frank of ways, The Restoration of Otto Laird reminds us at every turn that if we’re willing to confront the good and the bad of our life, and take any corrective actions that are needed and doable, that the most unexpected and life-changing things can take place.