Book Review : Adrian Markle - Bruise (2024)

Our lives are shaped by countless myths. I’m not talking about Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey here. Judeo-Christian values lead us to believe that if we're good people and that we work hard, we’re gonna be taken care of and find endless bliss in one way or another. But it’s not true. You can find where it is you’re meant to be in life and it can be unfairly taken from you. Then, you need to figure it all again. That’s (somewhat) the story at the heart of discreet, but low-key heartbreaking Adrian Markle’s debut novel Bruise.

Bruise tells the story of Jamie Stuart, a second-tier MMA champion who’s career is cut short by a nagging hand injury that gets worse with every fight. Without a fallback plan, Jamie moves back to the hometown he once run away for after his father’s death to grieve both his old man and the many lives that were stolen from him by cruel circumstances. In the meantime, he reconnects with his older brother Sid who lets him back in their childhood home as they try to repair damages from the past.

Loss, mortality & masculinity

Jamie Stuart is bereaved, but he's not bereaved the way he thinks he is. He's recently lost his abusive father sure, but he's also been robbed of his identity by an injury, so he reverts back to the only other thing he's known: being the wounded son of a brute. In Bruise, Jamie has to reconcile the strong adult and the wounded kid inside in order to find a path forward. It’s a complex situation many young adults find themselves in without necessarily being able to find a way out of. Especially young men who struggle with feeling stuff.

Bruise is an emotional novel at heart, but there's something quite masculine about the way it explores the distance between what Jamie feels and how affects his everyday live. He is controlled by his grief and yet never stops trying to navigate it. He's seen very little trying to feel the heartbreak and the rage within. Author Adrian Markle embodies that feeling in one important, hard-hitting sentence Jamies delivers every time he gets hurt by something: "I was a word champion". Every time he says it, it gets more loaded with meaning.

Men don’t do really well with loss. Especially if they feel like they lost something they have rightfully earned. It creates a void they’re immediately anxious to fill instead of taking the time to understand what it is they have lost like women or folks from the LGBTQ+ community would do. Bruise explores how taking a step back to take a step forward might bring back old demons, but also bring back emotional and existential battles your need to wage. It might not be spectacular, but it’s oddly cathartic.

The Art of the Ending

So yeah, Bruise is quietly effective even though sometimes it doesn't seem to know where it wants to go. I get it, the question it asks is existential and doesn't have an accepted answer (most good novels are about stuff that doesn’t have an accepted answer), but it's turning and turning and then it's over. It's going into a predictable, yet tragic direction only to bifurcate into the other predictable direction it could've taken, which begs the question: how do you even end a literary novel without a plot?

My take on that quandary is that you just don’t. I really liked Bruise for about 180 pages, but I would’ve rewritten the final 39. It doesn’t work with the soul seeking nature of the novel until then. Don’t get me wrong, I think it's still a solid novel and that it suffers from a problem a lot of stories suffer from, but I would've just put Jamie in front of a choice and ended Bruise right there and then. Because it feels contrived. There didn’t need to be a resolution to Jamie's predicament. Merely a guiding light to follow.

*

I liked Bruise. It's not the most emotional and transporting novel I've ever read, but 1) it's by design and 2) most debut novels aren't their author's best. What you need to know about Bruise is that it's original, understated and that it treats its own concerns seriously. It's the furthest thing from a beach read and I think the audience for such a story is unfortunately tiny, but it doesn't mean that it's not good. Dudes who are suffering and looking for direction, this is for you.

7.3/10

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