Encounters with books

Deixis Press, UK

Marc Joan has had stories published in many magazines and anthologies, including The Mirror in the Mirror from Comma Press. A short novel The Speckled God came out a couple of years ago with Unsung Stories.

Marc Joan grew up in South India and this novel-length associatively-linked collection of fictions is set there. The possibility of alternative realities weaves in and out, linking stories of Faustian pacts with the particle physics sci-fi ending. (Which is one of the best sections – Marc Joan is a scientist by training.) Spiritualism, horror, colonialism, and repressive customs are all driving themes. Joan’s characters often have an awareness that they are at the mercy of greater powers, whether worldly or spiritual. Some among them are the ‘hangdog souls’ of the title who have compromised with power for their own sake or the sake of loved ones.

Horror seems to be making a return into literary fiction, in Britain at any rate, and Marc Joan is part of that wave. But in the South Indian setting, horror and spirituality merge; horror is real to the believers, and is not ‘gothic horror’ in the European sense.

The individual has limited freedom and must bow to his/her fate, and yet can still choose to do the right thing. I get a sense of the vastness of the world and history from these stories.

One of the longest pieces is the purely realistic study of social mores The Mirror. The ‘monster’ lurking at the core of this story is the custom of arranged marriage. Its evil impact on two brothers and a girl is unfolded over a decade and a half. I got a choking feeling of life and freedom gradually being sucked away under the compression of tradition and family expectations. Only as small children were they fully alive.

Another astonishing tale in the collection is The Dairymen, about two college friends who go into business harvesting scorpion (B. Tamulus) venom by milking it from the stressed insects. They have been assured of the price by a personal phone call to a scientist (PhD from Cambridge!) at a major company in In. On that basis they have invested in dry ice equipment and six months of their time.

It’s got that contingent random feel to it so you feel sure the author must have got the premise from reality.

It’s a rare treat and anyone with a background in the sub-continent or who has trekked around India will have a special appreciation of the book.

by Edmond Caldwell. First published in 2012, this edition 2022.

In this book Edmond Caldwell is a purist writer with a visceral aversion to the artifices of fiction, such as plot, character development, dramatic turning points.

I can understand that. Such techniques often feel cheap and meretricious, sugar to help the medicine go down.

His reluctance to pander to the reader extends even to paragraphing – he dispenses with them. Dispenses too with the typical disclaimer ” … names, characters, business, events and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons …”

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He is on a mission to achieve authenticity, perhaps, or to break down the borders that limit fiction and make it 'safe'. He wants to shape a new type of writing.

One of his characters begins to explain it but stops: “As a writer I'm committed to an anti-story aesthetic, or rather anti-aesthetic, blowing up story and aesthetics from-“

Caldwell's stance seems to be one of both taste and philosophy. There is anger and resentment in these pages. He/his narrator seems to doubt the idea of human agency. Agency is part of the myth and the story-telling we console ourselves with.

And so these episodic adventures of our 'wayfarer' emerge from that attitude of doubt and anger with the world.

It begins with our narrator in the baggage claim area after a return home flight to the USA. He tells us his appearance is a touch Middle-Eastern, and in the subsequent chapters he is often sensitive about this, and imagines others perceive him variously as a terrorist or a Jew. He is about to crack a joke with a fellow passenger waiting at the carousel, but holds his tongue and decides the response would be friendlier if his blonde-haired wife were by his side and not in the rest room.

This first section is a close observation of an in-between space and a preoccupied state of mind. “They remained in one of those In-between spaces that exist only in airports … ” he muses. “There were hotels, and especially airport hotels. There were highway rest stops. There were the spaces of shopping malls, including the food courts, and the more confined spaces of supermax prisons.” That's a meta hint: the subsequent sections visit precisely these places. It's episodic, rambling, very real, and always run through with the narrator's endless thoughts circling in his mind. Often these thoughts become the main narrative and the sense of location recedes. This is so particularly in the section Time and Motion. It's an extended treatise examining the development of American capitalism by focusing on the history of the Arsenal Mall: in its early days as an arms factory it was the site of the first recorded workers' strike against the Taylor system of scientific management.

The book (marketed as a novel but it isn't) has the appearance and quality of autofiction. But there's no info on the author publicly available. For example the book's narrator is adopted, but I can find no such info on the author. I googled “Edmond Caldwell biography” and I found this: Author's Bio: information about the individual calling himself “Edmond Caldwell,” claiming to be a “writer” and publishing so-called fiction in intranets “zines” such as Word Riot, DIAGRAM, and SmokeLong Quarterly, please contact the Boston Police Department.

(Caldwell died suddenly in July 2017 and a movement grew to see this novel republished in the UK.)

Once the reader loses their expectations of plot, they can enjoy the book – it's like signing up for a holiday and after a couple of hours in the train realising that there will be no destination.

In the second chapter he is in a hotel outside a major airport, and on a leisurely stroll sees there are five or six other hotels in the vicinity – the vicinity being a nowhere-place surrounded by motorways. “As tired as he was he could not help continuing to reason, restlessly to reason.” He begins to realise this is a zone of hotels for people who have been bumped off their flights, connected solely by shuttle bus to the airport and nowhere else. It's a zone where one might feel one's sense of self dissolve. He perceives the things around him as being 'laminated' and the reader will intuit what he means. He walks further and comes across a village, but it is not a real village “it was shiny and clean and laminated and new”. (Something very like this happened to me on a hill walk around Oxford. We came across a village with an olde village school and olde village parsonage – but these old stone buildings were now private residences for commuters to Oxford city a mere 10 minute drive away.)

But it doesn't get bleak. Our narrator is always thinking, making connections, speculating, observing the rabbits, the typeface of road signs, making associations with historical events – and also worrying about how he might appear foreign to others.

And so it goes on. In the next section he is in St. Petersburg. Not exactly a holiday, he has gone with his wife who is at an academic conference. Again he is restlessly wandering, always puzzling, trying to penetrate the essence of this place.

His anger with the publishing industry emerges in the lost Beckett play section. “It's a platform, see? You can't get a lift-off these days if you don't have a platform!” Hodge (apparently an alter-ego of the narrator) screeches.”These days it's the mainstream or it's nothing.” He needs a provocation, and so unveils a plan to kidnap the critic (he's real) James Wood.

Well, you can see why this novel was never going to be accepted by one of the big 5 publishers and launched into the stratosphere.

William Storr in his book The Science of Storytelling expresses says this (in 2019, after Caldwell's book which in all probability never came to his attention):

Humans might be in unique possession of the knowledge that our existence is essentially meaningless, but we carry on as if in ignorance of it. We beetle away happily, into our minutes, hours and days, with the fact of the void hovering over us. To look directly into it, and respond with an entirely rational descent into despair, is to be diagnosed with a mental-health condition, categorised as somehow faulty.

The cure for the horror is story. Our brains distract us from this terrible truth by filling our lives with hopeful goals and encouraging us to strive for them.

Edmond Caldwell's narrator:

“Story was a trap, a false friend, an unreliable prosthetic, a delusion. He would go without story to make his fortune, without story his literary fortune would be made.”

That lost play by Beckett is a bit juvenile, too smug with its own irreverence. I had thought the book was on a journey from aimless interiority towards a greater sense of being embedded in history – a sense perhaps of having to make the decision to be involved in history. But then the Beckett play comes along and it's too showy for me – intellectual sparring while trying to shock with sexually explicit banter. I didn't understand why that section was included.

The book is defiantly original and stubborn, I keep going back to read sections again, seeing new things in it.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable read and a bit of a suprise from Ashley Stokes. His short story collection Syllabus of Errors was allusive, elusive, spiked with flashes of dark insight into the nightmare of history.

I have strong memories of that book eight or nine years later. Complex stories that are worth reading several times – in other words I should go back and read it again.

But his new novel is a rambunctious adventure following a trio of cryptozoologists on the track of the North Surrey Gigantopithecus – the Surrey equivalent of the yeti.

 “You’ve not experienced that thrill when suddenly, for a moment, you glimpse it between the trees – gigantic, proud, alive, part of us, the missing bit of us – ”

Kevin Stubbs holds down a job in IT by day, and at night he kits up with camcorders, thermal imaging device and sample jars for a session of stake-out operations through the woods. The obsessive search for the beast has cost him dearly – his Ukranian wife has custody of their small son. The local wags chant “Monkey magic” when he goes into the boozer. But Kevin is on the brink of The Great Confirmation when the whole world will queue at his doorstep and his son will finally be proud of his old man.

The novel is full of laugh-out-loud moments – after a description of the Aleister Crowley-devotee fourth-dimension-probing third team member, Kevin relates in a deadpan tone:  “This is one of the things about getting involved in the GIT. You meet people you wouldn’t ordinarily meet …”

But the leader of this 3-person team – Maxine – is a complete and total skeptic! There’s a thoroughly plausible backstory to this. And when you think of it, what fanatical skeptic wouldn’t jump at the chance of being appointed head of a team of pseudo-scientists?

Despite this, the trio have a warm loyalty to each other. The novel is structured around the official reports written by Maxine (aka the Sci-borg) followed by Kevin’s passionate extrapolations and background stories. Kevin Stubbs is a fascinating ‘anorak’ cynical/gullible character with lots of wry looks at suburbia. His exchanges with Max are hilarious – this cryptid-busting trio could easily be the premise for a long-running comedy series.

It’s great fun to read of the traditions and lore of this tight-knit confraternity. They have their decades-old grainy footage of the beast, competing theories (is the creature paranormal or a primate), discussions about sensing equipment, and memories of the founding fathers of the movement. It can feel like a cross between an extremist political cell and a local hill-walker’s group.

There is a hilarious incongruence between the dry notes by Maxine (“There was some delay in leaving the property due to a dispute about money and the witness’s reservations about GIT Cryptozoologist Funnel”) and the expansive and passionate accounts Kevin gives.

 “You’ve not experienced that thrill when suddenly, for a moment, you glimpse it between the trees – gigantic, proud, alive, part of us, the missing bit of us – ”

Clearly the Gigantopithecus is a proxy for that one last piece of magical mystery in life, that secret magic we still believe in. Stokes throws in a few associations with the lost forests of England – we feel a distant yearning for the impenetrable forest – Andreaswald, the dreaming forest of England – and the wild beasts that roam therein. We crave a few relict stands of trees that have escaped the concrete, the planning, the cultivation – I think of Hopkin’s lines:

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;  /   And bears man’s smudge, and shares man’s smell;  

The novel was also a bit of a nostalgia trip for me, as Stokes peppers the story with references to 1970’s formative influences, including Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World, the UFO craze, Judge Dredd, role-playing games, and also that familiar small-town scene of the local wags at the bar passing sarcastic comments.

Great tale, ingeniously put together, builds up momentum to a thrilling ending.

Will A. Stokes stay with lick-your-thumb novels of suburban intrigue or will he go back to the challenge of divining the widening gyres of idiocy and extremism?

A fascinating debut novel I had the pleasure to review for The Dublin Review of books.

Speculative novels from Ireland are as rare as hens’ teeth, despite the towering examples bequeathed to us by Jonathan Swift and Flann O’Brien. In more recent decades we have Mike McCormack’s fictions, and a YA novel by Sarah Maria Griffin. That’s about it as regards novels that meet Margaret Atwood’s tighter definition of speculative fiction as extrapolating the latent possibilities of current trends.

So I was immediately hooked when I heard of the premise of Bourke’s novel: a line of people queuing for generations, not sure what they are waiting for, but utterly convinced of the importance of keeping one’s place in the line. And ready to torture those who transgress.

The book twists between adventure and satire and existential questions – it’s Waiting for Godot crossed with Gulliver’s Travels. Seriously, that fits best.

Not surprising that it’s from Tramp Press. They brought out A Brilliant Void a couple of years ago – a collection of classic science fiction from Ireland. It’s like a window into a different era. There was a time when Ireland – or Dublin at least – was home to several sci-fi and horror writers: Dorothy McArdle, James Fitz-Maurice O’Brien, Jane Barlow, and many others.

I’ve been looking forward to Elaine Chiew’s collection of short stories for a couple of years ever since I read a few in the Unthology anthology brought out by Unthank Press. Elaine is ethnic Chinese from Malaysia, educated in the USA and now lives in the UK. A very modern spread of identities.

Well at last it’s here and I pitched a review to Litro Magazine.

I was attracted to Chiew’s writing by its sheer brilliance and by how it captures the giddy sense of living in a world where everyone is guessing the rules. As I mention in the review, one takeaway point from the stories is that the clash between the older generation’s values and the newer is greater than east-west divide.

Easily the best collection I’ve read this year.