Encounters with books

Hostages

by Oisin Fagan

Really enjoying this one. The novella-length first story, Being Born, is set in a secondary school and you can feel that that the material is just pulling the pen along, with the writer hanging on for the ride. Hilarious, very perceptive, and plain weird by turns. It’s very luminous and gripping prose, and a relief to read if you’ve been reading too much poised literary writing – or writing it yourself. The reviews of Hostages pump out adjectives like dazzling, verve, uproarious, deranged, genre-bending – and they are all perfectly correct.

This is from No Diamonds, which is the zaniest story in the collection. It shows Fagan’s exuberance.

Tara is important ’cause that’s where I brought Sinead on our first date, but according to John the Hippie, a Texan who dressed up as a druid and pranced around Lia Fail every morning whenever white sunlight leaked through the smog, breaking up the storms of cawing crows around his feet that looked like blots of tar and who, by that stage, due to a population explosion, basically ran the place, according to him there wasn’t always diamonds in Tara, and the Sinead thing wasn’t all that important, or at least, not as important as the mines themselves, although I said, ‘John, that’s just your opinion, Sinead is the importantest person in the world,’ which he said was just, for reals, my opinion. This is the John who preached in shite Irish to a bleary sun, slap-bang next to the M3.

The other stories are less whimsical (whimsy is best in small doses). There are ironic allusions to market ideology gone mad, ageing teachers all at sea in grasping PC culture, and the exploitation that underlies our cheap consumer goods. The clever playfulness is a bit like early Will Self, though with a warmth that Self’s stuff lacks.

The characters feel very real – in the school-setting story, you think to yourself, yeah, he’s grabbing all the characters he knew at school, but in The Sky over Our Houses Fagan sets down a dad with teenage daughters, and his wife Marianela, an Argentinian who has lived in Ireland for twenty years. Marianela is an amazing creation, spouting curses in Spanish, occasionally reliving the horrors of political violence she was witness to, passionate about community politics, and a living antidote to apathy. Very very real people – and this in a story where corpses float down from the sky at night!

I’m guessing Fagan is from somewhere around Kilcock, Trim, or Summerhill – these are the placenames that crop up in a couple of his stories. Well he’s putting these towns on the map!

A novella and eight short stories.

Marbrook has had two careers: first with the navy, and then decades as a newspaperman, working as journalist and sub-editor with papers such as the Baltimore Sun. His website and his Facebook posts often cast a critical eye on the media and its collusions and laziness. He has had three poetry collections published and four novels.

In the title story – long enough to be called a novella – a young woman, Artemisia, lies in hospital recovering from being struck by lightning while on a hike. She’s a fast-talking ebullient charmer, but seems to have total amnesia. Not even a memory of her own name. So she deduces what kind of person she must be by observing how she thinks and how she talks; her own wit constantly surprises her. It’s a fascinating conceit – we learn who we really are through our interactions with others.

She quickly strikes up a bond with the nurse Sister Claudine, who perceives that Artemisia is an exceptionally gifted person. But Artemesia’s visionary insights and wild way of talking make the nurse concerned that the young women will get sectioned : “You mustn’t talk like that. I mean, the words are just fine, but you sound ratty-tat-tat.” Artemesia seems to have been re-wired by the lightning bolt: she talks of being raped by a god. Her perceptions of others’ thoughts seem preternaturally keen. She doesn’t know what kind of person she was before, but she seems sure she has been animated. Sister Claudine herself is a person with a broad spiritual openness who is familiar with the reductive categories of medical science, but aware of how limited they are. The two make a connection, with Claudine taking the role of guide to bring her back to common-sense reality and a discharge from the hospital. “You don’t want to give the psych people an excuse to detain you.”

A summary of the plot doesn’t get across what’s unique about this story. The density and texture of the writing is astonishing. This is a long way from minimalism. A long way from a reductive perspective of humanity. All senses are alert, associations are sparked to past events, memories of childhood intrude. This is how we first encounter Nuala, the curator of a modern art gallery and the first discoverer of Artemisia’s talent.
Nuala Gwilt, terrorist-in-chief of postmodern art by virtue of a genocidal tongue, gemmy if androgynous looks, and a curatorial knack for razzmatazzing museum benefactors, repeated this curse before her morning ablutions for two weeks, more or less, until lightning struck, so to speak.

Marbrook’s characters have a depth and subtlety that make them seem more than merely human. They are big souled, capable of extraordinary flashes of intuition or acts of generosity. They may be vindictive but they are never petty.

Marbrook has set himself the nigh-impossible task of delineating a character – Artemisia – who is beautiful, a gifted artist, and a self-less personality. He makes her real, brings the goddess to earth so to speak, but not down to earth. She moves through the avaricious and publicity-obsessed New York art world without being tainted by it. Most writers seem to have a general project of demonstrating that high ideals founder, elevated motivations can be pared away to reveal the familiar drives, etcetera. Marbrook’s fiction seems to extend rather than reduce our concept of human nature: there is more to us than we think, we are greater than we suppose.

The story Ootwaert’s Hoe displays the same imaginative ambition. An artist begins to sketch the faces of the long-dead in a graveyard. Later he looks up old newspapers in the local library and finds his portraits are true to life. It’s not the uncanny aspect which is in focus here, but the depth and intensity of characters which emerge from oblivion. Marbrook’s writing in this piece captures the intensely visual grip an artist has on the world. The main protagonist, Bo, is an artist not just when he is painting, but every time he looks about him. And night after night he returns to the cemetery to paint the dead.

this is the ritual

Lilliput Press & Bloomsbury

Bracing and contrary and annoying and intellectually playful stuff here. It feels great to be able to pick up a book and say “not to everyone’s taste“. So many books bear the Nihil Obstat of palatability for the market.

This collection of short fiction has several biographies of (possibly) fictional writers, bits of possible autobiography where a disreputable character called Rob Doyle appears and fails, Ballard-style eidetic fictions that work like contact prints on your cortex, a meditation on how extreme pornography can get, and a piece on the author’s frenzied attempt to write a reassessment of Nietzsche.

And you’ll never ever have to listen to anyone say: “a lovely book by the lovely Rob Doyle.”

Unthology 7

Unthank Books
edited by Ashley Stokes & Robin Jones

I love the Unthology series of extraordinary new fiction, a sort of “best of” without deferring to established reputations – often a fatal weakness in state-of-the-art anthologies.
Fight them? Astonish Us is how the editors introduce this current incarnation. “We considered interviewing ourselves in twee and mimsy fashion … We thought hard about whether to use this introduction to provide an august and lofty survey of something called the State of the Short Story, or use it to tell you that we’re so middle class that we need no introduction.”

Fight them? Astonish Us

The people behind Unthology have a broad tolerance for different styles and aims in fiction. And so there may well be horror stories alongside experimental fiction. Generally a predilection for fiction that makes you think, rather than the whole beautiful-prose gig.

I’ll give the verdict straight off: I think this is probably the best anthology I’ve read, including all those ‘best new’ anthologies that come out every couple of years. There are just so many standout stories here: at least five that I’ve read twice. And as a whole the anthology conveys a distinct This-Is-England statement, though this was probably not what guided the selection for the book – one story is set in Barcelona and another in Yugoslavia.

Read on …