What I'm reading | The Stoneybatter Files

Apr 19 2018

Unthology 8

Unthank Books
edited by Ashley Stokes & Robin Jones

Short stories are the way we live. The world is atomized, desperate, dangerous and confusing at the minute, full of pain, passion, rage, yearning, injustice and too little joy. But not everyone experiences or expresses this in the same way. There is no homogenous form, only moments to collect and arrange. And that’s what Unthology intend to do.

— from the introduction

Unthology 9 is out already and 10 will be with us in June I think. The Stokes & Jones duo at Unthank have been swimming in an ocean of submissions, filtering through them like a pair of blue whales since December 2010, creating 9 anthologies over the course of 7 years = an average of 1.29 books a year.
I initially thought the “Unthank” in the publisher name is a clever Joycean neologism expressing the thankless nature of the labour, with a nod to Sartre’s Nothingness and a sideways glance at Beckett’s Unnamable. But no. It’s the name of the road in Norwich the editor walks down on his way into town.

Toggle Content (click to open)

As the introduction suggests, the Unthology series is excellent at publishing those short stories that do what only short stories can do. There’s an air of exhilaration and daring to these anthologies. The editors have broad-ranging tastes – the intro talks about how they also wanted to finish each book with a ‘naughty step’, an outrageous story that wouldn’t fit comfortably anywhere.
Unthology 7, as I mentioned previously, was the best anthology I had read in a long long time, beating lots of “Best of” anthologies. Number 8 is still growing on me.

It’s a pleasing balance of stories which might be described as realistic in ambition, and those which are not. The latter includes those which play with an idea and even one or two which could be accused of ‘showing off’. But if the story is fun, what’s wrong with that? Is authentic soul-enhancing fiction the only way for fiction to be serious?

Kit Caless’ Not Drowning but Saving is a clever satire on the motivations of humanitarian volunteers. There are not enough disasters happening to give meaning to the lives of all the thousands craving to be needed. They gaze at their TV screens waiting for a newsflash announcing an earthquake or tsunami.
Those suffering from withdrawal join together in a support group …. there are some dark insights into here.

Damon King’s piece is a concise look at that perennial source of argument: to cut the sandwiches in rectangles or triangles. The setting for this deadpan re-enactment is a prison, which gives a hint as to what way the argument might end.

Andre van Loon’s story takes a nicely distance perspective of the two main characters – a young man and woman, who don’t seem to be bothered by any material concerns, encounter a hiccup in their relationship. The reader is left free to regard them as a bit vacuous.

Recent months have been fraught with an atmosphere of anxiety about gender differences. One manifestation of this was a number of Twitter spats about whether men can write from a woman’s perspective and vice-versa. “If women wrote men the way men wrote women” etc. Lots of heat and little light. For better or for worse this was at the back of my mind, and the portrayal of the main male character in Lara Williams struck me as astonishingly perceptive. I keep going back to this story: there’s something enigmatic about it. It’s a fairly simple story about an ordinary (read ‘middle class’) guy who falls in love with a posh sexy girl. The writing is luminous. To give a maybe awkward example: the groom is told his wife is in the bathroom and wants to see him urgently. He goes to the bathroom door.

‘Knock, knock,’ he ventured, tapping at the door

Why doesn’t he just knock? Or call out her name? There’s something annoying about the way he says the words ‘knock knock’. Maybe the reader will begin to understand why his girlfriend says, apparently without reason, Don’t be so fucking pathetic, at different points in the story.
It’s a weird story. I think it’s a brilliant one, but I can’t fathom the author’s aims in writing it.

David Frankel’s story is a fictionalized bio of the artist Edvard Munch. Related in snapshots over the decades, it blurs the lines between biography and fiction. It feels complete and satisfying in itself, though it is an unusual genre: biography in a short story. Here’s to more in the form.

Clare Fisher‘s story is one of my favourites. It’s a day-in-the-life of a young woman who works in Tasty’s Chicken related with an exuberant immediacy and arbitrariness. She can’t help thinking back to moments in her life when she failed to show courage, but also a time as a teenager when she was nicknamed ‘The Guts’ for her legendary fearlessness. And so the title How to Get Back Your Guts.
The hectic pace gives this piece a upbeat feel, and yet it is an authentic depiction of a life stuck in a low-paid job. There’s loneliness, grime, and exploitation – but Tess has faith that getting back her guts will save her.

Lots of good stuff, Victoria Briggs‘ story also impressed me, and I loved Laura Darling‘s 10,000 Tiny Pieces.
Martin Monahan’s The Toasted Cheese Sandwich of Babel reads like a 20th century novel of ideas from Central Europe. The actions spans continents and decades, professors engaged in secret research, the CIA, connections with world leaders, CERN laboratory, crimes of passion. It’s a lot to have in a short story. Sounds like Monahan needs to get a novel going, and I’d be keen to read it.

0 comments

Sep 27 2017

Oisin Fagan’s Hostages

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!

0 comments

Sep 27 2017

To Be a Machine

To Be a Machine
Mark O’Connell
Granta

A personal journey of encounters with, and living among a selection of various ‘transhumanists’ – those who believe that humankind needs to use technology to advance beyond its biological nature, perhaps by extending lifespan indefinitely so we become immortal, or by uploading our minds to become digital entities, or by enhancing our bodies to become cyborgs, or by fusing with artificial intelligence. Those who see ‘biological nature’ as something to overcome.

It’s an intellectual journey of Mark getting to know some key figures and their ideas, but has its geographical side to it: you feel like plotting out the various flights and road trips. He has put in a lot of travel to write this book, a lot of time drinking beers and having breakfast with the people he writes about. There isn’t a single sentence where he references an email exchange. Mark seems to have sworn off digital communication – he wants to meet them in the flesh.

What’s fascinating about this account is that the authorial tone falters at times. There’s a common-sense tone that re-emerges as the main one. In this perspective, the various tribes of transhumanists are viewed with a sardonic wit. We smile with the author at their foibles or plain weirdness. We meet Max More who runs a cryopreservation facility where your dead body is frozen so it can be reanimated when technology has advanced to the point of scanning and uploading brains. Max More was born Max O’Connor, but announced in a fanzine many years ago: “I’ve changed my name to Max More in order to remove the cultural links to Ireland (which connotes backwardness rather than future-orientation.)”
But at other times the author confesses his anxieties about what the future may hold for us, and also his more existential fears: of death, of a lack of meaning to life. These fears, which are rather the preserve of religion and philosophy, are the driving energy behind many who turn to transhumanism. Mark astutely always tracks the childhood and formative years of his subjects, hears their stories of how they first caught the bug.

And to be honest, the parts where we see these West coast enthusiasts at their most bearded geekish fanatical are the most enjoyable of the book. It’s a good feeling to feel grounded in your own commonsense while reading about guys who cut into their own flesh to implant electronic devices the size of a cigarette pack. Or the anti-deathist who confesses he’s really looking forward to the future because of the sexbots.

But sojourns with the fanatical form only one facet of the book. Other players he encounters are far more formidable – either because of their hard-core scientific research, or their immense wealth, or their political influence. Randal Koene the neuroscientist is working on the problem of extracting the process of mind from the flesh of the brain. “As a PhD student in computational neuroscience at McGill University in Montreal, Randal was initially cautious about revealing the underlying motivation for his studies for fear of being taken for a fantasist or an eccentric.” There are wealthy and influential people willing to give his institution the odd million here and there. There are strong ties between transhumanism and the west coast milieu of tech entrepeneurs – and at key points with the military. A key advocate of transhumanism, and one of the most extreme, Ray Kurzweil, as hired by Google to set up a Singularity University training center for corporate executives. Billionaire Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal) is involved in providing venture capital to several tech companies with transhumanist agendas to some degree. The wave of the future will emerge from the work these guys are doing. Sometimes when reading this part of the book I had to backtrack, check credentials, make sure that I wasn’t reading speculation from basement dwellers, but research from cutting-edge scientists. The challenge of figuring out how the brain works sounds thoroughly futuristic, but when the brain in question is that of a roundworm with 302 neurons, then it becomes a feasible scientific project. Just don’t tell the academic committee your real reason is to seek immorality.

Following O’Connell’s adventures among the tech visionaries, punks, and fanatics is an immersive reading experience, and a stepping-off path for those who want to discern the wave of the future. It’s sharply intelligent and erudite – referring easily to essays of Descartes, Karel Capek, ancient Greek philosophers, Gnosticism, and an obscure essay from Heinrich von Kleist. He’s not trying to assess the rigour of the scientific thinking: he’s rather looking at the motivations and often unexamined beliefs of the key players – beliefs which O’Connell demonstrates have surprising forebears:

“Beneath the talk of future technologies, I could hear the murmur of ancient ideas. We were talking about the transmigration of souls, eternal return, reincarnation. Nothing is ever new. Nothing ever truly dies, but is reborn in a new form, a new language, a new substrate.”

The conversations with Randal are a high point of the book, and O’Connell here is no Sunday paper columnist, but a deep thinker himself. “In the weeks and months after I returned from San Francisco, I thought obsessively about the idea of whole brain emulation.” This is evidently not a rhetorical flourish. He concludes this particular chapter: “I never loved my wife and our little boy more, I realized, than when I thought of them as mammals. I dragged myself, my animal body, out of bed to join them.” I don’t know Mark, I don’t know if this is the truth or if it is a view from a diminished and beaten-down concept of what it is to be human.

For me the book tied together a number of articles and news items that have attracted my attention in recent years. Hawking’s warnings of the dangers of AI, similar warnings from Peter Thiel, Bill Gates and back in 2000 from Bill Joy, Google’s development of Deepmind, recurring BBC articles with headlines that sound like straplines from 50s sci-fi movies, news items reporting in matter-of-fact tones on how AI systems are taking over the running of hedge funds.

The book made me, momentarily at least, despair of what fiction can achieve. If I wrote a novel about a character who was initially a performance poet, then joined the Quakers, then became a militant atheist and later a transhumanist – well, fiction wouldn’t be up to the task of depicting these transmutations. I find the real people in O’Connell’s book much more fascinating than those in fiction. I think of that moment in the movie Sideways where Miles is revealed to the dinner table to be a novelist, and a relative insensitively remarks, “There are so many fascinating people that are real. Why read made-up things?” Just a few decades ago the characters and drama in this book was the stuff of sci-fi and speculative fiction.

“People just routinely give themselves too much credit,” says Tim. It’s my personal favourite quotation of the book.
Tim Cannon is the de facto leader of a small group of cyborgs – people who have augmented themselves with machine, even if only a sensor embedded under the skin. The general thrust of Tim’s remark is that we are animals – meat machines – who like to big themselves up and throw around grandiose concepts of free will and creativity. I picture this sentence as the centre of a web of associations to scraps of philosophy, fiction, and real people I have known. It’s a life-stance that I keep coming across. “You make too much of things.” I don’t see it as necessarily a perspective from a negative and cynical personality. It can grow out of a need for rigour, a desire to cut through to the essentials and not trade in elusive concepts.

I reckon it’s the most stimulating and involving popular book to touch on these issues since ’The Mind’s I’ edited by Hofstadter.

0 comments

Aug 13 2017

Djelloul Marbrook’s A Warding Circle

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.

0 comments

Mar 20 2017

The Girl Missing from the Window

Doire Press

Nine stories set here & now in Ireland. O’Reilly brings the reader right into the story, right up close where it is difficult to pass judgement. There’s no purple prose, no chopped sentences, no ironic distance looking down on the characters from above. Instead there’s a keen interest in people and their motivations and predicaments. Often that predicament occurs at the interface between a common-sense approach to life and the complexities thrown up by the modern world.

Toggle Content (click to open)

The opening story is about text bullying among teenage schoolgirls. The title What Rose Did, has an ominous ring. Rose Carney, we soon learn, hung herself from the branch of a tree. The story is related by Tracy, the mother of teenager Leanne. At first Tracy attempts to comfort Leanne, thinking she must be upset by the news. The family’s domestic routines are described, but as in the best horror movies, our perceptions have been subtly shifted and there is no comfort this familiarity.
“Saturday morning the boys were back playing the game Santa had brought them. I was in the utility room, sorting clothes by the washing machine. I could hear them arguing and, when it turned nasty, I found them rolling about on the floor, boxing, grabbing at hair, the game over.”
Harmless roughhousing, part of growing up? Or a hint of the darker side of human nature that cannot be eradicated?

Suspicions begin to grow around the role of the daughter, Leanne. It’s remarkable how depictions of the teenage girl lounging on her bed can seem so eerie. Her father seems to have a better intuition of what might have happened – but what kind of father is it who can so readily suspect his daughter of wishing someone dead? This is murky stuff indeed and the scene where the father tries to wrestle the incriminating mobile phone from Leanne makes for uncomfortable reading.

There’s a tension in many of these stories, a hint of dread. There’s also a lot a lot of soul – many of them have the impact of a ballad: there’s no startling twist but the emotive power catches you by surprise.

Guys and the Way they Might Look at You is about a couple whose marriage has grown cold; the man’s libido is apparently flagging. They remain remarkably civil to each other. They have children at university, yet they seem quite sporty, go to the gym, use the internet, and are in every way ‘modern’ for want of a better word. I liked the portrayal of this couple, who feel familiar to me, and yet they are not pinned to any familiar notions of Irishness as mediated to us. They hook up with a couple from Kerry, who likewise are presented just as themselves, and could be from anywhere.
This story was my favourite in the collection. It had a constant tension and also a hard-to-define atmosphere of unreality. If these people come across as unauthentic (though perhaps only to me), it’s not because they are not out there in the real world, it’s because they have never achieved authenticity in their lives.

In the best of O’Reilly’s stories there is no sense of artifice, the reader doesn’t ever think this is someone making things up. We are faced directly to reality. The writer Philip O’Casey makes an astute observation in his blurb when he says “some of them could be from today’s headlines.” And just as with many a newspaper story, you might well ask yourself “is this what the world’s coming to?”

The title story is another good one, with Irish men on the tear in Amsterdam.

Why didn’t social media tell me O’Reilly was this good?

PS Yes it feels odd to write about O’Reilly

0 comments

Jan 8 2017

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.”

0 comments