What I'm reading | The Stoneybatter Files

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

Nov 17 2016

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 …

Now I don’t know if it’s just me, but I think Unthology 7 is the best of those I’ve read. Number 8 is out since then, and I’ll probably get round to reading it in, oh, a couple of years. I was never the cool kid who knew all the latest bands. No rush, the unthologies will stand the test of time. Some day they’re gonna be a boxed set with embossed covers and edge gilding and tassels. That’ll be a boring day.

Barney Walsh’s tale is a sort of love story among the gutters of heroin addiction. It’s an enquiry into the nature of deviance with a nod to Clockwork Orange, and all round just a thumping great story that bravely veers into, well, the realms of bad taste. It’s my personal favourite in the book.

David Martin’s Spiders is set in an office on the 23rd floor. “It is dark beyond the glass, the city a sea of orange sodium light, refracted in the overcast. Rhys is at his desk, virtually alone here.” The data he deals powers the world outside in oblique ways. The company he works for used to be a spin-off from some entity that was originally a bank. Now they are downsizing after the financial crash and each month more employees are called in for their final notice. In his many moments of distraction, Rhys pauses to observe the colony of spiders who are thriving in a sheltered spot outside the plate glass.
It’s a wonderfully creepy story, a seamless meld of realism and allegory, set firmly in the 21st century.

The story right next in the book is also set smack-bang in corporate-employee post-crash England. The Hollow Shore, by Gary Budden. You might read reams about England’s lost heritage, and how retail chains have levelled High Streets to a single ahistorical non-contiguous space. But you need to read this story to get a feel for how eerie and alienating this can be. Simon has made a bit of a mess of his life, could no longer afford his flat in London, and returns to live with his parents in small town England. The parents are actually happy to see their son, and together they go for a Sunday dinner to a pub. Simon asks his father why they had chosen a chain pub instead of some lovely old place in the real town centre.

My father looked up from his paper. “We like it here.” For the first time that day, he smiled.

Maybe it’s just me, but I found that scene weirdly uncanny. It was also uncanny that back in his home town there is a life waiting for him to pick up again – old friends to meet, an ex-girlfriend to hook up with again. All this eeriness coalesces towards the end. I don’t know why this story works so well, but it’d be my choice for the best in the book and the best I’ve read in a long time.

Charlie Hill’s On the truth and lies of the love story has a neat structure: two columns, the left is a man’s telephone chat with an unheard friend; the right side is a woman’s chat, likewise with an unheard interlocutor. The man tells his buddy about how easy-going and cool his new girlfriend is, the woman’s conversation – set just a couple of weeks later – tells about how she rushed into things and the moment she realised things wouldn’t work out.
This story is a real coffee-break treat, with instantly recognisable situations and conversation patter. It’s short, funny, and very memorable.

https://storgy.com/2016/09/23/charlie-hill-franks-american-dream/

John D. Rutter’s is a topical story about an occasional journalist/blogger who inadvertently starts a rumour train that the famous entertainer B is a sex abuser. He is then surprised when a whole string of victims pop up with allegations, so it turns out B really is in fact a pervert. Or is he?
Fun to mull over as a piece of pure fiction, but the real-world correlates have generated a lot of heated debate.

Roisin O’Donnell’s story is a fictional portrayal of the Barcelona architect Gaudi. You really have to have courage to take on a historical figure in a short story, and O’Donnell gets inside Gaudi’s religious perspective. Her debut short story collection Wild Quiet came out a few months ago here in Ireland.

The Unthology editors have always shown a high tolerance for concept stories – the kind that runs with an idea and is not too concerned with the whole authenticity and slice-of-life rubrics. That suits me just fine. Dan Powell’s Free Hardcore was fun to read – it helps to know that hard core is the word for rubble and stone used to line a foundation trench.
Another story begins “I died last month. Didn’t have time to say goodbye.” (Roelof Bakker’s Green) I knew I was in for a treat. I enjoyed the translucent prose in this one, but felt I was missing something, as the story seemed a bit slight.

Elaine Chiew’s Chinese Pygmalion bowled me over. It’s a densely textured account of a 15-year old boy and his 9-year old girl cousin thrown together by family tragedy. Young Simon is struggling with the whole puberty thing and making dubious friendships online, while little Elly is a whole textbook case of weirdness.
“Elly whispers shiso-shiso-shiso along the corridors. She watches me sleep at night with owl-eyes. She stares at her eggs for breakfast and says that the yolks are trembling with fear. Music gives her mountain pectorals and marmalade is a place of alien skid” The mentions of uber-eclectic bands and musical styles , teen argot, London locations, and Elly’s own crazy idiolect make this piece a touch opaque, leaving the reader a bit of a teen himself, in awe of a world more complex and cooler than he is. – But I mean this as praise.

Open Windows by Debz Hobbs-Wyatt is set right now, the Facebook era, featuring a group of thirty-something friends who call themselves ‘adults’ in quotation marks. They are ex-friends to be precise, who have all gone their separate ways since the days of graffiti forays. One of their number, Adam, has died. They had kept in a sort of zombie-contact with him on Facebook, occasionally acknowledging his posts, but ignoring his invites. Adam had had an accident when he was 13 which had left him wheelchair-bound. He had stayed mainly in his room, inventing superhero characters, writing on Post-its, and clicking around on social media. His nan tells the friends that Adam always felt connected to them because of Facebook.
The prose and style of the story is jaunty, and yet a real existential nothingness seeps through. The lives of these people seem so slight, they have only irony to cope with the death of their friend. Tracy has become a spiritual medium, but it’s more of a hobby she doesn’t truly believe in. At one point she attempts to say something profound, and another of the friends tells her to “sod off”. Adam seems to have spent his whole life on superhero stuff and 80s bands, and they struggle to find anything to say about him. “Maybe we could all have been a bit more like Adam,” says one friend. “I left John because he was too serious.”
I am not sure to what extent the author intended this story to be unsettling – there’s an apt quotation from Peter Pan, the loveable boy who never grew up.

Ken Edwards’ Infinity is mercifully short. It’s not fiction, but a playing around with the notion of narrative. “And they all gather in that room and they talk and remark upon the room whether it’s a good room or not and they remember another room was that as good a room as the room that is the rom they’re in or wasn’t it perhaps it wasn’t or perhaps it was another room they were thinking of.”
I understood it as a stark demonstration of the arbitrariness of attachment to the world and to a specific era. It’s a very visual piece that stretches the brain muscles in unusual ways. It’s so off the beaten track, hypnotic and allusive – I was very curious what other stuff Edwards has out, and I see he has a new novel Country Life out just a few months ago. https://tearsinthefence.com/2016/02/16/country-life-by-ken-edwards-unthank-books/

I loved the prose of Elizabeth Baines’ Looking for the Castle.

”When the lover reached for his cigarettes, he had a way of doing it, dropping his arm in a curve, that made you think of someone drowning. He would light up and breathe, and his eyes would bruise sideways out of the present into the past.”

The narrator is chasing down childhood memories, growing anxious that they don’t fit into the current landscape, and it’s just perfectly written.

0 comments

Oct 2 2016

The Blocks by Karl Parkinson

Here’s my review of Karl Parkinson’s The Blocks, which appeared in the Irish Times of October 1st 2016.
(Might be a pay-to-view page for some.)

0 comments

Oct 2 2016

Iron Towns by Anthony Cartwright

Anthony Cartwright’s new novel Iron Towns bowled me over. It’s set in the industrial heartland of England – memories of the furnaces and forges and hammers and anvils are still alive, the local football team too is living off memories. Resonant fictionalised names are used – Kowton, Oxton, Ironport, the Spider House, Chaintown, Lowtown. The novel is a powerful blend of the mythological, the industrial and the lure of football stardom.

Anthony was spontaneously generous in instigating a mini-reading tour of London back in August. Rather than say anything more about his novel, I’m just going to drop a few extracts that struck me:

And there along the valley bottom, between the two rivers, is the Anvil Yards, a maze of ancient works and roofless brick factory buildings. The blocks of the old Greenfield Ironworks stand at its heart like some secret kaba. Names from the glory days of a revolution appear on road signs and raised on metal. Newcomen and Stephenson and Darby and Watt. And there at its edge, hard against the banks of the river Chain, is the football ground, built to look like one of the factories, still going, creaking into life for another season, one more year.

Toggle Content (click to open)

The players are born within the sound of hammers. Whether a great boom across rivers and docks or the tap, tap, tap from backyard workshops, the sounds of metal and stone are always close by. The rattle of the railway and tram, the tapping of the nailyard, chainyard, pottery, the blasting of stone from quarries, the hacking of coal from deep underground, the roar of a furnace. They hold in them the energy of fire and dammed rivers. Di Stéfano and Billy Wright look out on their iron bridges, Beckenbauer’s dad delivers his post through the snow and ash of ruined Munich, while Jack and Bobby Charlton’s father lies deep underground scraping coal.
When the supporters pile out on the away car park in Anvil Yards, next to the yellow concrete of the bus station, the sun glints on the towers of scrap over by the canal, and they sing Gyppos, and What a fucking shithole. Some of them take off their shirts. Their blond hair and white bellies move across the plain.
‘Who are yer? Who are yer?’
‘We are iron men, from the Iron Towns, come from the Anvil Yards,’ they reply from the Greenfield end.
The boy Tyrone is still smiling, looks daft in the sunlit doorway, his eyes following Alina hidden somewhere back in the kitchen. Dee Dee cannot begin to imagine what they are saying to each other, but doesn’t need to, she supposes. She wonders whether to mention him to Alina later, decides not to. She’s never teased her like that, never pried, tried not to show how much she worries, how much she has put into being the girl’s mother, this lovely, lonely girl, and sometimes thinks there is more than one way of spoiling a child.
Caesar sailed up the river but the people were ready. They set great iron spikes beneath the still waters. Caesar’s ships were drowned and the valley filled with water.
Then Caesar came a third time and the people ran and hid, and the valley filled with ghosts.
There is always a war. Invaders come and go, settle and remain, become the people that live among the valleys and the stones, wait things out, hollow out the hills and burn their black insides. There is always a war, always a fire that burns within, without, and the rivers only ever run with blood.
Arthur died on the muddy, muddy banks.
There was no boat to carry him.
‘You’ll have to smarten up your act, love,’ his mother repeated phrases she used to say to him when he was a kid. He smiled at this, a man in his thirties crumpled in the soft armchair in his parents’ front room.
‘All their furniture is too big for the house,’ is something Greta had said to him, and it was true, he’d never noticed before, but it was.
Strangers all of them, to each other, to themselves.

(Eli is Joey’s 92 year-old father, who occasionally disappears on a ramble)

At least the riots were in the summer. He’d got the bus out towards the flyover to go and have a look at the trouble himself, a bonfire burning in the Tesco car park at four in the afternoon. Young lads tried to nick trainers at the shopping village. Joey could never get to the bottom of whether Eli had gone to tell them all to go home or whether he thought the revolution had come at last.

0 comments

May 6 2016

Satin Island

Satin island by Tom McCarthy

This review first appeared in The Dublin Review of Books

What makes Tom McCarthy’s fourth novel so unique is not the prose style, nor even the intellectual speculations it is peppered with, it is the narrator’s sensibility. Take a look at this extract.
One of the huge cranes building the bank’s HQ was turning as we drove; the box from which the cables carrying the crane’s load descended was sliding along the jib-arm, which itself was swinging horizontally across the air. The box was sliding fast, and the arm was swinging fast, and we were driving fast as well; and it appeared, just for a moment, that the box, though hurtling along the moving arm, was staying quite still.
Such writing makes us aware that most novels are written by, well, writerly types of people. People who have studied English lit and love words more than geometry or art. In this work McCarthy displays what might be termed a da-Vincian sensibility. He has heightened awareness of structure, architecture, choreographed motion, covert physical laws. It is far more common to read writers with a special sensitivity to nature, or who have a good ear for dialect. Sections of McCarthy’s novel beg to be transmuted into the visual arts. (When this review was almost complete, I checked online and there has indeed been such an art show. Tom McCarthy himself collaborated in an exhibition at the ICA in London last year.)

The novel opens with the narrator U. waiting interminably at an airport for a delayed transfer flight. Nothing for him to do except browse the web and look about himself. He notices the myriad of screens around him: laptops, informational displays, screens showing reports of an oil spill. He is immersed in a media-saturated environment: when his girlfriend calls him on Skype, the video image is just one more window open on his laptop screen, itself competing with the TV screens around him. This atmosphere of distracted attention, “meandering along corridors of trivia” is deftly accomplished. Here, as occurs repeatedly in later chapters, we are plunged into a wholly synthetic environment which threatens to overwhelm the merely human. This sounds as though it is heading towards a familiar depiction of alienated-man-in-a-technological-age. However U.’s natural curiosity and sense of wonder lift him, and the story, from any nihilistic thoughts. Meanings may evade him, but he does not doubt they are there. Fascination is the dominant mode.
Besides, U. is in his natural habitat. He is a master of dealing with the deluge of information and compiling it into dossiers. This is the first novel I have read where instant access to information is not represented as disruptively new, but as a self-evident background. At no point is there a reference to the pre-internet era.
U. is an anthropologist working on a world-changing project for a multinational corporation. We never learn the precise nature of the Koob-Sassen project – at one point U. pictures it as a Tower of Babel rising in the desert, at another point he has a vision of it as an inscrutable black box, perhaps like a mausoleum or perhaps like a child’s toy.
U.’s role in the project seems to be a kind of concept-generator, a blue-sky thinker. His boss Peyman assigns him to prepare The Great Report. “The Document, he said; the Book. The First and Last Word on our age.”
This notion of “The Report” is a powerful metaphor. It is the both the yearning for meaning and the meaning itself. The drive toward Logos is one that is rarely depicted in fiction. (As suggested above, perhaps those with such proclivities tend to become something other than writers.) There are however precedents, for example in Bruno Schulz’s frantic searches for The Book once glimpsed as a child. Or Pawel Huelle’s stories, which again and again revisit the metaphor of a book – in one story the perfect correlate of U.’s Report is an immense mail order catalogue.

The novel has several threads: the mysterious project progresses, U.’s friend Petr is dying of cancer, and U. gets sidetracked into theorising about a parachutist’s death he reads about online. But the main driving force of the narrative is not plot as such; it is the way it enlists the reader into its search for hidden architectures and master-meanings. The reader’s speculations will at times pre-empt and become intertwined with those of the narrator. This absence of a plot will no doubt annoy some, but others will barely notice in their search for a thematic unity to the various obsessions and recurring imagery.
One such recurring image is that of a ceaseless flow of humanity. U. watches a birds-eye view of traffic chaos in Lagos. Another time it is roller-bladers skating past the camera. And then later he finds himself watching a clip of Muslim pilgrims performing the Hajj; later again a glimpse of those zombie walks which have inexplicably sprung up in all major cities in the last decade. A dialectic at work in the novel seems to be a toggle between the conviction that there is an esoteric logos, and a view of humanity as a meaningless flow.

Satin Island touches on several live nodes of contemporary culture: corporate ability to commandeer the grassroots, alienation of office work, new-age remedies, frantic seeking for the new cool, and the abandonment of rational argument in favour of following the confident leader. In short, the novel itself is a fair stab at fulfilling U.’s brief for his Great Report.

U’s flitting thoughts are always wired to the absurdities and contradictions of the age. (It’s obvious progenitor in this regard is DeLillo’s White Noise, and there are several parts which are strongly reminiscent of that novel.) The reader will often be in doubt whether the narrator has stumbled on a brilliant insight, or whether he is swallowing his own snake oil. At other points the reader will be jumping up to check facts on Google. (Is it true that there are no Starbucks in Seattle, only stealth outlets owned by the company?)
Rarely have I read a book so visually intricate and intellectually stimulating, and it well deserved its place on the shortlist for the Man Booker, and more especially on the shortlist for the Goldsmiths Prize for innovative fiction.

0 comments