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John Gray

The book’s conclusions can be summed up thus: Man is nothing more than an animal. There are no truths. History has no meaning. Our ideologies are all vanity. Our free choice is an illusion. We should learn “to live skillfully” in order to be happy.

“Man is weaker and baser by nature than we used to believe,” (as the Grand Inquisitor puts it) is the conclusion he reaches.

The winding road to this conclusion is paced by aphorisms standing like stark dead trees.

And so it goes, relentlessly dedicated to reductionism. We will never emerge from the forces that dominate the world today, which he lists as big business, organised crime, hidden parts of government. Where are democratic governments, universities, individuals?

At times the books seems to become a litany of facts presented from an utterly pessimistic angle. For example, many science writers find it inspiring that quantum mechanics puts paid to determinism and leaves scope for consciousness and freedom. The very laws of the universe do not seem to have been set down from the beginning. But the way Gray slants it is: “Even the most basic features of our ordinary experience may be delusion.”

The narrator refrains from making any implications about every-day ethical behaviour. Are we to continue to fight for justice, even though it is an illusive concept, nothing ever changes etc. etc.?

I use the word ‘the narrator’ because I am not convinced John Gray, the whole person, stands behind these views. Nevertheless, I hope we never find ourselves together on the proverbial sinking hot air ballon together, John. I’d dump you out and soar.

The back blurb states

… will probably prove to be one of the most important books this century.    – Mail on Sunday

Please. Even if armageddon is here and now and nothing makes sense any more, and we’ve given up long division as being too advanced for human brains – even if we’re crawling around with our underwear on our heads, there are tails coming out from our rears, and there is no truth but the might of the majority, please PLEASE let’s not elevate The Mail on Sunday to be the arbiter of what is the most important book of the century. For fuck’s sake.

Soren Kierkegaard

There is a caricature not yet extinct in popular culture of an effete romantic, one who will still write poetry about moonbeams, fall hopelessly in love with girls who laugh at him, brood at night on how to interpret a sidelong glance, deplore the crude manners of tradesmen. It is interesting that this caricature exists at all: generally a caricature is an exaggerated representation of a familiar real-life original. But in modern fiction I can’t think of any such vorbild: one has to go back at least 60 years. It might be that the original is familiar to people from reality.

Kierkegaard’s seducer is a refined aesthete, taken to the nth power and folded back on itself, but there is no suggestion of a hard fall to reality ever impending. Such a fall is not even conceivable. When we enter the seducer’s world, through the means of this diary, we enter a scheme of aesthetics & ethics that is the world, and only the ignorant turf-cutters and servants cannot be expected to participate.

Read on …

Philip O Ceallaigh

High Country, like the title story, has a daring simplicity to it. A young man takes the bus, hitchhikes, and walks to try to reach the remote uplands. But it is hard to escape the towns. The houses, the noises, the ugliness extends on and on. The people he encounters are drunk, talk ceaselessly of money, or try to cheat him. This is not pessimism; it is a minutely realistic account.

There are too many people in the world, inhabiting every square metre of arable land. Six billion, seven billion, or eight billion – whichever it currently stand at, it’s too many. The story reminds me of my own attempts to reach the mountains on a bicycle: getting caught in vast roundabouts, finding what appeared to be a country road only to arrive a few minutes later back in Tallaght, then at last gaining altitude, looking back at the city spread below like a coarse-grained vomit, and then getting caught in a traffic jam up the mountains. And the cars are much faster than in rural Romania where O’Ceallaigh was rambling.

Read on …

Peter Woods

Not London of the early 80’s, but hard graft is the same everywhere

The back cover blurb – for once – gets it perfectly:

When McBride, a young Irishman, leaves Co. Monaghan for the building sites of London, and then Germany, he is confronted by a harsh new world and the volatile men who have mastered and mythologised it.

Many, many thousands went to London in the 1970’s and 80’s and stood out on Cricklewood Broadway for a start. Peter Woods has lived through it and documented it faithfully. From the first mention of subbies, the Redcap, subs before breakfast, dead men and hop-ups, I knew this would be the real thing. Woods is not writing like a journalist holding the reader’s hand for a shocking tour of something-should-be-done-about-it. He writes as though he were still among these characters, still meeting up with them of a Friday night, though perhaps now with a more cushy job as a barman.

“Riveting, at times frightening” is how Colm Toibin describes the novel. I would go as far as “terrifying” in places. Isolated men, far from the community they were born into, with nothing in their lives but work, no-one to tell them who they are or what they should do with their life, nothing to stop them plummetting straight to alcohol, crime, and self-forgetfulness. It’s a man’s world, sealed-off, even in the case of well-balanced family men. And there are men here who have been rejected by their families, those suffering mental illness, those with a great burden of shame — all end up at some time or another looking for a day’s work on the sites.

I shared with three others, who they were varied, sometimes by the week

says the narrator of his lodgings. It’s hard – and unfaithful to reality – to forge a coherent narrative out of a concatenation of varying workplaces and flats. The reader quickly realises it’s not essential to remember all the names and details. The story involves you more and more deeply, even though – like life – it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Woods shares the love of mythologizing that these men have, their legends and stories of big money to be made.

This book is like a wormhole to a world from which by rights no such report should have returned.

J.M. Coetzee

This is a precise, lucid, and above all dignified account of an ordinary man caught up in troubled times. Michael was born with a cleft lip. His early life is sketched out: after a minimal education at a special school he became a gardener.

Because of his face K did not have women friends. He was easiest when he was by himself.

In other novels this might be the cue for the novel to shove the uncomfortable details into the reader’s face. Coetzee has other aims in mind. He does not shy away from depicting the deprivations of K and hs mother, but he does so with a distanced, respectful aesthetic.

Read on …

Djelloul Marbrook

These poems have something of the teenager’s self-absorption about them. This is not meant in any negative sense – maturity and knowing your place are vastly over-rated. The keen concern with the watching self in these poems rests on top of a whole career by the author – two careers in fact. The poet served in the navy and was a journalist in Baltimore for many years. The resemblance to a teenager’s thought is disconcerting, testimony to the resilient bonds that connect us to our formative years. To be a self is a work-in-progress.

A boy who looks embarrassed to be young

skulks beneath the scaffolds avoiding light:

I hope I will not have to be his like again:

This stanza, (in Sinistral) depicting the poet as an outsider

I am to the left of belonging,

forlorn, bereft and looking in.

Some are conceived under stars,

I was conceived under stairs.

is followed immediately by this stanza, which takes a step sideways.

You asked what my background is.

I wish I had one, but if I did

I would probably know less than I do

and be more certain about it.

It is disturbing to encounter the child within, to recognise how much has remained the same. Maybe it’s a source of comfort too, to know that there is such a resilient continuity.

My wake is smaller

than a periscope’s.

Nothing ever happened

that couldn’t without me.

These are the hidden thoughts that form the driving engine of a personality. The poet feels an affinity with all who have an inner self – Van Gogh is the subject of another poem. There is an objective reason for Marbrook to be an outsider – he was born in Algiers, never knew his father, has a strange name (Djelloul What kind of a name is that?) and shares the experience of the exile. But he is hardly unique in being an immigrant in the USA; one feels the poet’s sense of being an outsider is more metaphysical. He is aware of the selves he has deployed to make a way in the world. It’s not just the foreigner who has to adapt to the world we live in. It’s anyone who stubbornly keeps faith with themselves. Many never succeed.

Sometimes for me it’s a couple of lines in isolation that echo back and forth in my head.

Whoever’s selling nothing
is a truly frightening man.
I hope you’ve met one lately.

The poems stand as testimony to the persistence of the self across decades. Although that self is not static, but constantly off-balance, it endures. The course of the last century has seen ideologies clash, empires fall, religious institutions wane. It’s all happening so quickly it seems a man’s life has more solidity than an empire.

I first came across Djelloul Marbrook by reading his online commentary on culture and the media. Since 2005 he has been turning his lucid mind to topics ranging from the panzer blondes of Manhattan to the war in Iraq. He has an insider’s knowledge of the changes in the newspaper industry.

The more I read his blog, the more curious I became as to what his poetry could be like. He seemed to be very capable of saying exactly what he wanted to say in his almost daily posts. What more could he convey in poetry? And more concretely, why would he invest so much time in a medium that is read by so few, when each post on the blog instantly gets hundreds of readers?

Marbrook is a late-comer to being a published poet, which says nothing about how long he has been writing poetry. His collection won the Wick prize in 2007 which got it out to the world at last.