My story Contract was chosen for #StorySunday in London’s fantastic Litro magazine in Dec 2016.
Click the link here to go to the story. (I love old-skool internet days.)
…. Clives tries desperately to fit in with the caring & whimsical atmosphere of his new office job
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,
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.)
Dublin being a small place, I’d heard through the grapevine that a spoken-word poet called Karl Parkinson was writing a novel set in inner city Dublin. It remained in the back of my mind as something I’d like to read, as debut novels from working class Dubs were so rare as to be almost non-existent. But when I heard that the storyline is about a visionary poet/artist, and it’s strongly influenced by the works of William Blake, I knew I had to read it. It sounded like something very out of the ordinary.
I’ve been a follower of William Blake since my teens. I have a fond memory of going to the Tate Gallery when I worked in London, and looking for the Blake drawings and watercolours. I asked a member of staff – or perhaps it’s more likely a member of staff asked me what I was looking for – and was told that they had been housed separately for restoration work. “I can let you in to view them,” he offered, very unexpectedly. He opened the door to a storage room, showed me the cabinets, and left me to look at them. I was made to feel like a visiting scholar. At that time, sometimes when I was on the Tube home from work, people would get up from the seat beside me and move to a vacant one somewhere else.
I had no expectations of Karl Parkinson’s novel, because I couldn’t begin to imagine what a novel about a visionary in a Dublin corporation block might be like. But it didn’t disappoint; in fact it was the best novel I read that year, as well as being easily the most unusual.
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:
(Eli is Joey’s 92 year-old father, who occasionally disappears on a ramble)
Mike McCormack and myself are teaming up for a mini-tour of London, with two dates signed up at bookshops.
I’m immensely grateful to Anthony Cartwright for playing a key role in instigating the readings. His own fourth novel, Iron Towns, came out in May.
Anthony will be discussing the books with us on the nights:
Mike McCormack is an award-winning novelist and short story writer from Mayo. His previous work includes Getting it in the Head (1995), Notes from a Coma (2005), which was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award, and Forensic Songs (2012). In 1996 he was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and in 2007 he was awarded a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship.
His latest novel Solar Bones came out recently.
Anthony Cartwright has worked in factories, meatpacking plants, pubs and warehouses and with London Underground. His debut novel, The Afterglow won much acclaim – and a Betty Trask Award in 2004. His second novel, Heartland, was published by Tindal Street in May 2009 and praised by Jonathan Coe, David Peace, Catherine O’Flynn and DJ Taylor amongst many others. It was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and was a Book at Bedtime on BBC Radio 4. How I Killed Margaret Thatcher, a bitter-sweet comic novel that captures the intensity of early 1980s Britain through the eyes of an unusual 9 year old Black Country boy, was published in 2012. His latest novel is Iron Towns.
I owe an immense debt of gratitude to Anthony Cartwright for taking an interest in the book and proposing the readings to bookshops he knows. I don’t know Anthony personally and have never met him, so it all came as a great surprise to receive such a boost out of the blue. I hope to equalise the debt – and I don’t mean by endless FB postings recommending Anthony’s books.
I hope one day to pass on the goodwill and be able to offer a debut writer whose book I have admired (perhaps one that hasn’t a big PR campaign behind it), an unexpected helping hand.
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.
Valancourt The Viaduct reissue
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Irish Times Q+A