Things Grown Distant is a short collaborative booklet of short fiction and photos. Confingo has brought out three previous collaborations between writers and artists.
I can see why the photographer (Nicholas Royle) was attracted to the idea of pairing his shots to the text: Fox’s fictions are brief, visual, and allusive. In the main they take the form of the narrator’s fleeting encounters with people who have made a lasting impression on him.
This is not a writer attempting to pin down a character for the reader to recognise. This is a writer trying to evoke the magic of meeting someone and finding some time later you have become a changed person.
“She nodded and reverted to stabbing with the fork, while suddenly, somehow, I felt excluded from a whole realm of existence.”
The stories are about the mystery of “the other” – bringing Sartre’s phrase to mind: “Man is always a sorcerer to man.” That is to say, even minor encounters with other people can work a magic on us, for good or for evil. We may only meet them for a few hours, but they live in in our minds, continuing to interact with us.
In A Different Light the young narrator works at the mind-numbing job of scraping boat hulls. He reads Abraham Maslow and believes in enhanced human potential. His coworker Jez lives in a squat and sees the earth as a surrogate mother. He believes in world peace, clean planet, and civil action where necessary.
There’s no cynicism here, the story captures a stage of youth blooming with possibilities, where every new person you meet is a cypher. It’s also a vignette of late 1980s New Age subculture.
The accompanying photographs show glimpses though windows at night. The buildings – London terraced houses, apartment blocks – an only be dimly discerned. The affect is like a vivid dislocated memory where you struggle to remember the context. Or maybe it evokes a view of life as being lived in moments of clarity submerged in forgetfulness.
Valancourt The Viaduct reissue
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Irish Times Q+A