Neither love nor freedom
can survive the fire from
what we might become.

Several of these poems seem to take place at the junction between two hemispheres. The poet finds himself in the cold blue-before-dawn light with one foot in the old world and another in the margin that might or might not mean a future. But sometimes the margins coalesce; Shadows realign at the field’s edge.
Night self-heals, like water.

Dick Jones is a Modernist poet. In this collection he maintains a stance against cliche and the establishment and reinforces that good old modernist determination to amaze and belabor the bourgeoisie at the same time and at every opportunity.

Reading these poems one notices a telling use of language, the musician’s sense of rhythm, and the recurring echoes of the Beat poets; the voices from the 1914-1918 war, particularly Wilfred Owen; and Larkin, Thomas and Redgrove among other British poets from the middle of the 20th century up to our own day. But there is always the modernist’s unease before the incontrovertible fact that his work, no matter how avant-garde or experimental in design and execution, will have its life mainly through the patronage of a bourgeois audience.

Many of the texts are delightful and stand you back on your heels, like this one from 2004:

THE TIES THAT BIND

The morning after you left I drew
the curtains on the seven acre field.

Two hares were bowling through the stubble,
wind-blown, skidding like broken wheels.

They danced and sprung apart and danced again
and then were gone, beyond the tidemark

of the tree line. Then a mob of seagulls
swung downwind from the west, scattered,

gathered again in a brawl of wings and then
were gone, into a bleak neutrality

of towering clouds. Love or combat, the wind
blew them into the world and out again,

these dancers, bound only to the end
of their measures and not beyond.

Or, in another mood, Jones can produce taught, muscular poems like the opening Stille Nacht, with its poignant observations:

Outside a town in the Ardennes
Private Taunitz hung
like a crippled kite
high in a tree.

A cruciform against the sky,
he seemed to run forever
through the branches,
running home for the new year.

There are poems here which comment on and are inspired by events during the second World War, hand-me-downs, poems from a past before the past of the poet. Some celebrate the wonder and joy of parenthood; while others touch on the grief of loss and the awareness of death, the end of times.

I must say that I felt something was lost to me by approaching these verses via a digital (.pdf) route; and on more than one occasion I had to resort to printing the poem onto a clean A4 sheet, which immediately rendered it accessible, and often movingly so.

All in all, though, highly recommended. Go and get a copy for yourself.

. . .The only contact he had with people was when he shoved their heads down toilet bowls, and he couldn’t do that to the teachers.
As an adult, looking back, I understand that the reason everyone was frightened of Karl wasn’t because he growled but because we could all see where he was going and at some single-cell stratum of our evolved souls we were afraid that if he touched us, or looked at us, or got too near us, we’d have to go with him.
From the short story, If All Is Dark.

As a postscript to one of these stories Mat Coward explains how he set about writing short stories for themed anthologies during the initial years of the 21st century: I generally tried to make my stories fit into the theme as completely as possible in all aspects – the title, the setting, the plot, the jokes, the clues and twists, everything – and at the same time, just to add interest and emphasis, to find a way of making everything in the story work against the theme, too.

There are twelve stories collected here, introducing us to a passionate affair which remains unconsummated; a guy who created an entire religion based on chips; a military Captain and supporter of King Richard on the eve of the assassination of Mat Tyler. In addition there is a barman used by a world-weary policeman; a kind of detective called Doggo and his vile partner, Vincent; Rocket, a kid brought up in the back of a car; and very large Harry, a detective sergeant in the Metropolitan Police.

But the title story is the gem of the collection, in which Steve organises a reunion party for his old punk palls from the seventies. The narrator sets about trying to analyse what his experiences as a young man have meant in the totality of his life, leading to a calm, serene, moving and reflective piece of fiction:

Let me tell you about punk rock. For an exhilarating few months the kids controlled the music. The business, the media, they had no influence over what was happening. They recovered quickly, of course, and re-established the status-quo, and they learned from it – they determined never to let things get out of hand again.

They learned from it; but so did we.

“No future” was the big slogan back then, and it’s only taken me half a lifetime to figure out what it means. The future never arrives, and the past never departs, and what matters in between isn’t how you dance – it’s why you dance. And the day you realise that, is the day you go punk.

We’re still out there, us old punk rockers. We don’t bother with the safety pins any more, or the bondage trousers, or the gobbing. But you’ll know us when you see us. We’re the ones jumping up and down.

POZZO:
(suddenly furious.) Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time! It’s abominable! When! When! One day, is that not enough for you, one day he went dumb, one day I went blind, one day we’ll go deaf, one day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you? (Calmer.) They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.

We were at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds to see their production of Waiting for Godot with Ian Brown directing the Talawa Theatre Company‘s all Black cast.

The play has been produced with an all-Black cast several times before, though this is the first time in the UK. The text, however, is so strong and so insistent that before ten minutes of the first act had passed the skin colour of the players had become insignificant. The main duo chatter away in authentic Carribean accents, but again, this does not affect the audiences interpretation of the play. I have seen productions with Irish, Scottish, French, American and English accents, but I can’t honestly claim that any of these have improved my enjoyment or understanding of the text,

Nevertheless, the cast is a strong one and they push the play forward with tremendous energy and skill. If I had to single out a performance to tip the scales, it would be Guy Burgess’s portrayal of Lucky. But this is to take nothing away from the other players and the director, all of whom should be rightfully proud of their achievement.

This production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot reminded me of Beckett’s 1930 essay on Proust, where he demonstrates how time, habit, memory and salvation permeate À la recherche du temps perdu. The passing of time is a constant reminder of death, and as a way of by-passing this, Proust’s characters fall into everyday habits, repetition, boredom, distractions. This in turn can lead to the awakening of involuntary memory, and in that moment, the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being. Involuntary memory undoes time and habit. This is a kind of salvation.

Beckett is not only concerned with Proust, he is primarily concerned with his own influences and preoccupations and to work out an aesthetic manifesto on which to base his future preoccupations.

Time, habit, and memory are the concepts which underline Waiting for Godot, and there are multiple references to them in the play.

The other thing that came to mind while watching the performance was the recollection that Tennessee Williams called The Glass Menagerie a ‘memory play.’ Menagerie was written eight years before Godot and concentrates on a series of abandonments, but it also has everyone in the cast and the audience ‘waiting’, in this case for a gentleman caller. Perhaps Godot is also a ‘memory’ play in the same sense?

I don’t know who Godot is. I don’t even know (above all don’t know) if he exists. And I don’t know if they believe in him or not – those two who are waiting for him. The other two who pass by towards the end of each of the two acts, that must be to break up the monotony. All I knew I showed. It’s not much, but it’s enough for me, by a wide margin. I’ll even say that I would have been satisfied with less. As for wanting to find in all that a broader, loftier meaning to carry away from the performance, along with the program and the Eskimo pie, I cannot see the point of it. But it must be possible … Estragon, Vladimir, Pozzo, Lucky, their time and their space, I was able to know them a little, but far from the need to understand. Maybe they owe you explanations. Let them supply it. Without me. They and I are through with each other.
Samuel Beckett.

The play continues at the West Yorkshire Playhouse until the 25th February, then goes on tour to Albany Deptford London, Old Rep Birmingham, Theatre Royal Winchester and New Wolsey Ipswich.

Reviews of previous productions of this play are available here and here.

“How do we say No? In the fullness of time, how can we say No?”

and

“To create is to resist, to resist is to create.”

.

*

Whenever I find myself in a situation where I realize my own stance, though heartfelt, is hypocritical, I know that’s a good place to look for a novel. Valerie Martin.

*

“Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically, by definition, be disqualified from ever doing so.” Gore Vidal.

*

Guy on a mobile phone: And this guy wasn’t saying anything, I mean he had nothing to say, nothing… He didn’t say anything, he just kept talking, but he wasn’t saying anything… It was all just, talk-talk-talk but nothing, I couldn’t take it, talking and talking and talking and talking and nothing, nothing, nothing at all to say about anything, endless mindless talking and not saying a word. I mean, how could anyone just talk about nothing..

*

“My dear good creature, do you really picture me with a pot of paste and a pair of scissors eagerly sticking press cuttings into an album? I’m thirty-three & I’ve been writing for thirteen years – no, sixteen years!” Georgette Heyer.

*

Perhaps this is as good a place as any, as our heroes wend their way towards the future, to describe in some small detail the countryside through which they trudged. If I were to provide you with a simple-to-understand expression to describe where Lissoy was, then ‘in the middle of nowhere’ would be fairly accurate: somewhere dwindled into anywhere and the next thing you knew you were nowhere. The ‘nowhere’ consisted of bogs and moors with only a single road leading to the place and that road bounded by hedgerows along its full length as if to keep the inevitable at bay. The laws of scenery were not flouted but they were only paid lip service to. The landscape was one of emigration and emptiness, a thing trampled into the past. It did everything in its power to resist interpretation. It was as if anything that might have caught the eye had been eroded by time and this was all that it had left; that would vanish, too, one day but that day had not arrived. The mountain, Binn Moan, rose like a cry in the wilderness but, even so, did its level best to blend itself in with the sky and go unnoticed.

Jim Murdoch’s new novel, Milligan and Murphy, introduces us to two half-brothers, John Murphy and John Milligan, both of them forty years of age and still at home with their Ma. In the manner of Samuel Beckett we are introduced to a couple of accidental people living accidental lives. I mention Beckett in passing because Milligan and Murphy is inspired by Mercier and Camier, a Beckett novel in which two men repeatedly try to leave town without success

On the way to a local farm for a day’s work, the brothers decide to leave their lives behind and head for the coast. We, as loyal readers, are allowed to follow closely behind.

They arrive in Drumclaven, a shitehole according to Dervla Mahoney, the local barmaid. They have a brush with the local constable and take some refreshment in the form of half-pints of Guinness before moving on. There occurs, from time to time, a kind of merging of their identities which led me to see them as different aspects of the same being; perhaps the conscious and the unconscious mind:

‘Do you think we did the right thing?’
It was Milligan talking. For a second Murphy thought it was just one of the voices in his head.

The next town along the way was to be Rathnerth, but on the way they meet up with Aghamore Ahern, an artist, philosopher and dandy and, reluctantly, share a barbecued crow with him.

By the time Milligan and Murphy have reached Rathnerth and moved in with Mad Meg, their story seems to have come full-circle and moved to its end. The brothers soon fall for home comforts and begin to fade into the landscape. But it isn’t so; the end I mean.

Before long they find themselves in Portlow, a place colder and wetter than Lissoy. Milligan never imagined there ever could exist such a place. But he’d been wrong before.

In his novels and plays Samuel Beckett is keen to point out the double meaning of ‘enclosure’ for his characters. And Murdoch amplifies this theme in his novel. The box or room or place of confinement is at the same instant the loved home and the dark prison. Our characters’ need to escape from this prison/home is a constant desire.

What Beckett does over and over again is to take his characters and his audience from safe to unsafe places. And this is exactly what Jim Murdoch does with Milligan and Murphy. When we leave them they are on board a ferry to England:

Milligan stood clinging for dear life to the rail at the stern of the ship and looked back. He suspected that he was going to be physically sick before he stepped onto dry land again. He was neither here nor there and that was another feeling he didn’t like one bit. And alone. He had never felt so alone. The sea; the world; in fact all of eternity spread out before him from this point. He felt like old Noah or the Ancient Mariner must have looking out at limitless sea, unable to cope with the significance of what they saw.

The sea looks like nothing he has ever seen before. He and Murphy have escaped their confinement within the box of their Ma and Lissoy and and are in the process of leaving behind their cultural heritage. They are taking the journey from the surface of consciousness to the depths of the unconscious. And Jim Murdoch takes us along, too, down the same path, just as Beckett would have done. One part of us is kicking and screaming, wanting to stay in the safe place, but another part knows we will never be satisfied until we are properly born.

‘It was 1972 and I was eighteen years old. I had jumped ship and watched while she sailed away.’

The narrator’s account of his decade in Uruguay gets off to a running start. A young man in a remote country is a recipe for picaresque adventures, and Montevideo is seething with political violence and sweating with the tango. On his very first day young Frederick runs into Tupamaros member Julio, gets a job washing dishes, and accepts the name Ramon Bolio. ‘That day in 1972 I was up for change,’ he tells us.

Ramon is in the privileged position of being able to mingle at all levels of society. He teaches English to a Capitan of the military regime, yet frequents the bars where revolutionary politics is discussed. Those around him are more or less born into their situation, but he has the choice of whether or not to engage with this world. He walks up to the most beautiful girl among the tango dancers and tells her if she doesn’t come home with him he’ll spend the night howling at the moon. You wouldn’t have done that back home in York, the reader can’t help thinking.

There is something unsettling about this young Ramon – a man with no fixed beliefs who is so easily able to cast aside his English habits. He tells us he has wrestled to reconcile the need for a credo with the conviction that life is just a flash in the pan. Events proceed with an hallucinatory clarity. The reader can picture the action of each scene perfectly, but the emotive layer is often elusive. ‘I had embraced a new life and new friends and commitments and my emotions and feelings were not repressed in any obvious way. I was a dancer. I was not a camera,’ he assures us, though the reader is right not to take the narrator at face value.

This tale of an adventurous youth is being typed up by the Ramon of three decades later. He is back living in York, in the house where he grew up. But the events in Uruguay have defined who he now is: his name is still Ramon Bolio, and he teaches the tango with a passion. His sixteen-year-old niece has gone missing. A dual plot drives the novel forward. Questions are thrown up about how the past has made him what he is today.

Ramon’s brother Stephen is intellectually a little slow. It is up to Ramon to take the lead in dealings with the police as they investigate the young woman’s disappearance. He confronts them as they commence digging up Stephen’s lawn. ‘Stephen, Debbie, they don’t have the nous for this kind of thing. If they’d killed her they’d sit down and cry. They wouldn’t hide the body.’ It’s a rather odd thing to say of his brother, and betrays a familiarity with violence. This attention to detail runs through the story and only slowly becomes apparent.

The characters, and in particular the narrator, are created with perfect psychological coherence. For example Ramon mentions on the first page that a slim volume of Gurdjieff was in his backpack. Sure enough, a hundred pages later he borrows a technique from the wily thinker. And after his first encounter with violence, Ramon’s narrative proceeds with the same manifest confidence as before, yet the new relationships he forms come across as increasingly erratic and unsound.

Montevideo and its dance bars, checkpoints, and growing atmosphere of fear is conjured up with great immediacy. All the while tango features as a recurring metaphor. ‘Tango is about memory, abandonment, love, defeat, death, sorrow and it is about standing before a beloved object and remembering that object as a living presence.’

John Baker’s novel is suffused with existentialist concepts: attachment, nothingness, the instability of the human being. His style owes more perhaps to Camus’ essays on Algeria than it does to the classic English novel. His prose achieves the almost impossible task of being as plot-driven as a thriller yet steeped in philosophy; an adventure story yet a sustained reflection on how to live life more fully. It is beautifully written, a tango of thought and action, its true power not apparent at first sight. It is imbued with a deep sense of mystery: not just the mystery of where the disappeared have gone, but the mystery of what connects an individual to be one person through time.

When I read this novel I was in the enjoyable position of knowing nothing about the author or his previous work, and resolved to keep things that way until I finished. ‘One of Britain’s most talented crime writers,’ declares a blurb on the back. Delete the word ‘crime’ and it hits the mark. This novel deserves a place in every backpacker’s pocket and on every thinking man’s bookshelf.

Reviewed by Aiden O’Reilly in Dreamcatcher 24.

Will Self writes irony and challenges gender roles along the way with immaculately timed black humour. The lead character in each of these stories wakes up to something of an anatomical surprise. In the first story, Cock, a woman grows a penis; whereas in the second offering, Bull, a man grows a vagina behind his knee. Throughout, classical narrative expectations are undermined and destabilised. And we find ourselves always more interested in the emotional, rather than the physical metamorphosis of the protagonists

The two stories are unconnected, apart from the genitalia involved. Cock and Bull is absolutely filthy, the product of a depraved mind. Go and get yourself a copy. It is the funniest book I know of in the field of the hermaphrodite.

“When I speak of style, I mean the style Henry James spoke of when he wrote that in literature, we move through a blessed world, in which we know nothing except through style, and in which everything is redeemed by style.” John Banville.

Not all the time, but often enough, he writes the kind of things you want to read:

I was thinking of Anna. I make myself think of her, I do it as an exercise. She is lodged in me like a knife and yet I am beginning to forget her. Already the image of her that I hold in my head is fraying, bits of pigments, flakes of gold leaf, are chipping off. Will the entire canvas be empty one day? I have come to realise how little I knew her, I mean how shallowly I knew her, how ineptly. I do not blame myself for this. Perhaps I should. Was I too lazy, too inattentive, too self-absorbed? Yes, all of those things, and yet I cannot think it is a matter of blame, this forgetting, this not-having-known. I fancy, rather, that I expected too much, in the way of knowing. I know so little of myself, how should I think to know another?

But wait, no, that is not it. I am being disingenuous – for a change, says you, yes, yes. The truth is, we did not wish to know each other. More, what we wished was exactly that, not to know each other. I said somewhere already – no time to go back and look for it now, caught up all at once as I am in toils of this thought – that what I found in Anna from the first was a way of fulfilling the fantasy of myself. I did not know quite what I meant when I said it, but thinking now on it a little I suddenly see. Or do I? Let me try to tease it out, I have plenty of time, these Sunday evenings are endless.

This is a book about memory, or should I say, around memory, the ebb and flow of memory, and the breath of Proust and Beckett is seemingly ever present. Banville insists he is committed to language and to rhythm above plot, characterization, or pacing. And on the evidence of this hugely enjoyable book, that is certainly the case.

If you decide to read this one: you will need a dictionary.