Pharricide by Vincent de Swarte (Cōnfingō)

Perhaps in these strange times you're looking for fictions that navigate solitude and isolation.

Robinson Crusoe may snag your attention, although you'd do better to read Charles Boyle's ferocious deconstruction of Defoe's novel and its malign cultural influence. You can get a copy of Good Morning, Mister Crusoe here. Recommended.

Another recommendation is Pharricide by Vincent de Swarte, translated from the French by Nicholas Royle. It's published by the Manchester-based indie Cōnfingō.

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I reviewed this book for the TLS here. It's a striking exercise in guignol and will appear; to anyone with a taste for the grotesque. The setting is la Phare de Cordouan, situated in the mouth of the Gironde estuary and known, for good reason, as 'the Versailles of lighthouses. Look it up on Google images - it's a marvellous setting for a place where all hell is let loose.

Order your copy (postage-free) from the publishers here.

Doppelgänger by Daša Drndić (Istros Press)

On my desk as I type this is a copy of The Complete Saki, the collected short stories of that perverse Edwardian genius H. H. Munro. 

Contents aside - macabre social satires with a whiff of the belle époque, the missing link between Wilde and Wodehouse - what snags my admiration is the marvellous blurb on the dust wrapper, provided by the American author and critic Christopher Morley. The best blurb ever, I reckon. Here it is: 

"There is no greater compliment to be paid the right kind of friend than to hand him Saki, without comment."

There aren't many books like this, and there aren't many friends (of any gender) like this either. 

But here's one book that would offer the same kind of compliment to the right kind of friend, a book I've so far passed on three times to date (admittedly with a comment or two). It's Doppelgänger by the late Daša Drndić,  translated from the original Croatian by SD Curtis and Celia Hawkesworth and published by Istros Press.

I came across the writer for the first time last year, when Doppelgänger was submitted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize. It knocked me and my fellow judges for six and was unanimously chosen as one of six books making up an exceptionally strong shortlist. The prize was awarded jointly, and rightly, to Will Eaves for Murmur (CB editions) and Alex Pheby for Lucia (Galley Beggar Press), both superb novels. If the conventions governing literary prizes were more flexible I feel Daša Drndić could have been a third winner (has that ever happened?) but she had died in 2018 (see her Guardian obituary here). This, I have to say, counted against her when it came to the final deliberations.

But I urge you to read Doppelgänger and I can't resist breaking Morley's Saki dictum to add the following comment:

The title offers a commentary on the novel's structure - the book is made up of two separate stories, each navigating the space between how we see ourselves and how the world sees us. The first, 'Arthur and Isabella' is a brilliantly uncomfortable and transgressive account of a sexual encounter between Arthur and Isabella, an elderly couple who meet on New Year's Eve in the snow; the second, 'Pupi', about an eccentric and cultivated old man who spends his time watching rhinoceroses in the city zoo and attending gallery openings. The two stories reflect one another awkwardly and together produce something naggingly unforgettable and far more than the sum of its parts. Think of Harold and Maude, remade by Béla Tarr.

If that snags your interest you can buy Doppelgänger direct from the publisher here.
Find out more about the author here.

The Golden Rule by Ernest Noyes Brooking (Boatwhistle Books)

If he were a painter Ernest Notes Brookings would be classified as an outsider artist, and an important one.

He's not part of any group or movement and unknown beyond a circle of devoted admirers. Few poets are so immediately recognisable (usually within a line or two) and so engagingly inimitable. He's in a  class of his own, and magnificently so. Readers unacquainted with his work may write him off as a William McGonagall-type eccentric, an amusing oddball. That would be unfair.

I first became aware of his work in the 1980s as a regular reader of The Duplex Planet, a cultish American magazine founded in 1979 by David Greenberger. The magazine exploits a single, brilliant idea - it consists of transcribed interviews with the elderly residents of nursing homes and so-called 'meal sites' in the Massachusetts area which are illustrated by some of the world's best graphic artists.

This combination of authentic geriatric speech and contemporary images was and remains utterly beguiling. The voices are real, the memories intense and vivid, the tone candid and unrestrained.

Ernest Notes Brookings - Ernie - was born in Newbury, Massachusetts in 1898. He served in the US Navy, studied engineering at MIT and settled in Springfield, Vermont, where he worked as a designer of machine parts.

In 1979 Greenberger was employed as the activities director in in the Duplex Nursing Home in Boston where he first met Ernie, who was then in his early eighties.

Greenberger noticed that Ernie enjoyed reading poetry and suggested that he should write some of his own. This Ernie began to do, and with tremendous gusto, providing he was given a subject. In the remaining seven years of his life he wrote nearly 400 poems and there was nothing he couldn't tackle with alacrity, from power tools to after-dinner mints, from Vermont in winter to the death penalty. An online index of his published works confirming the astonishing range of his interests can be found on Greenberger's excellent website.

Ernie's very distinctive poems unvaryingly consisting of punchy four-line ABAB stanzas with erratic rhythm and a wondrous sense of discovery and delight and the urge to explain, were a regular highlight of The Duplex Planet (named after the nursing home) until his death in 1987. The bouncily assured verses were accompanied by illustrations which sometimes served to reflect the content, sometimes to subvert it. The result is irresistible - poignant, hilarious, challenging.

Here, for Mothers' Day is a typical piece:


MOTHER


Female parent of animals and humans
Found on all parts of the earth
Partially people like Truman
Increase in size soon after birth

At home around the dinner table
Mother's prayer God bless this food
There may be cows in the stable
But generally nothing crude

A prize cow pedigree sought
Hide vary colored, has short horns
While feeding calf, muscles are taut
When over, turns her head and yawns

Cat feeds her little kittens
While they hiss and meow
Never wore any mittens
What for and how

A white sow ponderous and plump
Feeds her litter all day long
Without a rest or slump
Until all are grown and strong

A mare feeds pony at leisure
During when a slight neigh
She never had a seizure
But enjoys crunching hay

A bird in tree nest
Waits until eggs hatched
Thought: these are the best
Wait until the door is latched

A hen on eggs in nest
Cackles when hatched
God will do the rest
About six in a batch.


I was delighted to discover at a recent book fair that a small indie outfit called Boatwhistle Books, 'a London-based publisher of singular books for singular readers' publish a generous anthology of his work. Here it is:

It's an American classic to set alongside Whitman's Song of Myself. Seriously.

You can order The Golden Rule direct from the Boatwhistle here. Prepare to be dazzled.

The Blaze of Noon by Rayner Heppenstall

In 1939 the author Rayner Heppenstall (1911-1985) published his astonishing first novel The Blaze of Noon. This brilliant debut was critically acclaimed and sank without trace.

The outbreak of the war in September was a distraction and the author, Yorkshire born and bred, had a German-sounding name which may have counted against him. Heppenstall's career picked up after the war but it was an odd one by any standards - see his erratic bibliography here.

Heppenstall is interesting - a minor author certainly, but a huge influence on a generation of experimental writers in the middle of the last century. He was a close friend and mentor of B. S. Johnson (a fact curiously overlooked in Like a Fiery Elephant, Jonathan Coe's excellent biography of the latter). A well-connected 'man of letters' and a close friend of George Orwell, he was also a self-confessed cannibal, but that's another story for another time. The Blaze of Noon is a really outstanding novel, and I never tire of recommending it, but it's fair to say Heppenstall's reputation was never to match this spectacular debut.

I think of Heppenstall's stalled career whenever I see another book launch cancelled. My heart goes out to any author being denied their modest moment in the spotlight and the chance to sign some books. They are jolly occasions and for many of us as close as we care to get to the social whirl. It's a chance to gossip and trade horror stories about agents.

Having said that, I hope that book launches (when they return) will become more  . . . ambitious. Not just a bunch of people mingling as the drink kicks in, not just a modest speech followed by a reading, accompanied by tepid publisher's plonk and Kettle crisps. There should be live music, readings by actors, perhaps a performance - an event, in other words, with a seated audience, proper booze (spirits are better than wine) and some decent grub. You also need somebody with plenty of chutzpah to bellow persuasively at those gathered to buy copies on the night - that's what it's all about. Make it a proper party - the kind of thing I've aimed to offer audiences attending a recent series of literary cabarets I organised in London.

The most recent event I organised is likely to be the last of its kind for a while. A Leap in the Dark was held on February 29th in a derelict Conservative Club in Paddington with a wonderful cast featuring Melanie Pappenheim (singer) Helen Ottaway (musician/composer), Tim Etchells (performer), Amy McCauley (poet/perfomer), Michael Hughes (novelist), Aea Varfis-van Warmelo (actor), Anna Aslanyan (author/critic), Neil Griffiths (author) and Natalia Zagorska-Thomas (fabric conservator and gallery owner). We had music and poetry, performance and discussion. Plenty of whiskey and sandwiches and cake, and a very convivial evening. We could have launched a book if there'd been a book to launch . . .

Here are some pictures:

'Propositions' by Amy McCauley, performed by (l to r) Aea Warfis-van Warmelo, Alexis Coward and the author

Melanie Pappenheim performs a troubadour song

Melanie again, perfuming with Helen Ottaway

That kind of gathering is, for now, a thing of the future. But we can still gather online, and I'm planning a series of similar shindigs to link performers and a live audience. I'll tell you more when I know more.

Stay well.

The Martian's Regress by J O Morgan (Jonathan Cape)

Jonathan Cape, part of Penguin Random House, is nobody's idea of a small independent press, but I'll break my own policy today because Cape have just published the poet J O Morgan's seventh book, The Martian's Regress.

Morgan is among my favourite poets and has his roots in the world of indie presses. His first three books were published by Charles Boyle's CB editions: Natural Mechanical (2009) Long Cuts (2011) and At Maldon (2013). Next came In Casting Off (2015) from the Scottish indie HappenStance Press, run by the wonderful Helena Nelson. I reviewed this and his next book Interference Pattern (2016, Jonathan Cape) for the Times Literary Supplement here.

Morgan sixth book Assurances (2018), his second with Cape, won the Costa Poetry Prize last year.

You can never second-guess what he'll do next; each book is a departure and he goes from strength to strength. I recommend of them as essential poetry for these dark days. The Martian's Progress, published earlier this month without any fanfare, immediately earns its place in the world. I've never read any poetry remotely like it.

J O Morgan and Assurances

As usual with Morgan it's a book-length poem but this time, in a break with his established practice, it's made up of 44 separately-titled poems. No extract or paraphrase will do The Martian's Regress justice, so I'll say no more than that it is set at remote point in the very distant future when a Martian, descended over many millennia from human colonists, visits earth to undertake a survey of the now-abandoned and moribund planet. It's a hell of a premise, and one which Morgan develops with startling originality.

I've been spellbound on each of three readings to date and look forward to future encounters. It's as if Morgan has both invented and perfected a new form, just as William Gibson did with Neuromancer (1984), the astonishing novel that launched the cyberpunk genre.

Dispel any thoughts of the so-called 'Martian school' poetry popularised by Craig Raine and others in the 1980s (which I always found quite resistible as it was essentially a series of 'hey wow - this thing looks like that  thing' moments, merely making the familiar temporarily strange). What Morgan does is make the strange even stranger. In The Martian's Regress he bundles myth and science together, deploys the most outrageously bizarre imagery and handles language with a serene virtuosity. His style is intelligent and crystal clear; he has a virtuosic way with the long line and is a master of the book-length poem.  It's all fantastically futuristic and paradoxically old-fashioned (with a deliberately 'retro' feel to much of the technology). It's confident, precise and profound, with lines that set the mind racing.

Order from a local independent bookseller, or direct from the publishers direct from the publishers.

Box Hill by Adam Mars-Jones (Fitzcarraldo)

Yesterday's book, Leonard and Hungry Paul by Rónán Hession (Bluemoose Books) explored a gentle and largely uncharted form of male sodality, the friendship between two unremarkable men.

Box Hill, the new novella by Adam Mars-Jones, also navigates a male relationship but a very different one. It's a first-person account of an intense and transgressive sexual arrangement, set in a decade both recent and remote: the 1970s. The unprepossessing narrator, Colin, a tube driver, looks back on an his time with a biker called Ray, following their chance first encounter in the Surrey location that gives the book its title.

In that respect it's in a long-established 'summer of '66' tradition of gay coming-of-age fictions with Colin as the gauche young innocent discovering his 'true nature', but in that respect only. Ray and Colin begin a sado-mascochistic relationship, with Ray as the dominant partner and Colin the rapt and enraptured object of his chilly affection.

Colin appears at first to be engagingly guileless. As the increasingly disarming details of the arrangement between the two men emerge we reflect on what love is, and can be.  Colin is willingly and (it seems) contentedly objectified by Ray and other members of the motorcycle gang (which becomes a poker club/orgy on Saturday nights), the goings-on related in a droll, unassertive manner. The details are seldom explicit and never graphic, but we get a clear picture of Colin's elective lack of agency, and the emotional and physical satisfaction he derives from it.

We're in Fifty Shades of Grey territory, perhaps, but navigated by somebody who really knows how to write. I can't imagine any better prose fictions will be published this year.

Fitzcarraldo books have the look and feel of French paperbacks from the last century - Gallimard, say, or Editions de Minuit. And they have the most impressive list of any small publisher,  one that includes two Nobel laureates. It's interesting to see a major British writer committing to an indie press, and a Very Good Thing. Fitzcarraldo have done a great job here.

The launch event (scheduled for Monday this week was cancelled along with everything else, but the book is now available and you can buy it directly from the publisher here.

Leonard and Hungry Paul by Rónán Hession (Bluemoose Books)

I drafted all this week's blogs last week, and since then, well . . . 

But here's a thing. Today's book is being regularly cited as perfect reading for those in self-isolation who need bucking-up, because it's a gentle, kindly, humane fiction that offers an alternative to current news narratives. I agree up to a point, although I'm with Beckett when he says 'the syndrome known as life is too diffuse to admit of palliation'. Books offer a distraction as much as any consolation. But with theatres, cinemas, concert halls, museums, galleries and bookshops now either closed or about to close we're being thrown back on our own resources. Hence this blog. 

Here goes.


Who are the great male pairings in fiction? Don Quixote and Sancho Panza? Bouvard and Pécuchet? Holmes and Watson? Jeeves and Wooster? Vladimir and Estragon, or perhaps Mercier and Camier?

They are durable, much-loved characters but it's hard to imagine any of them as solo acts. Together they make up a complete entity, if you like - Bertie without Jeeves would be a twit merely (although a twit with a supernatural gift for comic narrative); Holmes without Watson is (as we discover in the one Conan Doyle story written from the detective's perspective) a terrible story-teller.

I'll to add the eponymous Leonard and Hungry Paul to that distinguished list. Rónán Hession's novel, published by Bluemoose Books in March 2019, is an account of a friendship between two very modest and unremarkable thirty-something men. It has a gentle, unforced warmth and wit that I found irresistible (and I'm picky).

Hession explores the kind of genial male sodality that featured in The Detectorists, the telly programme which Adam Mars-Jones reckoned was the best pastoral comedy since As You Like It, (written - I just checked - in 1599).

Paul (we never find out why he's called Hungry) is perhaps the most unremarkable lead character in literature. Leonard, on the other hand, is a relative firecracker - he writes entries for children's encyclopaedias. There's a risk, consistently avoided, that placing such humdrum characters at the heart of any novel might result in  . . . well, a humdrum novel. That doesn't happen, thanks to Hession's light and engaging style, his gentle breeziness and affection for his characters, his absolute lack of condescension.

He is also a very funny writer indeed, and there really is something about this novel that speaks to our current predicament. Leonard, we told, chooses not to go out because “nothing made him feel lonelier these days than the thought of spending time in the company of extroverts”.

 Rónán HessLeonard chose not to go because “nothing made him feel lonelier these days than the thought of spending time in the company of extroverts”. 

Buy Leonard and Hungry Paul from the publisher Bluemoose Books here.