Robert Shearman
WE ALL HEAR STORIES IN THE DARK by Robert Shearman
Part Three of my review as continued from HERE.
When I read each story, my thoughts will be shown in the comment stream below….
THE GIRL FROM IPANEMA
“Picasso painted the absurd images in his head. But I make my images live, and then, only then, do I paint them.”
Those are the words of the famous Brazilian artist, a magus of a man called Saras, in this substantive work that is a Shearman must-read. It is really an art installation novel in long short story form as well as somehow fully spreading its arms as a massive novel, like the Christ statue above Rio, a statue where we can imagine today’s statue killers beheading it and placing Saras’ head on top instead, just for the brute avant garde act of it. This work is perhaps the first culmination of the whole book, a third of the way through my sequenced reading of it. A book with sporadic culminations along the way. We shall see. It tells of the narrative man (working for an art gallery in London and visiting Saras about a possible prestigious exhibition for his firm), a narrator who may be at one point drugged by Saras or Saras’ wife (the latter being an incredible patchwork-art female character to whom I can do no real erotically asexual and ugly justice here in my review however wide I widen my appreciative arms to tentatively embrace her) … so he is an unreliable narrator because either he was indeed drugged or mendaciously telling us he was not drugged…. anyway his experience of ‘rutting the rhino’, is an apotheosis of what I shall now call the ‘abracadabra’ context that I have hedged talking about above and nobody really understands as a word…. and perhaps that context is the gestalt I still seek. A context involving Azathoth or blending bodily amorphousnesses. Meanwhile, just think of the probable truth of Shearman speaking the words of that Picasso-related quote above — but in the context of writing about, rather than painting about…
GOOD GRIEF
“Then he asked the clincher. He asked if there’d been any itrauma in his life recently,…”
Every day, for me, is an itrauma! – especially during these days of the co-vivid träumerei to which most of us are submitted every time we attempt to sleep. The attempt, for example, of others to infiltrate dreams face to face with each other along the lines of this book’s ‘abracadabra’ bodily syndrome or mutual melding etc….This story, at one point, frighteningly described exactly a certain numbness symptom of the illness I have been suffering lately and that made me remember that for some years I have been stating publicly that this style of gestalt real-time reviewing of books needs as many readers as possible to triangulate the coordinates of each book. And then each individual triangulation universally triangulated. Even the author’s own triangulation, which is just one triangulation among many, all triangulations being equally valid. To help with each other’s heavy-lifting of the material they are reading (enjoyable though that heavy-lifting is, and, for me, if a book does not need heavy-lifting, it is not enjoyable at all.) THIS book, so far, is the optimum book in that respect. It really is. And ‘Good Grief’ is the tipping-point, a compelling work that deals with marital bereavement from the husband’s point of view, encompassing many of the potentially perceived themes of this book so far, and many of my expressed thoughts about such themes, and, here with the synchronicities involving the wife’s death, her arguably ghostly return, re-symbiosis of the marriage, the death’s head-on, face-on car crash details and the other people involved now coalescing almost as a romcom in the plot’s gestalt, absurdist, theatrical, emotionally moving and disturbing. And by the way, is the nose automatically airbrushed from the eyesight by one’s brain?
THE GRAND ADVENTURE
“So she taught him ‘Summer Holiday’, she sang it over and over again,…”
Such a moving, perfectly pitched coda to the previous story ‘Good Grief’, as, here, we have a man’s dying wife called Helen Marshall; “They laughed at the coincidence”; “she’d been boxed up for nearly two years, that was long enough”, and, after such lockdown, through the Hospice’s commercial enterprise of retrocausality, he is able to enjoy one hopefully perfect married day with her, knowing her mind and memory are restored, a single day, a seaside trip, a meal out, before her finally tapering to a baby dot on a screen. But also, as a coda to the previous story, I did have one ominous feeling at “A little outside Lewes the cars ahead began to slow.” I did not laugh at the coincidence, but then I remembered, with some relief, they had been late starting out on the trip. Because of a red dress.
GROUND BEEF
“But Burger King had a special light, everything so yellow, and so happy; and the smell was of meat and of salt and of special sauce.”
Another moving story, this one based on nostalgic family trips to London specifically to visit an early Burger King, of all ironic things, a slice of America off the Buckingham Palace Road, as, for me, the equivalent was a Lyons Corner House in the 1950s…and this, if you read it in contiguity with the previous story, as I have just done, creates almost an exact parallel for each story, here an eventual retrocausal device for an old man (the father) for a special day release from a Hospice situation, here a day out with his daughter (the narrator) who I believe the father sees as his dying wife in one of her stages reaching towards the baby dot….and, if not a proper ending, it was a perfect one for this work. And the story even made me have a yearning for a Whopper and Cheese with Fries!
Just as an aside, I anticipate using five of my websites as vehicles for this extended review, this being the third. If you would like at some time to view the whole maze of my websites, their links are shown here: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/24010-2/
THE HOLLOWS
“Molly looked up from a programme that was extolling the virtues of the letter ‘g’.”
…which is appropriate just after it expired above in my sequenced reading of this book! And appropriate, too, just before ‘h’ in the alphabetically-ordered subsections of this story itself, from a to z, whereon a sleepy death sort of takes over and we never really know whether he finds his lost wife after all, although he thinks he does, for a while. At least she knew how to keep things more succinct than his accreting letter threatening to become longer than even this heavy-lifted book, when telling someone she is leaving him! All this zero summing reminds me that I founded something called the Zeroist Group in 1967, a fact which my own writer’s bio has always shown. This story of hollows, meanwhile, is full of hollows itself, and polystyrene beads. Adultery in a crematorium and a girl who climbs like a squirrel the naked metal-skinned body of her dead grandfather, notwithstanding. But, over all, zzzzzzzz.
ICE IN THE BEDROOM
“Falling from a great height wasn’t too bad — and he’d heard that the body fell so fast that there wasn’t time for the brain to process it, in effect you’d be dead before you knew it,…”
Falling or jumping, pills maybe better? This sprawling inner portrait of a man in bereavement, the book’s latest lost wife now called Cathy, and the circumstances of her death, although seeming clear as some need for her brand of Midsommar leap, remain unclear, as is his relationship with Cathy’s equally bereaved parents and his own eschatology of impulses alongside, so far, this book’s scatology of raw meat syndromes. The whole panoply, for me, is unfocused, not a successful story-as-story this time, but I shall always remember one of its scenes, and that when I wake up in the middle of the night in future I shall imagine its ice vista with wolves … and a particular she-wolf.
Its essential yearning of the bereaved for the dead and vice versa in whatever shapes and visionary settings, domestic and fantastical and spiritual and absurdist, seem to join synergy with the mutual yearnings between the canons of Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem, my real-time gestalts thereof linked here and here respectively. In fact, more generally, there is perhaps mutual synergy potentially between the Tems’ canons and this book’s.
Its essential yearning of the bereaved for the dead and vice versa in whatever shapes and visionary settings, domestic and fantastical and spiritual and absurdist, seem to join synergy with the mutual yearnings between the canons of Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem, my real-time gestalts thereof linked here and here respectively. In fact, more generally, there is perhaps mutual synergy potentially between the Tems’ canons and this book’s.
From wolves in the ice just now above, to cats in the …what?
THE INEFFECTUAL PHOTOSCOPY OF CATS
“For the first time in history there really was the sense that a moment could be frozen forever,…”
A story of the pioneers of early photography, a blend of Blackwood and Wells, a-friend-meets-an-old-friend-after-a-number-of-years, mad-scientist, the-friend-aged-too-fast story, a story in an unsuitable area for his friend, (here South London), and this particular example of such an archetypal story concerns the once prevailing inability to photograph cats at all (who would want to do so, I ask!). In spite of my ribaldry, this is an excellent horror story. With the cat or cats beginning to emerge in the experiment depicted here. One where the main visiting protagonist needs to “connect”, like one needs to do with these stories, many pictures left by his friend. And then one picture with all 101 cats pictured inside it! But the type of rigor-mortis invoked here is one you need to read about rather than let me merely tell you about. Just keep your mouth shut, though.
…to no picture all…
I SAY (I SAY, I SAY)
“It said ‘Wish you were here.’ And on the reverse side, no picture at all, nothing, no, not a thing.”
This severely politically-incorrect, if highly entertaining, theme-and-variations on the ‘There was this Englishman, and an Irishman, and a Scotsman’ joke, well, all can be forgiven for its heart and for its perfectly poignant ending. Whatever the intervening pratfalls inherited from earlier (or later?) circus clown stories in this book, its ultimate ‘fall’ or “collapse in death” is encapsulated by the Irishman’s. And, although they are otherwise quite different stories, I would strongly recommend this Shearman story to be read alongside V.S. Pritchett’s ‘The Fall’ (reviewed here). And having a daughter is always a blessing in spite of and because of everything.
IT FLOWS FROM THE MOUTH
“I just couldn’t warm to my godson.”
The godson himself, by dint of dying as a tiny child, did not stay warm for long, though. The reluctant godfather as narrator had been trapped by loyalty to an old boyish friendship, then such need to warm to intruders like that friend’s wife and their son, yet life takes people away, and life brings them back, with time flowing (not the story’s comparison, but my own) like water through fate’s revolving clown’s head of a mouth, a mouth like an ‘o’.
An enjoyable page-turning narrative, full stop.
Also, for me, a Shearman story that vies with a number of other stories of his to be the most remarkable and unforgettable, a story of this narrator much later invited to his friend’s house, a relatively small house with a Reggie Oliver ornamental landscape-garden, an appendage as aesthetically ruly as it is unruly-by-size comparison with the house. And with a faux maze. Godson as water-fountain angel statue, soon to be removed by today’s type of statue kidnapping. And the narrator’s yearning need by seduction of her sculpted breasts to warm to his friend’s wife, even while his friend, the husband and father, warms to the statue with an almost sexual-regenerative apotheosis of this book’s Child is Father of the Man syndrome… the antic sperm of time flowing by circular vent from carved stone toward earth’s innards, and then back again? But which came first? And a virtuous or vicious circle? You choose.
But please remember, filters can work both ways, I say.
An enjoyable page-turning narrative, full stop.
Also, for me, a Shearman story that vies with a number of other stories of his to be the most remarkable and unforgettable, a story of this narrator much later invited to his friend’s house, a relatively small house with a Reggie Oliver ornamental landscape-garden, an appendage as aesthetically ruly as it is unruly-by-size comparison with the house. And with a faux maze. Godson as water-fountain angel statue, soon to be removed by today’s type of statue kidnapping. And the narrator’s yearning need by seduction of her sculpted breasts to warm to his friend’s wife, even while his friend, the husband and father, warms to the statue with an almost sexual-regenerative apotheosis of this book’s Child is Father of the Man syndrome… the antic sperm of time flowing by circular vent from carved stone toward earth’s innards, and then back again? But which came first? And a virtuous or vicious circle? You choose.
But please remember, filters can work both ways, I say.
JASON ZERRILLO IS AN ANNOYING PRICK
“Some of the stuff he came out with was nonsense, even Jesus knew that.”
And Jesus had a mute sidekick mime act as keynote within his apostles, born from other clown shows and dumbsters in this book so far. Incredibly, for a story first published in 2012, the main body of this work is an EXACT parable for the Boris / Cummings combo of today. I do not exaggerate. It is perfect. Read it and see. Its denouement, though, is still in God’s real-time abeyance?
LA RONDE
A run of the mill story as a roundelay of synchronicities, telling us of a group of connected people in a circle dance of fate, each affected in life-changing ways in their own ways by the existence of the famous film actress Debbie Markey. I was wondering if this was the book’s disappointing story rather than the one actually entitled THE DISAPPOINTING STORY IN THE BOOK. And just one question – how did Angela actually know it was a certain lady’s tattoo of Debbie Markey that had distracted her dead husband into that very death?
A LITTLE LIGHT READING
“She wasn’t mean. She was kind. She meant well.”
A most moving account of a seventy-something woman, who since a child has posted her diary entries back to herself one by one for a later, a much later, perpetuity of reading. A classic. Well, I thought so. It was almost like or exactly like some sort of novel evolving with unexpected characters coming to prominence and then others, some concerns concerning her, then others. It made me think that I might stay alive forever simply by remaining involved with writing episodically a real-time review like this one towards an impossible or endless gestalt of such reviews. And if I finished all the latest reviews without first beginning another one, I would finally yield my life to old age. And this story seemed like a bonus gift to me, by being the extra story numbered 66. Also its contiguity to La Ronde above made me think that I may be more of a catalyst for an exterior circle dance than I ever believed I could be, all those characters dancing my dance. But me dancing in theirs, too. All of us triangulating the endless future.
A classic, as I say.
A classic, as I say.
- … to “the ever pointless staving off of death” in the following work…LO! HE ABHORS NOT THE VIRGIN’S WOMB“And there was so much death, twice as much death, […] the mortuaries were crammed full to bursting.”If we have a new normal today in our own world, this represents the new new normal, where the latest instruction to train drivers is to plough through track suicides and continue the journey. A powerful story of Cameron, his boyhood nostalgic Christmases and larger-than-life seasonal accoutrements such as balloons and snow. Shearman, the ultimate Träumtrawler. Only in Shearman can the balloons become grey and heavy one minute, then provide a more hopeful birth of a new sun the next. Only in Shearman can you have such turkeys wishing for Christmas yet resisting such a fate till the last forkful. Only in Shearman can you actually believe in multiple Second Cummings of this book’s Jesus, “arms wide, all smiles”. Like that statue in Rio. Read this story and Await Further Instructions. Balloons or Babylons farting when you misknot them. Cameron and his now ‘stable’ parents. God was born instable, was He not? And is God like this story’s taxi-driver? Cameron and his grandfather, a pair of parabulists for our times. Nostalgia become knots of nastiness.“—and the tree was wearing fairy lights and tinsel like cheap jewellery, too much jewellery, like a little girl playing dress-up, like the whore of Babylon—“LUMP IN YOUR THROAT“It’s not your husband. It’s not my husband. It’s all men. It’s every single one.”Some of Shearman’s stories border on being unbearable. In a shriving way. A necessary journey. This story of “homunculus husbands” is the most unbearable so far. It hits and then hurts the reading nerve. It is gender politics unsandwiched with a vengeance. Imp as Father of the Man — an insinuous conceit made even more powerful by having already been primed and pricked by the idées-fixes incubated by the book up to this point.
THE MARCH“They would hurry out on to the streets, husbands and wives, the children too, and merge with the swelling crowd, and they would blink at each other, and maybe smile, as if this is some long awaited reunion,…”A pied piper type diaspora from lockdown, via lake and earth’s innards, towards some hill and sun that the balloon became a story or so ago. Yet, the souls that the village idiot of a piper empties out of us, as saviour in several comings, are strung like babies, or shrunk balloons? Ourselves in a cycle of empty renewals towards where we are now…? Yet do idiots not have a far-seeing wisdom belying their clumsy acumen? The archetypal visionary author, naively clear-sighted, through clouds of clotted thought, can transcend even their own idiocy…alongside the forging of their traditionally inchoate basics of horseshod purposefulness?
MASTER OF THE MACABRE“There was an almost preternatural stillness to the air, I fancied that time itself had stopped, or at least slowed,…”I know the feeling. Being merely a horror writer, merely that, it had to be downplayed because, as with many books I choose to review (or do they choose me?), there can be a preternatural truth emerging, one that can be dangerous. This book, at least in parts, is a case in point, perhaps the best case in point, and I call myself a weird or fantasy writer (when purporting to write fiction at all), and indeed I no longer have stories in the ‘Best of’ Horror anthologies. Perhaps I wouldn’t be able to do so, having (thankfully?) lost the knack! But I promised from the very start – near where I made that quote about horror stories holding hands together – that this review would not be about me. But perhaps every book reviewer is so imbued by the books reviewed, they actually become him or her, and vice versa. This story is the sad tale of an academic, with all the trappings of a MR James college reading, except that he is not very good at reading aloud (perhaps as a way to temper the horror?’), an academic who sidelined at student gatherings with with what some call spook stories as another light disguise for horror. A story of a triangulation of the male narrator and this sad academic and a woman called Margaret. They do learn to punt. But essentially an attritional story. A life towards mistemper. It still goes on in my head, even though (or because?) it is written in a monotone, or do I mean an undertone? A creepy story that genuinely creeps. Skirts with the truth of what ghosts it tells.THE MASTERWORKAnd this is far from it. But it is nevertheless the perfect counterpart to the previous story, as if the two stories are meant to be read together. Here, amid a witty satire of the publishing world, we have a writer who is not a ghost story alchemist of fiction into truth. But one who transmutes a faith in dubious truth as fiction into even worse fiction, such as rewriting books of the Bible as blockbusters. This includes Christ’s resurrection as a counterpart to Conan Doyle bringing Holmes back from the dead. And one who builds a gestalt of fictions as a garbled tower of words so as to reach an idiot God upon high masquerading as an omniscient writer with omnipotence over the manipulation of truth, possibly another version of the idiot pied piper a story or so ago above. (Possibly preferable somehow to my trying to reach a different idiot god bubbling amorphously at the centre of the earth?)“, he’d reduce the ineffable oneness of the universe into a straight narrative with beginnings, middles and ends,…”MEMORIES OF CRAVINGS LONG GONE“And they tasted their childhoods.”Back to baby dot, as before in this book, here by dint of a woman’s cooking. A woman used as a pretend grim threat for children, a woman who, I feel, as a cook, is equivalent to the master of the macabre a story or so ago, unspectacular but effective, disarmingly a genius for truth but with an inbuilt sadness. Here the woman has more than he did of this book’s ‘confidence’, though, as amid historical wars involving Prussia and Austria, she cooks a stew for the town’s departing army, a stew that brings back all the good memories of their past, a departing army that includes her husband and three sons. When they do not return, but a different victorious army arrives in the town, she eventually does the same, except she makes them diminuendo as those earlier good memories themselves, eventually becoming this book’s pitiful souls like shrunk babies hung on the battle-lines of a life not yet fought?MOND“She doesn’t only feed you fruit. She brings you meals of hedgerows and hedgehogs, of wannabes, of steaming sleet with equanimity on the side.”This is simply remarkable and unforgettable. A date a man has with a woman and takes on or is made to take on her version of Wittgenstein’s ‘the meaning of a word is its use’ semantics. Involving today’s rogue pronouns as well as female on male coercive abuse. With tinges of Daddy-Daughter jealousies. Ionesco and Joyce absurdisms and wordplays made into a page-turning accessible fiction. No mean feat. Did not know half of Desmond was love. And there is also a telling echo of the masterwork tower of “babble” from a story or so ago.
This review will continue here: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/790-2/