Des Lewis - GESTALT REAL-TIME BOOK REVIEWS A FEARLESS FAITH IN FICTION — THE PASSION OF THE READING MOMENT CRYSTALLISED — Empirical literary critiques from 2008 as based on purchased books.
I am sorry if that’s a plot spoiler for this vignette’s ending. Early Seventies in Belfast, and the narrator — driving at a roundabout with his wife beside him, and kids in the back — rescues a man from the violence of the UDA, not a Fenian man but a Presbyterian? Why do my eyes glaze over? I should know more than I do. I was an agnostic adult in the early Seventies watching the news from where I lived in England, but a story is a story and needs to be told, even if nobody now understands it. History is like being on a roundabout?
“In one dream I’m in school and nobody in the class knows what ‘onomatopoeia’ is except me. But I can’t put my hand up. I’m paralysed. Another dream is of me snoring. And jerking awake to stop me snoring.”
This is a classic story. Is it already a classic story I happen not to have encountered before, i.e. a work that has already been deemed by others to be a classic? I shall check after I have written this review of it. A story about a skinny, precociously smart 11 year old boy and his experiences within sofas as a so-called righteous means of Catholics burgling Protestants. His pissing and sleeping arrangements within the sofa are larger than life, but wildly believable, as are his father and uncle who are part of the gang selling furniture then burgling the house where it is delivered, the boy in the middle of the night cutting himself out of the sofa and letting them in! There is so much more to take in about these laterally thought-out manoeuvres, particularly the manoeuvre here in question in what can only be deemed an unforgettable Swiftian masterpiece.
“It’s that soap with the wee label that never goes away. Imperial Leather. The last thing to go is the wee label. How do they make it do that?”
“When they had a boiled egg at home their mother spooned it from the shell into a cup and mashed the bits up with some butter so that the yellow and the white mixed evenly.”
Not forgetting the elastic band in the white? And what we infer might have happened to the boys’ parents….This is the story of two brothers, around 10 and 12, who seem to be staying with their parents’ posh social friends, the lady a gaily, smartly dressed one who refers to the time as quarter to lemon, and her husband a Catholic doctor, I infer, who likes Agatha Crispy stories as well as medical books in his library, one of the latter containing a “person with a blackened hairy tongue thrust out. A bare woman with droopy chests covered in spots. Then babies stuck together…” – and one brother is hated by the other for his bodily noises, and they share a game of archery with the hosts in the garden, and when the latter leave the garden, one boy points his bow and arrow at the other… But the crucial scene is where one boy in his pyjamas dances with the lady on the bespoke sprung dance floor…the “gorgeous clothes” and rhapsodic religion of dance to the sound of showtime standards. Dancing outside the ‘iron lung.’ And we gradually realise why the boys are staying here. I felt as if I had been immersed in some aura of perfumed cigarettes and banana flaws of innuedo. Moments that I shall cherish…
“The doctor’s wife took a seat on a stool and leaned her elbows on the table staring at her guests. She looked long and hard at them then smiled. ‘I would just love two boys like you,’ she said. There was a sound of crunching toast and chewing.“ The boy’s slow motion football… ‘Like you’re in syrup when you head the balloon – it’s slow motion – like in the pictures.’ “…the radiogram was up and a record was revolving slowly – clicking in the overrun.” Not forgetting the childish talking in code that the husband and wife had learnt from the boy’s parents. “‘We speak it even though we don’t have any children,’ said the doctor’s wife.” The once sprung archery bows and bent arms now forgotten…
“The doctor said grace and they all bowed their heads after the doctor’s wife bowed hers.”
“If there was one thing worse than worrying, it was wasted worrying.”
This incredibly observant story means a helluva lot to me. Empathy apotheosised. My visit to hospital clinics in recent years, observing the other patients, and interacting with those nurses and doctors who attend me as an oldish man during tests and results, and my reading literature in between as a waiting-room dewaiter! Here in this story it was Chekhov, recently mine has been MacLaverty, a godsend…. I must “degrump”!
Please excuse me quoting this whole crucial passage…
“He was struck yet again by the power of the word. Here he was – about to be told he had difficult changes to make to his life and yet by reading words on a page, pictures of Russia a hundred years ago come into his head. Not only that, but he can share sensations and emotions with this student character, created by a real man he never met and translated by a real woman he never met. It was so immediate, the choice of words so delicately accurate, that they blotted out the reality of the present.”
“It was a Sunday and felt like a Sunday. ‘Family Favourites’ was on the wireless.”
I know that particular memory. But this kaleidoscope of memories of Fifties Belfast is over my head, like the lofted football of its plot. Extended family stretching across the terraced street, with characters galore, a priestly Father, a famous footballer as guest, memories of a certain sectarian football game and its printed programme, now a valued item much later as we look back. And the father who was his nibs, then sketcher of those playing, and there is one great line in this story that sums me up as I try to force my way through the roof of this story’s house…
‘You’re no good if you can’t make something out of a blot.’
Lead water pipes did me in, too!
“Granda was now leaning forward with his elbows on the table. ‘There wouldn’t be a foul from start to finish.’ ‘Where’d be the fun in that?’ said Father Barney.”
“‘You’ll not lay a finger on me,’ said Ellie, laughing. She bunched her fists and held her elbows tightly in to her waist.”
This is a poignant story, poignant literally, sniggerable, too, perhaps, as two sisters dress and clean the dead body of their 20 year old niece Ellie, died from UTI, I infer, unless I misremember something. The older sister, with hung gold cross vertical on a chain to stop abrading the chin, stricter than the other sister, and such strictures extended to not only the spitting upon an iron to see how hot it is but also inserting a hot poker into a goffering iron for smoother lace to be put on the body, and, later, a pointed intimacy with the corpse to absolve the message given by a gold ring they found around Ellie’s neck. “Why would anyone want to wear the likes of that? Instead of on your finger.” There’d been no such poker for Ellie, thank God, judging by the auntopsy! (My word, not the story’s). Ellie died before she fulfilled her love with a man who that aunt considered to be unworthy, one of three lodgers in their house — as we see in extended flashback — a love affair as a single kiss after he eased a skelf from Ellie’s finger with a needle! Any ‘brothel sprouts’, notwithstanding!
“And if it isn’t foulness and filth they’re after, it’s a round-about way to lead up to foulness and filth.”
She is being assessed for dementia, a Joycean monologue, her son now come from England to say to her that she shares in the decision, as she tells us, of where she goes now, a northerner being in Dublin because of her husband who died forty plus years ago. Possibly the greatest self-expression in literature of encroaching dementia — I should know! — within a narrator’s account of it, if all her memories and tragedies like losing another son and much else are to be believed. And her accidentally burning a shrine at home with candles, her home to which she yearns to return instead of being put away in a different home…
“All four of them. They each had something different to say. The stones took on a life of their own – like Plath’s mushrooms. Strong, elbowing forward, butting for attention. Our story must be told.”
Arguably, this author’s most powerful story. I find it hard to imagine that those stories by him I have not yet read can be more powerful than this. A novelette, in fact, a tale of painting and an island and pesky invasive ticks and rape and old fashioned photographic Polaroids. A gallery’s art installation of notes for this story and expressive images by the artist, the victim woman, now an artist with a gallery exhibition, who was raped when she was younger on a Scottish island while she was painting — a callow painter, now one who has exorcised that rape in more ways than one, artistically and actually by taking advantage of the fact that boys and men on that island were never taught to swim because if their fishing boat goes down, it was somehow better that way. And the doctor and his wife on the island whom she sought thereafter… Too much to cram into this review. I simply re-visualise its suspenseful nature, its cinematic qualities, and the ability for art like literature and painting to put ourselves into the head of the rapist who cussed ‘fuck and cunt’ — till we also re-visualise this woman, his victim, with whom we are meant to empathise. But who knows the truth of all the repercussions we are shown? The presumed victim’s real-time, contemporaneous notes (e.g.”How to incorporate the ghosts without actually showing them?”) as part of the Art itself, as I always hope my gestalt real-time reviewing can also achieve by mutual synergy of collusion. Making the ultimate truth, or the ultimate lie. This is a work with literally several significant elbow moments. Check them out. I won’t quote them here. And the flashing in the eye of a reflected sun by knife or square mirror, always a circular light to blind us.
“He spun through the pages with his thumb. It was blank except for the beginning pages.”
An aunt called Nora helping her niece by taking out two small grand nephews, and we are also told about her unrequited love with someone who said ‘Adieu’ when going as a soldier to the Great War, now, as a spinster, she is checking routes in a gallery to ensure the boys do not see any unruly art.
“Porridge stuck to you – it set you up for the day.”
“It had been years since she had travelled upstairs on a bus.”
‘There’s no use hurrying if you don’t know the times of the trains.’ That’s what she was once told by her eternal sweetheart who went off to war.
She once treasured ‘The Encyclopaedia of Primary Teaching.’ ‘The air was full of small mechanical sounds, tickings and scrapings.’
We, too, are imbued with her ‘dwam’, as she shows them, in the museum, a Mummy with blatant blackened substances and a split nosebone, a life as death.
“The soul leaves the body and tiptoes to the doorway. Then turns and goes back to kiss the body that has sheltered it all these years.”
There is no way to convey this story. And its ending. With mere snippets. There were so many other snippets that chose not to be quoted by me. They said you have to read all of this story, or none of it. Too late, I countered!
“How futile all this was. How was anyone to deduce his life from such fragments?”
Indeed, but the story deduced itself, this time, without my help. A Scottish poet as professor in a Iowa university who gets lost in the typical winter storm of the mid West — lost in the quadrangle! “No, I’m not being raped – I’m just lost. Yes, somewhere in the middle of the fucking campus.” Lost despite the single flagpole. Trying to find a bus to get home. His desired loved one Lorna now estranged in Scotland. Evocative conveyance of life’s Blind’s Man’s Buff, if not bus! He and Lorna back home once watched The Dolls House together, another Nora to go with the one in the previous story above? Until another flagpole as coordination — a tall Indian cleaning lady from the University building — carries a telephone message to him from Lorna… to get his bearings, somehow making me remember again what his mother once said…
ON THE ROUNDABOUT
“To tell the story.”
I am sorry if that’s a plot spoiler for this vignette’s ending. Early Seventies in Belfast, and the narrator — driving at a roundabout with his wife beside him, and kids in the back — rescues a man from the violence of the UDA, not a Fenian man but a Presbyterian? Why do my eyes glaze over? I should know more than I do. I was an agnostic adult in the early Seventies watching the news from where I lived in England, but a story is a story and needs to be told, even if nobody now understands it. History is like being on a roundabout?
THE TROJAN SOFA
“In one dream I’m in school and nobody in the class knows what ‘onomatopoeia’ is except me. But I can’t put my hand up. I’m paralysed. Another dream is of me snoring. And jerking awake to stop me snoring.”
This is a classic story. Is it already a classic story I happen not to have encountered before, i.e. a work that has already been deemed by others to be a classic? I shall check after I have written this review of it. A story about a skinny, precociously smart 11 year old boy and his experiences within sofas as a so-called righteous means of Catholics burgling Protestants. His pissing and sleeping arrangements within the sofa are larger than life, but wildly believable, as are his father and uncle who are part of the gang selling furniture then burgling the house where it is delivered, the boy in the middle of the night cutting himself out of the sofa and letting them in! There is so much more to take in about these laterally thought-out manoeuvres, particularly the manoeuvre here in question in what can only be deemed an unforgettable Swiftian masterpiece.
“It’s that soap with the wee label that never goes away. Imperial Leather. The last thing to go is the wee label. How do they make it do that?”
LEARNING TO DANCE
“When they had a boiled egg at home their mother spooned it from the shell into a cup and mashed the bits up with some butter so that the yellow and the white mixed evenly.”
Not forgetting the elastic band in the white? And what we infer might have happened to the boys’ parents….This is the story of two brothers, around 10 and 12, who seem to be staying with their parents’ posh social friends, the lady a gaily, smartly dressed one who refers to the time as quarter to lemon, and her husband a Catholic doctor, I infer, who likes Agatha Crispy stories as well as medical books in his library, one of the latter containing a “person with a blackened hairy tongue thrust out. A bare woman with droopy chests covered in spots. Then babies stuck together…” – and one brother is hated by the other for his bodily noises, and they share a game of archery with the hosts in the garden, and when the latter leave the garden, one boy points his bow and arrow at the other…
But the crucial scene is where one boy in his pyjamas dances with the lady on the bespoke sprung dance floor…the “gorgeous clothes” and rhapsodic religion of dance to the sound of showtime standards. Dancing outside the ‘iron lung.’
And we gradually realise why the boys are staying here.
I felt as if I had been immersed in some aura of perfumed cigarettes and banana flaws of innuedo. Moments that I shall cherish…
“The doctor’s wife took a seat on a stool and leaned her elbows on the table staring at her guests. She looked long and hard at them then smiled. ‘I would just love two boys like you,’ she said. There was a sound of crunching toast and chewing.“
The boy’s slow motion football…
‘Like you’re in syrup when you head the balloon – it’s slow motion – like in the pictures.’
“…the radiogram was up and a record was revolving slowly – clicking in the overrun.”
Not forgetting the childish talking in code that the husband and wife had learnt from the boy’s parents. “‘We speak it even though we don’t have any children,’ said the doctor’s wife.” The once sprung archery bows and bent arms now forgotten…
“The doctor said grace and they all bowed their heads after the doctor’s wife bowed hers.”
THE CLINIC
“If there was one thing worse than worrying, it was wasted worrying.”
This incredibly observant story means a helluva lot to me. Empathy apotheosised. My visit to hospital clinics in recent years, observing the other patients, and interacting with those nurses and doctors who attend me as an oldish man during tests and results, and my reading literature in between as a waiting-room dewaiter! Here in this story it was Chekhov, recently mine has been MacLaverty, a godsend…. I must “degrump”!
Please excuse me quoting this whole crucial passage…
“He was struck yet again by the power of the word. Here he was – about to be told he had difficult changes to make to his life and yet by reading words on a page, pictures of Russia a hundred years ago come into his head. Not only that, but he can share sensations and emotions with this student character, created by a real man he never met and translated by a real woman he never met. It was so immediate, the choice of words so delicately accurate, that they blotted out the reality of the present.”
A BELFAST MEMORY
“It was a Sunday and felt like a Sunday. ‘Family Favourites’ was on the wireless.”
I know that particular memory. But this kaleidoscope of memories of Fifties Belfast is over my head, like the lofted football of its plot. Extended family stretching across the terraced street, with characters galore, a priestly Father, a famous footballer as guest, memories of a certain sectarian football game and its printed programme, now a valued item much later as we look back. And the father who was his nibs, then sketcher of those playing, and there is one great line in this story that sums me up as I try to force my way through the roof of this story’s house…
‘You’re no good if you can’t make something out of a blot.’
Lead water pipes did me in, too!
“Granda was now leaning forward with his elbows on the table. ‘There wouldn’t be a foul from start to finish.’
‘Where’d be the fun in that?’ said Father Barney.”
THE WEDDING RING: Ellen Tierney 1884–1904
“‘You’ll not lay a finger on me,’ said Ellie, laughing. She bunched her fists and held her elbows tightly in to her waist.”
This is a poignant story, poignant literally, sniggerable, too, perhaps, as two sisters dress and clean the dead body of their 20 year old niece Ellie, died from UTI, I infer, unless I misremember something. The older sister, with hung gold cross vertical on a chain to stop abrading the chin, stricter than the other sister, and such strictures extended to not only the spitting upon an iron to see how hot it is but also inserting a hot poker into a goffering iron for smoother lace to be put on the body, and, later, a pointed intimacy with the corpse to absolve the message given by a gold ring they found around Ellie’s neck. “Why would anyone want to wear the likes of that? Instead of on your finger.” There’d been no such poker for Ellie, thank God, judging by the auntopsy! (My word, not the story’s). Ellie died before she fulfilled her love with a man who that aunt considered to be unworthy, one of three lodgers in their house — as we see in extended flashback — a love affair as a single kiss after he eased a skelf from Ellie’s finger with a needle! Any ‘brothel sprouts’, notwithstanding!
“And if it isn’t foulness and filth they’re after, it’s a round-about way to lead up to foulness and filth.”
THE ASSESSMENT
“Old age is something you never get better of.”
She is being assessed for dementia, a Joycean monologue, her son now come from England to say to her that she shares in the decision, as she tells us, of where she goes now, a northerner being in Dublin because of her husband who died forty plus years ago. Possibly the greatest self-expression in literature of encroaching dementia — I should know! — within a narrator’s account of it, if all her memories and tragedies like losing another son and much else are to be believed. And her accidentally burning a shrine at home with candles, her home to which she yearns to return instead of being put away in a different home…
“He takes me, not by the elbow, but by the hand.”
UP THE COAST
“All four of them. They each had something different to say. The stones took on a life of their own – like Plath’s mushrooms. Strong, elbowing forward, butting for attention. Our story must be told.”
Arguably, this author’s most powerful story. I find it hard to imagine that those stories by him I have not yet read can be more powerful than this. A novelette, in fact, a tale of painting and an island and pesky invasive ticks and rape and old fashioned photographic Polaroids. A gallery’s art installation of notes for this story and expressive images by the artist, the victim woman, now an artist with a gallery exhibition, who was raped when she was younger on a Scottish island while she was painting — a callow painter, now one who has exorcised that rape in more ways than one, artistically and actually by taking advantage of the fact that boys and men on that island were never taught to swim because if their fishing boat goes down, it was somehow better that way. And the doctor and his wife on the island whom she sought thereafter… Too much to cram into this review. I simply re-visualise its suspenseful nature, its cinematic qualities, and the ability for art like literature and painting to put ourselves into the head of the rapist who cussed ‘fuck and cunt’ — till we also re-visualise this woman, his victim, with whom we are meant to empathise. But who knows the truth of all the repercussions we are shown? The presumed victim’s real-time, contemporaneous notes (e.g.”How to incorporate the ghosts without actually showing them?”) as part of the Art itself, as I always hope my gestalt real-time reviewing can also achieve by mutual synergy of collusion. Making the ultimate truth, or the ultimate lie. This is a work with literally several significant elbow moments. Check them out. I won’t quote them here. And the flashing in the eye of a reflected sun by knife or square mirror, always a circular light to blind us.
“He spun through the pages with his thumb. It was blank except for the beginning pages.”
VISITING TAKABUTI
An aunt called Nora helping her niece by taking out two small grand nephews, and we are also told about her unrequited love with someone who said ‘Adieu’ when going as a soldier to the Great War, now, as a spinster, she is checking routes in a gallery to ensure the boys do not see any unruly art.
“Porridge stuck to you – it set you up for the day.”
“It had been years since she had travelled upstairs on a bus.”
‘There’s no use hurrying if you don’t know the times of the trains.’
That’s what she was once told by her eternal sweetheart who went off to war.
She once treasured ‘The Encyclopaedia of Primary Teaching.’
‘The air was full of small mechanical sounds, tickings and scrapings.’
We, too, are imbued with her ‘dwam’, as she shows them, in the museum, a Mummy with blatant blackened substances and a split nosebone, a life as death.
“The soul leaves the body and tiptoes to the doorway. Then turns and goes back to kiss the body that has sheltered it all these years.”
There is no way to convey this story. And its ending. With mere snippets. There were so many other snippets that chose not to be quoted by me. They said you have to read all of this story, or none of it. Too late, I countered!
WINTER STORM
“How futile all this was. How was anyone to deduce his life from such fragments?”
Indeed, but the story deduced itself, this time, without my help. A Scottish poet as professor in a Iowa university who gets lost in the typical winter storm of the mid West — lost in the quadrangle! “No, I’m not being raped – I’m just lost. Yes, somewhere in the middle of the fucking campus.” Lost despite the single flagpole. Trying to find a bus to get home. His desired loved one Lorna now estranged in Scotland. Evocative conveyance of life’s Blind’s Man’s Buff, if not bus! He and Lorna back home once watched The Dolls House together, another Nora to go with the one in the previous story above? Until another flagpole as coordination — a tall Indian cleaning lady from the University building — carries a telephone message to him from Lorna… to get his bearings, somehow making me remember again what his mother once said…
“The back of my hand to you.”
I shall now, in due course, read and review any stories from BLANK PAGES that I have not already read, here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/11/12/blank-pages-by-bernard-maclaverty/
END