Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer > Books: 2022‎ (193)

Lang was a man of science. But, in that first incision, a fleeting feeling arose; complex, multifaceted, yet fleeting nonetheless. All the compartm

Lang was a man of science. But, in that first incision, a fleeting feeling arose; complex, multifaceted, yet fleeting nonetheless. All the compartments of his life began to collapse into one another; his own flesh opening beneath his instrument, his insides mixing with the air around him. A word he hated: contamination. Exposure. He nearly pulled the scalpel away, but the thing passed – he relaxed. He’d had a coffee later than normal, he was just jittery. This body is very well preserved, remarkably so, but that is no cause for alarm. These things happen. He shook his head side to side a little, and as he returned steadily to the performance of tasks that had long ago become habitual – the slicing, the peeling back, the extracting, the measuring, the stitching back together – his mind began to wander, the film of memory beginning to play

That thing she was telling me the other day, what was it, something about redistributing matter – the redistribution of matter – yes, you know I couldn’t stop thinking about it after she said it! But then I started to feel worried, and I couldn’t stop thinking about all the things that are not matter – the immeasurable things, and I started to think about what is lost, other than matter, which as you know, breaks down, becomes other. But what about that which was not matter to begin with, you know, the inner life, all of that. All of that too becomes lost. And I couldn’t stop thinking that no, surely it isn’t lost, it can’t just be obliterated like that. A whole life – the dreams we don’t remember, the fantasies that unspool in our heads before we fall asleep. The thoughts we have that are too terrible to name. The memories, memories of things that happened when we were the only ones there to witness them. Things that leave no record. The invisible things that expand within the self. They cannot disappear, that can’t simply vanish. Tell me, Doctor, where do they go? I am not religious, I will not say the soul. But the inner life, that suffuses the whole body. The limbs, the organs… all the desire that animates the flesh and voice. Oh, I am very worried about it

The office worker relates to her output as a stranger does to her knuckles on a person’s door. The gesture is tentative, even slavish. A sheet of p

The office worker relates to her output as a stranger does to her knuckles on a person’s door. The gesture is tentative, even slavish. A sheet of paper, a file, some mail. She is alienated not just from her boss and co-workers, but from herself, because her work goes somewhere invisible. She might as well be an orange in a supermarket. Who judges and cares for her? The person who sucks her juices.

The brown recluse wears a violin design
No dolls but a prayer wheel. It's a spider
Who trusts the fall like an expert
This is a very old child's story
Absolute otherness gives the weight to gravity
Before the job was complete the Lord paid us
Work's never been as good again
Pass. All pass. The North cashed the ice in
And seven days of solid mist
Lay in which to plan well and lose the gist

Every reader changes the story, bringing it to life and making it real, every reader plays their part, just as I have played mine.

This is how it always starts. Nelson asks for your advice and, the next thing you know, you're involved in some horrible murder case, being chased

This is how it always starts. Nelson asks for your advice and, the next thing you know, you're involved in some horrible murder case, being chased by some madman.'

'Just like old times,' says Phil. 'You and Nelson hunting for a killer on the Saltmarsh.'

Ruth stares at him. Can he really be saying those words s

'Just like old times,' says Phil. 'You and Nelson hunting for a killer on the Saltmarsh.'

Ruth stares at him. Can he really be saying those words so lightly? Can anyone, even Phil, not be aware of how much the last case cost her, how many lives were lost or changed for ever?

Does the discovery of the bones mean that she is about to be involved in another murder investigation? What will it be like to be working closely with Nelson again, especially with Michelle's baby about to be born any day? The whole thing - the dig on the Saltmarsh, Erik's son materialising - feels uncomfortably like one of those dreams where the past replays itself but with certain details subtly altered. When she first dug on these marshes she was in her twenties, single, just about to embark on her academic career. Now she's still single but she has a seven year-old daughter and an extremely complicated romantic past. Her career, too, seems to have stalled. She's a senior lecturer at UNN but it's a fairly lowly institution in the middle of nowhere. She should really be looking for a new job at a better university. She has written two books which were well received in academic circles even if they didn't trouble the best-seller lists.

Enough time goes by and it is as if old things never happened. Things once fresh, immediate, terrible, receding away into old God's time, like the walkers walking so far along Killiney Strand that, as you watch them, there is a moment when they are only a black speck, and then they're gone. Maybe old God's time longs for the time when it was only time, the stuff of the clockface and the wristwatch. But that didn't mean it could be summoned back, or should be. He had been asked to reach back into memory, as if a person could truly do that.

Quoth the raven, never would be. Here was now, a light year removed from that reverberating day, and all the things that followed, all the hard things, the happy things, the happier things. The usual fog cleared a moment from his mind. The small hours were refining him down, like a rough whiskey. What would God want to take from his story, he wondered. St bloody Peter at his gate. What was important in all this, his life, his life, like any other life? He thought suddenly of all the detectives on the earth, and all the detectives that had been on the earth – would it be hundreds of thousands? Would they be herded into the detective enclosure? And made to race against each other like horses? All the detectives – the violent crimes, the rapes, the murders, the con jobs, the robberies, the frauds, the very waterspout, the waterfall, the great flood of crimes in human stories. The hubbub, the hubbub. That had so concerned them all. Like the waterfall in Powerscourt, pouring down, pouring down. And all these men, in all the languages of the world, all the races, all the forces, trying to peer in, to weigh up, to come to conclusions, to strike it lucky, cop a break, to squeak a case through by the skin of its teeth. What was their worth, their own weight? And what was at the heart of it? His life, his little life? The fog edged away from the shore of himself, the sea opened like the stage in a theatre, the helpful sun burned in its element, there was a truth told to him, a truth, in his curious age, in his palpable decay, that there at the heart of it, there at the heart of it, for ever and always, was June. Winnie and Joseph and June. But June.

It was a story of atrocities, certainly. It was almost beyond description, and he had laboured for years not to describe it, to anyone else, and more importantly to himself. Never to allow the little sequence of horrors to play in his brain. Think everything else before he thought of those things. Think of things that did not exist, talk to the tumbleweeds of souls that did not exist. See ghosts before telling that story. Clamp his mind shut with heavy Victorian metal clamps. Now no more. It was no longer possible to be a citizen of grief, his passport to grief was cancelled, he couldn’t enter there. Now he must be brave. Of course, unbeknownst to him, he had been brave all his life. That was true, but not true for him. The main drone of the pipes he had heard under everything for sixty years and more was alarm and confusion, like the very pith of battle. Now that was not so, so much. He wondered was there God involved? Had he been released from his ordeal? He didn’t know. He could be suspicious of the brightness in him, in his limbs, in his almost ecstasy, as being something slipped into him by a medicinal god, like a needle with a vaccine in it. He didn't know. Something else knew. It might as well have phoned him on the telephone. Come in, come in, you can row that boat no more. The current was against you. Here is a little harbour. Rest up there.

Is this a story about a pony-tailed Chinaman bowler? Or a tale to go tell a pony-tailed Chinaman? That is for you to decide.

Is this a story about a pony-tailed Chinaman bowler? Or a tale to go tell a pony-tailed Chinaman? That is for you to decide.

“Wasting talent is a crime" says Graham.
"A sin" concurs Ari.
I think of Pradeep Mathew, the great unsung bowler. I think of Sri Lanka, the great underachieving nation. I think of W.G, Karunasena, the great unfulfilled writer. I think of all these ghosts and I can't help but agree

As I write about her, I'm tempted to describe her as she was before, specifically when I first met her, to put her back together at the moment of h

As I write about her, I'm tempted to describe her as she was before, specifically when I first met her, to put her back together at the moment of her greatest strength, instead of in the midst of her implosion. But that isn't the point, I remind myself, that is not the point: I'm not writing to patch up holes and make people (or myself) think that there's nothing to see here, but rather to bear witness to unintelligibilities and breaches and silences. That is my continuity, that of the scribe. But I'm comforted when she occasionally emerges from her detachment - itself perhaps a form of wisdom – with some impertinent remark that takes me back to how she used to be: witty, ironic, snobby, critical, at times even malicious. Can she have been all those things, or am I remembering wrong?

Like I said, that was the plan. But I couldn't get a fix on Do Yeon-ssi's attention span at all. I felt her lose interest in our discussion. That h

Like I said, that was the plan. But I couldn't get a fix on Do Yeon-ssi's attention span at all. I felt her lose interest in our discussion. That happened fairly quickly. But--and here's the horror story--she lost interest without losing focus, continuing to respond to my inanities as if something was actually at stake. It's like this: At a marionette show you find four types of engaged audience - four different philosophies of enjoying the performance. There are those whose attention is reserved solely for the actions of the marionette: that's Arpad XXX, wishing to believe that the figure is alive in one way or another. Then there are the ones who can't and won't stop looking at the puppet master (or seeking signs of the puppet master, if that person is hidden): that's how Xavier is. There are those who watch the faces of their fellow audience members: my preference, obviously, since I'm the one here talking about the other types. And there are those who follow the strings and the strings alone. Do Yeon-ssi is a string watcher. She may not much care about the order of the strings – if they tangle, they tangle. Still, they express something to her, something about the nature of the illusion before her. That's enough of a reason for her to pursue the strings to their vanishing point.

I feel like the whole stories within stories approach is part of what I think of as my big project as a writer. Ultimately, what I want to do is to try and find out what stories are actually made of, why we believe them, why they take hold of us, and why no matter what we do to try and control the story, or even to create a story, there’s some element of it that is just wild and almost seems to make itself. And also, I guess, whether stories are our friends or our enemies. I just have a lot of questions about what stories are, and the only way to try and interrogate or possibly persuade stories to reveal something about themselves is to make all these provocations and assaults on them, and try and unpack them and unpick their seams and see if they react. Will the story bite you back? Sometimes it does, and then you do sort of run off, but then you come back and have another approach.

So I think that in Peaces, in particular, there was an interesting new angle in that you have a character who almost is a story, and is trying very hard to move out of storyhood and into personhood, and is somehow being prevented and limited by… well, mainly by Ava. I found Ava so inscrutable. I kept wanting to see if she would wink or something. I really couldn’t figure out what she was doing with this whole, There is no Přem. I honestly couldn’t tell you the answer to what is going on there. But at times I was like, Can you really see him? Like, what are you doing, Ava? What are you doing to this poor Přem? And then other times I just thought, I know whatever’s going on in this group dynamic is interesting. And it’s something to do with stories and stories about a story about a person, a kind of hall of mirrors type investigation.

Time collapses as the value rises, bossman turning away complaints, a fifty pence scratching through the code quickly becomes a ten pence dragged across the numbers that disclose.

A day becomes every other and weekly silences quiet her enthusiasm for home. They are too busy, she thinks, but it’s her, she’s the one who is here.

The distance between death and life proclaims absences unbearable. Distant glimpses of waning villages assuage the emotions of scarcity.

She stops calling and spends more time with her brood of thoughts; she finds extra shifts to take her mind off what she’s lost.

This isn’t it, though – he thinks of who should be the one to care for her.

Norm-switching form and a Union Jack sways outside the home she’ll die in.

Does she know who he is, does she not care or has the atrophy made her unaware, who is there, a few drops left of memory.

He can’t take it, her, what is this, Ghanaian or not she planted her seed to bloom over here, wafts of western idiosyncrasies pungent to her frail identity.

On Sundays her hand slips into his, a light renewal of platonic perfection, until her son becomes someone else’s reflection, the face of so many she loved but could never tell, though she always shows warmth to whoever approaches her church.
To watch a mother become a woman, deteriorate to become a girl, an infant who can’t be held, waiting, unaware, to submerge with a family’s final and stifled breath.

This is where she should be. Briefly, to see him smile she’ll remember it was him, and she’ll stretch her arms, an embrace with no charm, ingratiated with this terra, hell, an immigrant mother who will die here alone and can only rise with the body of work her son has done well.