Paul Fulcher's Reviews > Darker with the Lights on

Now on the outstanding shortlist for the 2017 Republic of Consciousness Prize for 'gorgeous prose and hardcore literary fiction' from small, independent presses.

Little Island Press is an independent publisher of fiction, poetry and essays. Founded in 2016, in its own words it "publishes innovative, intellectually ambitious writing in elegant, hardback editions."

Having started with poetry, it has this year moved into fiction, including David Hayden's Darker with The Lights On.

The connection with poetry is apposite for many of the stories in the collection are more prose poems than stories. Beautifully written at the sentence level, with stunning images (particularly the use of colour) and sublime prose, but rather surreal and at times one is left a little wondering how each paragraph, sometimes each clause, relates to the preceding one.

I look up through the glass and into the massing sky, bruised silver-grey and violet, and raise my arms, my hands, thinking through the sudden pain in my head, and see a frozen lark fall at great speed before exploding on the concrete path, scattering its music all around the garden in numberless, glittering fragments.

My appreciation of the collection was stronger in the pieces with a clearer story and sense of direction. To give a few highlights:

In Play, a professor delivers an over-complex lecture on the philosophy of play while the students listening bicker amongst themselves and comment on his discourse:

'Pichard argues in his 1955 book Play in Play that the objective of all play is the abolition of biological reality. I parse the words and gain their sense but don't really know what they mean.
...
Paradoxically Pichard stresses the essentially embodied nature of play. On investigation this turns out to mean nothing more than that one needs a body in order to be able to play. It is the kind of dressed-up statement of the obvious that is presented as an intellectual breakthrough but is, in fact, a banal utterance with no analytical power whatsoever.'

'Have you heard that he writes most of the papers that he cites?' Said Sameh.

'He pseudonymously dialogues with himself reserving his scything vituperation for authors who are in fact himself,'said Sameh.

Sameh concludes (a sentiment I remember from more obscure maths lectures at University):

'I will work on the assumption that he is giving us the questions, and the answers in outline, for the end of year exams and see where that takes me.'

In Auctioneer, the eponymous character explains why he believes in disposing of objects and gives the most eloquent rationale I have come across for my own habit of not keeping books:

Being intimately involved with things that are more permanent than one's self is a lowering experience in my opinion. The alternatives - flowers, food, some, music- we have them, we enjoy them and when they go we are still here, remembering. Few events give me greater pleasure than the demolition of a familiar building, fortunately a common event. Books may well be the worst of the household ephemera: dry husks that, slab by slab, rise in great, whispering walls, beginning their owners. The essence of a book is another thing entirely, not the words as such bit what lies beneath the words, that is what can set you free. That is why libraries are so important, as long as one does not linger too long in them. If to have to buy a book I give it away immediately after I've finished reading.

There is humour too. In How to Read a Picture Book, a cigar smoking talking squirrel (!) gives a group of children a very neat explanation of the different elements of a story for children, while in Last Call for the Hated a man experiences persistent, obvious but rather low-level hostility from the populace, such as smearing toothpaste on his door and ostentatiously serving the person behind him first in the chip-shop queue.

And in Reading, an older man apologetically approaches a younger as they wait on a train platform:

'I know something very few people know. There are small occasions of magic still lodged in the world. Books... Books are enchanted. Not in the way that people imagine. Not in the sense of wordy transits of delight wrought by restless writers, but something very specific and universal. When you die - when you die - you revive in the world of the last book you were reading before your ... demise. I can tell that you don't believe me and I don't expect you to but - because I like you - I wanted to warn you. What are you reading at the moment?'

'Management Accounting for Non-Financial Specialists'.

'That's bad'.

I must admit at times I found it more difficult to get a grasp on some of the other stories but as Hadyden himself explains in the Irish Times (https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/yo...) this is a deliberate technique:

“When I took that specificity away, I ended up with something that became much, much more interesting, more uncanny, and more generalisable to people’s experiences of different kinds of discomfort. Taking the specifics out, the recognisable accents and language, for me anyway it made it more interesting, it made it stronger, it made it possible to develop the theme of the story more strongly.

A striking debut and a unique piece of writing. At times I did feel a rather inadequate reader, like the professor in Play - I parse the words and gain their sense but don't really know what they mean. - but the writing was always beautiful at the word level and the stronger stories highly memorable.

Thanks to Little Island Press for the ARC.