CERN ZOO

CONTINUED FROM HERE


The Terror of the Tomb (1992)

This was a major re-write by a 1990 DFL self of something written by an earlier DFL self in the Sixties. Fundamentally, a sort of absurd horror story or a MR James pastiche or something more concupiscent between the two! It tells of someone investigating grave-robbing in a Sussex village and the subsuming of the Self. The village “had one long main street, where the pubs and bank-fronts huddled close to the gossip shop and the pork butcher’s. But, unlike other country communities, it had back streets and sunless alleys more fitting for a run-down city...”

There is also a Fish Station “where those that can’t breathe in air end up for a while.”

Not forgetting a pub:

“Beneath the Sign of the Dogs that Whine
Their tongues and scissors flicker;
Within the inn there grows a skin,
And the stew is crusting thicker.”

One would forgive neutral observers wondering if the pub was a cover-joint for another scar museum? (1 June 09 - another 4 hours later)






 

Todger’s Town (1999)

A quilted story that is another of those long dubious ‘shades of emptiness’! Actually, this is a really strange one. It has all the hallmarks of early period DFL. Part of an erstwhile Toilet Mythos, here we have a lavatory-man who “had worked man and boy as a stink-man: clearing the tanks of the rich and selling the produce to the poor.” Full of Lovecraftian references - and Cthulhu monsters roosting on the roofs of working-class ‘back-to-back’, ‘two-up-two-down’ and ‘tunnel-back’ houses, some of these houses with pretentiously overgrown porches sprouting from the front doors. Grovellings and Guttersnipes. And larger-than-life characters and anachronistic Christmases. There is also a terraced road of houses where the lavatory-chain flushes have been placed in the houses next door to the toilets they flush - and imagine the neighbourly squabbles ensuing...! It’s a hoot and a half! Not to everyone’s taste, no doubt.

I earlier tried to wring out a leit-motif aiming at the optimum-last-thought-before-one-dies concept threading this whole book - and here we have just one example:

“...his Mum told me he had died sitting on the lavatory-bowl. I actually received the impression from her that she was annoyed as she had only just finished his laundry. / I knew that Todger always liked to sit on the outside toilet for as long as possible, strumming his double bass. Quite a drawn-out affair, the only peace he got, I suppose. Lavatories were in his blood. I dropped a single rose into the bowl that had borne his end.”

And if that is a spoiler, I apologise.  (2 June 09)

Tom Rose (1991)

This is nearly as long as my quilted stories. I remember being surprised (and very proud) when it was accepted by Alan Ross of ‘London Magazine’ for the London Magazine Anthology: ‘Signals’.

It is one of my strongest, strangest stories that I have long since fallen out of love with. About a magician / drag artist performing in a women’s seminary – implicating bodily and religious concupiscence, ghosts that play the ‘Battleships’ game with the story’s protagonist, mixed with gentle unspoken love between two of the seminarists plus a richly textured, often irregular spirituality. The story is both poetic and grotesquely absurd. I now find it difficult to grasp. It is either my best story or my worst. Looking at it coldly today, I sense it to be on the brink of returning into my favour as a reader, but I continue to be wary of it as its author. Its sometimes beautiful, sometimes clumsy prose never ceases to surprise (even shock) me on each re-reading. I intend never to read it again after today.

“The gaps in the text nagged at her, but before she could fill them in, she saw crouched shapes at the back of the hall, shifting in shadows. Like beached monsters trying to prime their dark flesh for easing back into the giant womb of death: as if they were foetuses of ghosts.” (2 June 09 - 2 hours later)





Top of an Angel’s Head (1996)

 Two dreams paralleling, feeding into and feeding from each other. One a liaison in a Hodgson-like ghost ship scenario. The other an affair of the same couple in a boudoir-scenario amid fairies. The result of this interweaving of images is one I cannot interpret or evaluate, merely describe. There are echoes of the human heads of previous stories in this book, some of which were smuggling ambergris. Also tissue like that on show at the Scar Museum. The story seems to be lending its own specific weight to some still slowly evolving gestalt... Is this collection a novel, after all? A rhetorical question in a rhetorical review.

“She smiled and went to the side of the room where she had evidently left the breakfast tray. She brought it over and I breathed in the fragrance of rose-hip and hibiscus tea—on which floated blossoms—and delighted in the plateful of steaming rashers that—she told me—hid shy eggs beneath. A hunk of lightly toasted bread, with a skewer in its centre bearing black olives, floated like a full-masted raft in a basin of warm milk that was gradually growing a skin so cultured that it looked like the top of an angel's head.” (3 June 09)




 

Uncle Absolutely (1992)

Another story that I’m told by some of my friends is their favourite one in the book. That sort of information from me should have no place in a review.  But as I develop this review, I feel I should not withhold anything – as well as simultaneously trying to be objective.  Meanwhile, this story is based on some of my childhood memories of living in the Essex seaside town of Walton-on-Naze (in a house called Olive Villa) between my birth in 1948 and 1955 (when my parents with myself moved to Colchester). However, the Uncle character - who is so uncertain of himself that he answers everything with the ritual and incantatory use of the word ‘absolutely’ - is created specifically for this story. Everything else seems more or less real. The Uncle somehow makes it all seem even more real!

The ending is poignant, a poignancy enhanced in the sense that it also proves words in this book are more important than the things they describe, thus working to make those same things seem more real as things ... if one can ride the rollercoaster-paradox embodied in that claim! And I too have a soft spot for this story.

“A swing in the large garden which took its own volition from a ghost that was mugging up on childhood.”  (3 June 09 - 2 hours later)

Valedictory (1993)

An old man on an island (in a scenario and ethos similar to that of ‘Big Ship, Little Ship and Brown’) says goodbye to a girl for whom he has been guardian (her having reached puberty and thus unwise for her to remain with him,  now collected by a galleon of strangers as if they had always been destined to arrive upon the very first striking of her clock of womanhood). Unrequited love and lush fantasies of tone. It suits the fading identity of the I-narrator as it ploughs through the plot of life towards its end, with the head-lease author (me) generally controlling the dimmer-switches (sometimes erratically up and down in ‘brightness’) of each story’s protagonist’s or narrator’s character and soul.

“The oar-slaves abruptly took up crooning. Their shanties made me hide my eyes for fear of tears showing. These were songs of the soon to depart. To the knowing, each stanza told of the route and even the destination.” (3 June 09 - another hour later)




 

The Walking Mat (1993)

This is one of the longer stories in this book, but, unlike many of the previous long ones, it is not a quilted story. It seems organic. A definite ‘genius loci’. It seems to summarise some of the leit-motifs still homing in. It is a man’s return to the half-sunken novelty hotel where his wife died at his hand on honeymoon. It is about the nature of a gratuitous act. It is of a dual symbiosis where one of the participants dies in the process. It is of the evolution of selves. Tripartite wars. The optimum-last-thought-at-the-point-of-one’s-own-death. It is of interaction and dialogue reminiscent of ‘Effervescent’, ‘The Chaise Longue’, ‘The Scar Museum’... It is of many other things I can no longer grasp.

I have been developing a huge amount of self-doubt as I progress through this experimental (‘intentional fallacy’-inspired) real-time review of ostensibly my own book. But one needs to factor in randomness and synchronicity, truth and fiction. Yet it remains essentially pretentious, and if I believe that an author is just as able (or unable) to critique his own book as other so-called independent reviewers – why have I seen fit to interpolate personal anecdotes throughout, i.e. anecdotes about the writing of some of the stories? Perhaps the answer is in the end of ‘The Walking Mat’: an ending of re-enactment and role-playing. If that is a story-spoiler, I apologise, but it is necessary for me to make this ‘self’-important observation in the context of what is fast becoming an important event in my writing life (i.e. this review). An importance I did not predict when embarking a week or so ago upon doing this (on the face of it, crass) experiment. I suppose it is significant that at the outset I speculated upon this review taking months or even years. And here I am, today, nearly finished!

“The hotel was expensive. Not so much a sea-view as the fish-eye itself.”  (4 June 09)

'WEIRDMONGER' REAL-TIME REVIEW CONCLUDED HERE