The Life of Polycrates and other Stories for Antiquated Children, Brendan Connell

"Neo-Decadent writers will honour the fragmented, the contorted, the unfinished, the unpublished" writes Brendan Connell in his manifesto. With the obvious exception of the latter, many of the stories in this collection fit the first three categories, although to call them "unfinished" might seem churlish. I wouldn't want to suggest that they are unfinished in the sense of having splinters and unvarnished surfaces - clearly a great deal of attention has been paid to getting the tone of each piece right, and generally these efforts are successful. But quite a few of the pieces end on an arbitrary tangent or drift into a fantasy.

Again from his manifesto: "Story arcs should only be used to hang oneself with. Nothing is ever resolved. Nothing progresses." That's not always true in life, or in this collection. Many things progress: tumours, obsessions, men's fates accumulate momentum, leading to their ultimate downfall. Connell has indeed studiously avoided any traditional open-and-closed story arcs. In fact, some of the pieces can hardly be called stories at all. In some cases, the possibility of a story is all that is glimpsed behind layers of obfuscating fragmentary texts and references.

"The Search for Savino" begins in typical gothic style with dark hints at the peculiar habits of an obscure artist related by one collector to another. But the narrative quickly breaks down into a series of lists, catalogues, letters, dialogues and transcripts of interrogations. Somewhere behind all of these partial evidence there may be a story, but Connell is not going to give us enough clues to work it out. There is something to do with painting on skin, on eyelids or eyeballs, but that's as close as you're going to get and, one suspects, if that frustrates you then you've missed the point.

The title piece of book is by far the longest. From my initial bafflement at what seem to be invented "sigla" (e.g. "conjectural conceptions" or "offstage comments") and the slight irritation with which I always meet untranslated quotations in languages that I cannot easily translate, I began to get a sense of what the text was pretending to be. Taken partly from classical sources (such as Herodotus), "The Life of Polycrates" sometimes does just what it says on the tin, narrating the rise of fall of the tyrant of Samos in an approximation of the exotic austerity of classical Greek style. But the straightforward narrative is interrupted by fictional fragments of epistles, excerpts from the catalogues of libraries, lists of the contents of a dressing case, ancient graffiti. There are absurdly lengthy footnotes to rival Flann O'Brien's asides about De Selby in "The Third Policeman". Connell seems to revel in playing with the architecture of academic discourse: the "sigla", when the do make their appearances, seem arbitrary, there is a great deal of indentation, numbered and lettered lists and chronologies.

It's an epicurean tale too, which delights as much in the descriptions of feasts and of unusual dishes (e.g. fried daffodils), of the perfume of young men's oiled hair, of the exotic specimens in Polycrates' garden, as in the actual plot, which feels of secondary interest. Connell is more interested in the texture of ancient Greek life than in ancient Greek lives. Clearly a huge amount of research and a lifetime of erudition has gone into so dense a piece, but occasionally the tone is betrayed by an out-of-place chattiness: "a boat-load of goodies" does not strike me as a line that could have been lifted from Herodotus, if that is the intended effect.

Elsewhere "The Life of Captain Gareth Caernarvon" recounts the adventures of a nineteenth century English Colonial, hunter, transvestite and uber-carnivore that wouldn't have looked out of place as an extended Monty Python sketch (with Graham Chapman as the bewhiskered and corseted Captain).

Less successful is "The Slug". A handsome man deliberately sets out, over the period of his lifetime, to make himself repellent, for reasons we cannot properly understand. Here Connell's use of sentence fragments and single sentence sections seems self-indulgent and designed to shock. "Section VIII" of the story simply reads, "The colour of vomit", which is neither shocking nor interesting, merely adolescent posturing.

Connell has a gift for the kind of phrase that looks out of place, but which nevertheless jolts the reader to attention. In the otherwise unexceptional piece "Molten Rage", the narrator looks and the traffic and describes "men willing to kill, not only each other, but babies, old men and women, in order to feed these creatures in whose bellies they perched like half-digested herring." Neither does he shy away from raiding the dictionary for what primary school teachers now call "Wow Words": altocalciphiliac, acousticophiliatically, frotteurism. Usually I raise my eyebrows at this kind of extravagance, but Connell does it with such chutzpah that in the end I gave up minding.

In "Collapsing Claude" a bank clerk becomes addicted to an emasculating, obese and sexually voracious woman. In a superficially similar piece, "Maledict Michela", an elderly German man falls for the magnificent ankles of a similarly poisonous female, but in this (superior) story the battle is more poised, and the story takes an abrupt corner before ending at a Chekovian impasse as the German husband's immunity to his wife's spite leads to the last line: "She despised him. Her walled-up spite was for him the very fountain of youth."

As in his other books, Connell is only interested in extreme characters, wholly gluttonous or predatory women, completely spineless, abject men, or impossibly, fantastically carnivorous. There's also a common thread of disgust for crowds, for the mass of unremarkable humanity, which many of his self-marginalised characters share, and which seems vindicated by the last line of "The Slug": "Everyone is vulgar".

"There’s nothing wrong with writing a lousy book," states point 10 of his manifesto. Just make sure it’s really lousy. There is nothing worse than competence." This book is by no means lousy, and Connell is too addicted to risk-taking to risk mere competence. I didn't think all of the risks paid off, but I'm glad he took them, because without the deliberately grotesque stylistic flourishes, and the fragmented textures, the thinness of the characters and conceits would have been glaring. Like a bike ride in the Lake District the terrain of this book is uneven almost to the point of fatigue and irritation. There are one or two nasty ditches, but the views from the tops compensate.

The Life of Polycrates and Other Stories for Antiquated Children, by Brendan Connell will be published by Chômu Press on the 23rd March 2011. Pb 266pp. Available from Amazon UK.

The Translation of Father Torturo, Brendan Connell

Father Xaviero Torturo is, like many of the protagonists in Connell's later collection Unpleasant Tales, a man obsessed with change, though the changes he desires extend beyond himself and into the world in which he lives. He is a priest who, tired of being "the begrimed receptacle" for the offences of others, applies the philosophy, dedication and ruthlessness of the family trade – assassination – to his work.

"As a child he had been brutal, a kicker of cats, a resolute swatter of flies..." His parents savagely murdered, this boy is taken in by Uncle Guido, their avenger, a kindly murderer who would see him enter the church. Torturo's education is thus entrusted to cigar-fancier Father Falzon, who encourages the young prodigy to read very widely, and gives him a piece of deathbed advice: "Don't give yourself away. Not until you have them check-mated."

As Torturo's career within the church first falters, and then progresses at pace, he follows that advice to the letter, even withholding his plans from the reader. Though we are able to guess his intended destination – "playing the faithful servant", he hopes to "usurp the master" – his purpose and methods remain obscure. This allows us to appreciate the fruition of his plans all the more.

I almost felt as if I should have read this book in French – it reminded me very much of reading Gide. I can easily imagine it in Gallimard's Collection Folio alongside books like Les caves du Vatican. Perhaps that stems from the shared subject matter – Catholicism and amorality – but I think also there's a similarity of tone and a similar intellectualism.

The book's dedication nods to another gay writer of that period, Baron Corvo, on whose Hadrian VII this is roughly patterned. This novel could perhaps be criticised for its portrayal of homosexuals – Bishop Vivan, an early ally of Father Torturo, is something of a giggly, effete stereotype – though a defence is that the main characters, good and bad, are Catholic priests, not generally an occupation in which you would expect to find healthy, happy gay men.

The Translation of Father Torturo dates back to 2005 but is now available for the first time on Kindle, published I think by the author; a few typos and formatting glitches did no real harm. Some Roman Catholics might be pleased by its assumption or at least implication that the sacred relics of the saints hold actual, magical power; others might choose to find the perverted, corrupt priests that populate the book offensive. I wouldn't hesitate to recommend this provocative and grimly amusing book to everyone else.

The Translation of Father Torturo, Brendan Connell, Kindle, 3417ll.

Blind Swimmer: An Eibonvale Press Anthology

Offered the theme “creativity in isolation”, it is perhaps not surprising that many of the authors in this anthology have imagined solitary beachfront or wilderness retreats for their writer protagonists to escape to. One of the most interesting stories here, Nina Allen’s “Bellony”, tells the story of an aspiring writer’s growing obsession with the work of a children’s author. Allis Bennett had escaped Nazi Poland as a child, and then spent her life in seclusion in a dowdy seaside town, producing a series of peculiar books before disappearing without trace. Fond of these books from childhood, the young woman moves into the missing writer’s empty house to discover that Bennett’s official biography is riddled with omissions and deceptions.

It’s the sort of literary and metaphysical detective story that reminded me of Paul Auster. It doesn’t operate on the same level as a book like Oracle Nights: for one thing there is a tendency for minor characters to provide their life stories replete with the next piece in the story’s puzzle, and the author is a bit too keen on interpreting the story for us, rather than simply telling it. However, she gets the ramshackle, sun-bleached atmosphere of her seaside town just right, and the unravelling of the mystery is genuinely gripping. I did begin to think of Allis Bennett as a real author, and could almost visualise the faded paperback covers of her strange children’s novels.

Douglas Thompson also conjures a beachfront retreat, but his writer protagonist is already an enfant terrible whose first novel caused such ructions in society, and made him so much money, that he decides to live as a recluse for the next thirty years, to write more of his scabrous masterpieces and avoid the polluting touch of the book business and the fawning world of fans and critics. It’s a premise that raises interesting questions and gets to the heart of the book’s question: how far can any artist remove herself from the rest of the world and continue to produce relevant art? Is it necessarily the case that the further one withdraws into a shell of work and solitary reflection, the more navel-gazing the output? What kind of crazy stories would really get written (if any) by a novelist who spent thirty years without communicating with the rest of humanity, and would there be any point in reading them?

Coincidentally, on the 26th September on Radio 4’s “Americana” programme, the crime writer James Ellroy claimed:

I don’t read books. I fear stimulation: going to motion pictures … I ignore the world as it is today. I do not follow politics contemporaneously at all. I have no opinions. I am not on the internet. I do not watch television, have a cell phone or read newspapers. I feel no social obligation to keep up with the world today.

But is there a point when retreating from distractions means cutting oneself off from any source of real subject matter, or are the contents of a genius’s head enough to keep him going for a lifetime of masterpieces?
Frustratingly, having stated the question in the premise of “The Flowers of Uncertainty”, and set the thought experiment in motion, Douglas Thompson doesn’t seem too interested in answering it. Instead we have a clever recursive series of nested narratives, a range of alternate universes that the author might have found on his return to society.

Starting in a languid, poised style, the story becomes steadily more bombastic at each layer of the story, until the characters are waving guns and throwing silly Hollywood action-movie put-downs around. It’s an entertaining ride as the carpet is repeatedly pulled out from under the reader’s feet, but it feels like an opportunity wasted.

Somewhere further down the coast, in “The Book of Tides”, David Rix’s writer is using his beachcombing finds as inspiration for his magnum opus, a linked series of stories based on his “readings” of the tides. Like Derek Jarman’s garden, his beach hut is surrounded by driftwood sculptures that protect him from the world. He makes tentative connections between his found objects, like a tarot reader hoping that the vaguer his interpretation, the more likely it will contain some grain of truth. The arrival of a more unfathomable bit of jetsam in the shape of a fugitive girl complicates his meditative existence.

There is something tentative about the tone of the whole story that I found frustrating. A particular lump of driftwood is described as “Barkless and cracked, it seemed to reach out, though he wasn’t sure whether it was in agony or exultation. Maybe both”. There’s a reluctance to assert anything definite, to engage with the world, to make a simple decision. When the two characters find five human corpses washed up on the beach, there is no mention of alerting the authorities, or even of burying the dead. The writer is so caught up in his creative monologue that his response is to assemble another piece of sculpture on the beach.

There are problems with the pace of the dialogue: it lurches from stammering sentence fragments into unexpected outbursts of emotional anguish. Here and there the conversations had a lumpy quality that reminded me of soap operas where people invariably show their anger or distress by straightforward shouting. But the awkward, disjointed relationship between the two lonely characters is sensitively portrayed, and the whole story is attentive to the small, subtle clues in the way two strangers might relate to one another. It’s a serious piece of work, perhaps taking itself just a little too seriously.

Thankfully Rhys Hughes is on hand to provide a welcome slice of levity in “The Talkative Star”, a flurry of terse microfictions about the sun and his oblique conversations with various characters including the author himself. This is, I fancy, the same sun who appears in Aesop’s fable, although he is more eccentric and whimsical here, a less gormless cousin to the Mighty Boosh’s moon.

Like Nina Allen’s writer, Gerard Houarner’s Vietnam Vet in “The Flea Market” finds redemption by rummaging through crates of other people’s stuff, in this case, a stack of pretend, cardboard records drawn by school children which have the power to induce hallucinations and visions of his dead family. It’s a unique conceit, and the story undoubtedly creates a heavy, drugged atmosphere. But there are some bits of stylistic trickery that grated on my nerves, in as much as Houarner tries to wedge large chunks of backstory into a single metaphor:

“The sense of dislocation was as bad as coming home from war nursing a wound, a habit, and the title ‘baby-killer’ from a rich kid in poor drag at the airport.”

Andrew Coulthard’s “Lussi Natt” is an overlong supernatural horror in which the by now familiar solitary writer (this time in the Swedish wilderness) is alternately seduced and terrorised by a trio of birch-tree sprites among other evil presences. I think I could see what the author was aiming at here, and all the necessary ingredients to make a genuinely frightening story were in the mix. The author tries repeatedly to escape his predicament, but apparently mundane circumstances frustrate him over and again. There’s always the possibility that his weird experiences are merely the side-effect of forgetting to medicate for his bipolar disorder. One could imagine this as an effective and subtle psychological horror movie, but there is no snap to the storytelling. Every phone call home is laboriously played out in full, and rather than building to a crescendo of unease, the plot meanders back and forth between apparently unrelated encounters with the evil spirits of the woods.

Underworld clichés abound again in Terry Grimwood’s “The Higgins Technique”, this time about the porn industry, and a desperate writer who tries to resurrect her flagging career by immersing herself in the dark world of rape fantasy porn, in order to write about it. The director is a sweaty, booze and cigarette soaked has-been, the male porn star is a vacuous puppet, and the money men are Eastern European and sinister. Of course the writer has her epiphany, where the hastily sketched backstory of her baby’s cot-death can be brought to closure. The story is almost saved by a disturbingly ambiguous ending – I wasn’t sure whether the protagonist was really going to survive to write her confession.

The story is told from several viewpoints, including that of the lonely, masturbating porn consumer, and I could see what slant Grimwood has taken on the “creativity in isolation” theme. All the characters are isolated from one another by an abusive industry, and all are struggling to create something: the director is still dreaming of being a real film-maker, the actress is trying to find a unmarketed niche to write herself into, even the porn addict is using his imagination. But the characters are for the most part so two-dimensional, and their motivations and hang-ups so off-the-peg that this potentially interesting take on the given theme doesn’t catch fire.

Then there is Alexander Zelenyj’s amusingly dreadful tale of sexual obsession that shouldn’t have been allowed to share the same binding as decent stories like Nina Allen’s “Bellony”. “Far Beneath Incomplete Constellations” is the grandiloquent tale of a university lecturer’s controlling, abusive sexual relationship with one of his female Japanese students. It’s a story that never uses one word when half a dozen will do, preferably Latinate and eldritch ones. Whenever the main character realises anything, he has “an epiphany”. There are absurdities such as “it had birthed anger in him” when something makes the protagonist angry.

The central motif, that of the protagonist riding his lover, who has transformed into a crimson (not red!) winged beast, as a metaphor for sex, reminded me of the animated sex scene in the movie “Anchorman”, when Ron Burgundy and his lover ride pink winged unicorns, and I found that reading the story was a lot less onerous when I imagined the protagonist’s dialogue read out in Burgundy’s voice. Later on my hunch was confirmed when I learned that lecturer’s office smelled of “rich mahogany”, which is of course, one of Burgundy’s least successful chat-up lines (“I have many leather-bound books and my apartment smells of rich mahogany.”)

Besides being at times laughable, the protagonist’s insane notion that his Japanese lover is inhuman, a lust-making shell designed to entrance him, is not seriously questioned anywhere in the story. The Japanese student is herself made too timid, pliable and inarticulate to effectively counter this violent dehumanizing idea. The story ends with the man riding an asteroid accompanied by one last injudicious metaphor: he fishes a drowned bluebird from a pond full of semen.

Despite editorial oversights such as “Far Beneath Incomplete Constellations”, a lot of care has gone into putting “Blind Swimmer” together. There’s a thought-provoking foreword by Joel Lane, who discusses withdrawal and engagement as two equally necessary modes for any writer, even one who professes to reject “the mainstream” (whatever that is). “How can this loneliness be shared and learned from without falsifying it?” he asks, concisely summing up the problem that seems to haunt many of the writer-protagonists in this collection.

“Radical and counter-cultural writers in the UK are branded irrelevant” he writes, and “any writer who does not buy into the ‘affirmative culture’ of forced optimism and competitive individualism is isolated by the indifference of the ‘market’ (a prescriptive myth shared by commercial publishers and booksellers).” I take issue with this: I don’t believe that there is a dominant ‘affirmative culture’ operating in the literary mainstream, and I can think of few recent successful novels that have celebrated competitive individualism or any kind of simplistic optimism. There is a danger of small-press and “genre” writers creating an insular victim culture: uncritically reading one another’s books and believing themselves an oppressed minority. To compare the small press market to “shanty towns…crowded with literary refugees” buys into this myth.

Lane wisely warns writers not to “withdraw into a narcissistic inner world of perpetual wound-licking”, but I can’t help wondering whether the term “weird fiction” panders to that very same adolescent instinct (“we’re different and special and nobody understands us”). Writers might fool themselves that they’re not getting published because they’re just too “out there” for the mainstream publishers, but it’s hardly a recipe for constructive self-criticism. “Nobody likes my writing but that’s just because they can’t handle it!” Possibly, but the more likely explanation is that it’s not good enough. And one doesn’t have to explore the mainstream canon of literature very far to discover that it has always been packed to the rafters with outcasts and misfits who never saw themselves as part of a separate, parallel tradition of “weird” literature. Joel Lane mentions Jean Genet, and there are of course dozens more canonized Great Authors who did not write “horror”, “fantasy” or “speculative” fiction, but who expressed horrifying, fantastical and speculative ideas that could invigorate and widen the scope of so-called “genre” fiction.

Blind Swimmer – An Eibonvale Press Anthology edited by David Rix. Eibonvale Press 2010. ISBN 978-0956214751 (paperback), 978-0956214744 (hardback).

Unpleasant Tales, Brendan Connell

Unpleasant Tales collects twenty-two short stories from Brendan Connell, who contributed "The Putrimaniac" (included here) to Dark Horizons 54 last year. Anyone who enjoyed that story will find much more to their taste here. For those who didn't have the pleasure, titles like "A Dish of Spouse", "The Skin Collector", "Mesh of Veins" and "The Cruelties of Him" give a good indication of what to expect, although every so often there's something like "The Nasty Truth About Dentists" to lighten the mood. On the whole, these stories live up to the book's title extremely well. "For an artist, all experiences are exquisite", claims the protagonist of "The Tongue", and this collection pushes that idea to its limit. The artists here are experimental to the fullest horrific extent of the word, though I hesitate to give examples; best discover them yourself for the complete effect. The selfishness of the artistic impulse, its lack of regard both for others and for one's own best interests, is here shown at its very worst.

There's not a story in here that wouldn't have been accepted for Dark Horizons in an instant, and taken alone each is rather brilliant. Reviewing the collection as a whole, a formula reveals itself: a character, usually male, is introduced, and then we discover his obsession – music, odour, body piercings, food, plants, tattoos, and so on – and learn about it in some detail, and by the end that obsession has overwhelmed him, usually with deadly consequences. Some stories break away from the formula, but I would recommend taking this collection a story at a time, rather than reading it all at once, to avoid that sense of repetition setting in. It's very well written, full of interesting words, and evidently well-researched throughout, given the level of detail. However, in a very literary book, typos can unfortunately be quite harmful to the overall effect, and there are quite a few here – and as in some other Eibonvale books they grow more frequent as the book draws on. Bobble for bauble and course for coarse stand out, as does "He fed her on a strict diet of deserts". In the end, though, far better to have been able to read this book, typos and all, than not to have read it at all.

Unpleasant Tales, Brendan Connell, Eibonvale, hb/pb, 284pp.