Without a kink in the line there’s no story to tell. The kinks are the story.
There is gridlock on the M40 and a banana skin on every pavement. Lovers are disturbed in bed and my father becomes a rain god. Complacency is mocked. Death hovers. Shit happens. How the messiness of life is translated into fiction is considered and no conclusions are reached. Why, anyway, setting out from A, am I so sure that B is where I want to get to?
Interruptions push back, disrupting the status quo or derailing progress. 99 Interruptions – a cross-genre exploration of interruptions in both life and literature, and of the relationship between the two – attempts to take them in its stride.
‘I can’t think of a wittier, more engaging, stylistically audacious, attentive and generous writer working in the English language right now.’ – Nicholas Lezard in the Guardian on An Overcoat: Scenes from the Afterlife of H.B. by Jack Robinson, a pen name of Charles Boyle
Person from Porlock rings just as you get into the scented bath; the kids – or the husband – arrive home early, prompting a panicky re-trousering; the Pill has been forgotten, and other Vatican-approved measures are called for; shit happens; and then, one day, it’s all over. “Sometimes the interrupter is an Amazon delivery guy and sometimes it’s Azrael, the angel of death.” For Charles Boyle, interruption is the essence of both life and narrative fiction. Somewhere in the background, a slight figure who may be E. M. Forster is wringing his hands apologetically and saying, “Oh, dear me, yes, it must have a story”; and a story requires a complication. As Boyle says, “The kinks are the story”.
In ninety-nine brief meditations, the artist formerly known as Jack Robinson (one of Boyle’s pseudonyms) offers a wearily realistic view of a world in which God laughs all the time because he’s heard our plans. His father drifts in and out of the story, clearly not well and clearly not always getting the picture. But as Boyle acknowledges, even if for the average Joe or Josephine there is nothing more galling than going downstairs dripping fragrant suds to find that the parcel is for number twenty-two, for the creative artist interruption may be a gift. We wouldn’t still be reading “Kubla Khan” if Coleridge hadn’t been able to put “A Fragment” after it. The point of any dream is the point at which you waken.
Stevie Smith, as ever, says it best: “I am hungry to be interrupted / For ever and ever Amen / O Person from Porlock come quickly / And bring my thoughts to an end”. The upper-case Interruption is the one when it is Azrael and not Amazon. Boyle’s slim book is a little missal of mortality, a reminder that death is not just a line break but Fin. There’s a lot of beta-male life coaching and self-deprecating philosophy around at the moment; what makes Boyle’s different is that the medium is the message. This is a literary book about writing and the imagination, not just about the disruptions and the disappointments that litter our way. And note – interruption #67 – that they don’t all come with a dramatic knock:
Not all interruptions are sudden. Like illnesses, or “economic modernisation”, some are so gradual that for a while I’m not aware they... – Brian Morton
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/99-interruptions-charles-boyle-book-review-brian-morton/
At just fifty-three pages, one of the great, ironic pleasures of 99 Interruptions is that it can be read uninterrupted. Presented as a numbered list in a book without numbered pages, these ninety-nine interruptions might be mini chapters of a literary memoir or micro-fiction, or diary entries, maxims, aphorisms, edited highlights from the author’s notebook. Each one feels instinctual, like it might have been penned on a train or waiting for a bus. They are often simultaneously pithy and profound. Interruption 92 reads, “Did you sleep well? I would have done, if it hadn’t been for the foxes mating in the back yard, a pain in my gut and a nagging suspicion at 3 am that I have wasted my life.” Within these musings, seemingly fleeting thoughts, all of life resides, from the quotidian to the existential.
For many years, Charles Boyle has been a leading figure in the field of short, experimental fiction. He began his own press, CB editions, initially to distribute his own poetry but soon expanded to publish titles by distinguished US short fiction authors such as David Markson, Diane Williams, and Todd McEwen, alongside emerging homegrown talent. CB editions is one of the leading UK small presses, embracing modernism and brevity. In 99 Interruptions Boyle considers the journey his career has taken. “And look what I’ve become—a writer? More a belletrist.” 99 Interruptions is evidence of this distinction. He is more concerned with the effect his prose has on a reader than the form it takes. Boyle’s hybrid writing follows no writerly shape or genre trope, allowing his rich, inventive prose, blessed with a poet’s ear, to become the work.
99 Interruptions proposes that life can be understood as a series of necessary interruptions, because, as all storytellers know, “without a kink in the line there’s no story to tell. The kinks are the story.” These kinks may be minor interruptions: the arrival of an Amazon delivery driver, a crashed website or a thunderstorm—“everything that conspires to get in the way of plain sailing from A to B.” Or they might gently slide into focus, “Like illnesses, or ‘economic modernisation’, some are so gradual that for a while I’m not aware they are happening.” One of Boyle’s most significant personal interruptions was the death of his father when he was very young. His father appears repeatedly, in more than a dozen of the ninety-nine interruptions, often as a spectre, a missing companion, dropping in on the author from time to time. In Interruption 9, he joins Boyle in a cafe where it has just started to rain. “He sits down at my table and asks what kind of car I’m driving these days and when I tell him I don’t have a car he looks disappointed. My father liked his cars; his last one was an olive-green Riley. He’s been dead for 65 years. He’s a rain god now.” Throughout 99 Interruptions, one continuing interruption goes unmentioned but fills the pages: grief.
Memories of childhood and his father are scattered throughout, along with writers and books, who are themselves a vital influence and presence in Boyle’s life. Throughout his career, Boyle has placed literary figures and their books inside his own. He has fictionalized Stendhal, ordered a polemic around Robinson Crusoe, written books about books. Other writer’s interruptions matter just as much as his own. Like when Elizabeth Bowen witnessed a suicide whilst in a Manhattan skyscraper. “Of course she didn’t know, in the moment of seeing: a rapid shadow, an interruption of the light through the window.” Sometimes, fictional characters speak to him. “Sorry to interrupt, says Billie. She’s in a novel I’m reading and she’s not really sorry, she can’t help herself.” Paula Fox, Gilbert Adair, Laurence Sterne all feature along the way, interrupting Boyle’s own interruptions. Other interrupters come in the form of photographs and footnotes. And Boyle himself, at times, feels like an interruption. “There aren’t many social situations in which I don’t feel like an interloper, interrupting a party that was proceeding quite happily until I turned up.”
There is a kinetic energy between Boyle’s interruptions, a ping-pong effect, switching from modern domestic mundanity—“Clackety-clack, clakety-clack, and then lightning strikes or the earth opens up or my credit card is blocked or I fall in love or it’s Monday and the museum is closed”—to comic admittance: “I stroke my life, feed it, smooth down the rough bits and take it for walks. I story it. Sometimes it bites back.” This movement provides 99 Interruptions with a playful, jostling tone that refuses to settle; like a can-can of kicking legs, the effect is joyous rather than dizzying.
As a slim, hybrid collection of thoughts, memories, wisdom, 99 Interruptions may feel slight in the hand but it sits heavily in the heart. Boyle is able to resurrect his father in a way only writers can, allowing him to convey the strange, missing life of his father in unsentimental yet deeply affecting ways. “As I concentrate on the smell of my father’s aftershave it fades to nothing,” he says, “like the dot on a cathode-ray TV screen faded to nothing when you switched it off. It was saying: Please don’t go yet, keep me company, watch me disappear first. So I did.” And as Boyle knows all too well, as readers, we will sit and watch it disappear too, while waiting for our next interruption. - Simon Lowe
https://www.full-stop.net/2022/10/31/reviews/simon-lowe/99-interruptions-charles-boyle/
I have read more quote-unquote serious books and certainly longer and darker ones this year, but such books hog accolades, and where sheer readerly pleasure is concerned nothing published in 2022 has topped Charles Boyle’s 99 Interruptions, a book so brief it possesses no page numbers, each ‘interruption’ comprising its own section and limited to a few hundred words at most. Some of these are aphoristic, others personal in nature, many of them both. ‘Interruptions’, Boyle writes, ‘are gentle or not-so-gentle reminders that we have no God-given right to be here at all.’ I kept thinking, reading it, that this is what philosophy would be if contemporary philosophy were any good to read. His father enters the book, carried by the grace of his son’s brusquely elegant prose: ‘He sits down at my table and asks what kind of car I’m driving these days and when I tell him I don’t have a car he looks disappointed. My father liked his cars; his last was an olive-green Riley. He’s been dead for 65 years. He’s a rain god now.’ I liked this so much I had to close the book for a while. ‘I tell him we can’t smoke in here; we can smoke at the tables outside but it’s raining, so we’re just going to have to wait. He looks at me as if I am a complete stranger. After this long we are strangers’.
Underlying any extended meditation on the fragmentary, of course, exists the fantasy of wholeness, of the continuous and unbroken line, of chronology unfurled and time transformed into eternity. The tension between this fantasy and the interruptive nature of reality forms one of the book’s greatest pleasures. ‘I’m much older than my father ever was but of course now that we’re sitting together I’m still a child.’ In the meantime, writing, art, rain, and what Boyle quotes Louis MacNeice as calling ‘the drunkenness of things being various’. He confesses: ‘In the early years after I stopped writing poems a few lines slipped through, as if at the doorway the man I used to be had turned and begun to say something more before leaving but then thought better of it.’ The rain ceases. A quiet book and one which increases the overall measure of quiet in the world of the reader, like a hot shower on a cold day. Just what I needed this year. - Nathan Knapp
http://review31.co.uk/essay/view/114/review-31's-books-of-the-year
1. I sit down to write a review of Charles Boyle’s 99 Interruptions, but I no sooner put finger to keyboard than I urgently need the right word to describe the book’s appealing smallness. Is it a duodecimo or a sextodecimo, I wonder. I count the leaves, check the binding, trawl the internet. This is an out-of-date question, I realise eventually, and not really an interesting question anyway.
2. To any given task the potential interruptions are infinite, but they do seem to fall into two categories: interruptions with an external source (family members, a cat fight in the back garden, a caller from Porlock) and interruptions with an internal source (useless questions about book format, random alerts from some malfunctioning mental appointments calendar, concerns about the underlying cause of various pains, the endless rephrasing of an imperfect conversation). Not that I really think there is a distinction between an internal and an external, I don’t believe in either after all, but it helps to halve infinity sometimes.
3. I will just interrupt the practical demands of my life to read this book, I thought, but the practical demands of my life, so to call them and so to call it, repeatedly interrupt my reading, even though the book is short. Two sets of interruptions grapple with each other over my attention. There are perhaps only interruptions (and interruptions to the interruptions).
4. Sometimes the interruptions come even before whatever it is that they interrupt, in which case they are perhaps not interruptions to that activity but interruptions to the preconditions of that activity, to the preparations that are I suppose themselves some sort of activity but not identifiable as any activity in particular. Is most of my life these days lived in this state of velleity?
5. The first time I sat down to read read this book, 99 Interruptions, I was interrupted by finding a surprising quotation on the first page I came to, and then by finding that I had to check the source and context of that quotation.
6. Without interruptions there is no story, Boyle shows. The interruptions are the story. An interruption disrupts the natural tendency to oversimplification (which is indistinguishable from nonexistence).
7. An interruption is the assertion of the particular against the pull of the general and the abstract. It is the prime quality of fiction.
8. An interruption breaks a continuum and causes two realities to mingle. I frequently find this irritating but at least my irritation is real irritation.
9. Is the fragment the only authentic contemporary literary form?
10. Boyle remarks that, although most fiction is written in the past tense, a reader or critic invariably relates the narrative as happening in the present, “as if everything … is still happening and there’s no end in sight.” I hadn’t thought about this before, and thinking about it now is interrupting my progress through the book.
11. Fiction interrupts time by the introduction of a completely other thread of time, allowing the reader to jump between the two as inclination or interruption dictates. Before it is anything else, fiction is a sin against time, an interruption or eruption.
12. In most situations I tend to feel that my presence is an interruption of whatever would otherwise be the case. This is probably not a very healthy way to think, but I cannot find a way in which it is not true.
13. I am actually writing a review, if you can call it that, but I am interrupted by that little repeated stifled sound coming from the headphones that S is wearing so that I am not interrupted by the music she is listening to. I won’t interrupt what she is busy doing over there on account of this; it is about time I accepted that the membrane between writing and real life (so to call it) is always entirely permeable. No wonder I never get anything done.
14. Would it be possible to welcome every interruption into the work itself? To create a work entirely of interruptions? (Like Boyle’s!)
15. Be that as it may (does this construction even make sense?), the work is ultimately interrupted by its deadline.
https://volumebooks.online/p/99-interruptions
‘This is the business. From the start, you realise that you are in the presence of a sharp, subversive and observant intelligence, a writer with an ear for a story and the easy narrative manner of someone who – it comes as an instant relief to notice this – isn’t going to bore you once.’– Nicholas Lezard, Guardian
‘The effect of Boyle’s poetry is exhilarating. He is happy to join literary tradition, to be guided by the penetrating curiosity of Stendhal and then leap off on his own thought tangent.’– Gillian Allnutt, Observer
Charles Boyle, Paleface. Faber and Faber, 1996
‘Deceptively simple-looking poems, almost throwaway at times, but full of wit and insight into the way we live now, our tribal customs and evasions.’– William Scammell, Independent on Sunday
‘Howlingly funny … Boyle is a fine poet of the city – the solitary, broken-biscuit aspect of it – and of its rituals.’– Sean O’Brien, Sunday Times
‘Boyle’s details resonate with historical and social awareness: his elegant, atmospheric concision achieves the effect of a radically compressed short story.’– Simon Carnell, Times Literary Supplement
‘Brilliant … Boyle’s disaffection – middle-class, middle-aged, in a listless millennial culture – is rendered in a perversely attentive and humorous fashion, which itself almost compensates for the anomie and despair.’– Robert Potts, Guardian
Charles Boyle, The Other Jack. CB Editions,
2021
A memoir about books, mostly – and bonfires, clichés, dystopias, failure, happiness, jokes, justice, privilege, publishing, rejection, self-loathing, shoplifting and umbrellas – by an author who has published poetry, fiction and non-fiction under his own name and pen names.
... and bonfires, clichés, dystopias, failure, happiness, jokes, justice, privilege, publishing, rejection, self-loathing, shoplifting and umbrellas.
My granny used to say, when she saw me getting teary over a film we were watching on TV, ‘It’s only a story.’ When Robyn’s bike was stolen and I offered sympathy, she responded, ‘It’s only money.’ A woman once said to me, grinning from ear to ear, ‘It’s only sex.’ To someone despairing of the judges’ decision, I want to say, ‘It’s only a book.’ But it is never only anything.
Writer and reader meet in cafés to talk about books – that’s the plot. There are arguments, spilt coffee, deaths both in life and in fiction, and rain and laughter.
‘It’s like being in the company of a beloved friend who’s had a bit too much to drink (maybe) and wants to share a lot of nonsense which, perhaps, is not so nonsensical as it seems ... This is a gem.’ – John Sandoe Bookshop
‘Whatever a novel is, I feel this is what I want a novel now to be.’ – Jane Feaver
‘“The world is not going to be changed by a chat about books.” The protagonists of The Other Jack, writer and reader, are well aware of it, but that doesn't stop them from doing what they do. They meet in cafes to talk about books. […] These conversations are what most writers and readers actually write and read for.
‘The writer, despite identifying as Charles Boyle, comes out to his reader as Jack (“I used Jack as time off, a holiday from being me”), but who is he? [...] Does he smoke too much and laugh easily? Do his notebooks have blank pages at the end? Is he “as fickle as any author” in his reading habits, which include skipping to the last pages when browsing in bookshops? Is he the one […] for whom “there are times when all writing . . . is about sex”? They keep turning up, each with interesting things to say, and the more they talk, the more you want them to carry on: to tell you about Stendhal and Pessoa, punctuation and criticism, fonts and endings – all those things that have long been on your mind.
‘The list includes pen names: “user names for different accounts for which you then forget the passwords”. Are they designed to conceal or reveal something about the author? Only the bearer of one can tell. You might confuse Charles Boyle with Jack Robinson or think them completely different people – it’s your choice. Still, whichever of them is writing here deserves to be read on his own terms. So what if “writing and reading take place in a culture of rainy days and diminished expectations”? So what if “we are interested in literature only when a writer trips on a banana skin. Or maybe wins a prize”? This book is straightforward about its subject: “it’s a book about what we talk about when we talk about books”. Like chats about books, it’s not going to change the world – unless your world is made of books, in which case this is your material.’ – Anna Aslanyan, Review 31 Books of the Year
‘A wry and mischievous collection of Charles Boyle’s musings on books, reading, writing and publishing. I read it on holiday and am possibly the only person ever to have read Charles Boyle outside Boyle Sports in Boyle, County Roscommon.’ – Rónán Hession, Books of the Year, Lunate
‘I can’t think of a wittier, more engaging, stylistically audacious, attentive and generous writer working in the English language right now.’ – Nicholas Lezard in the Guardian on Jack Robinson, a pen name of Charles Boyle
‘The book presents as a wash of short, wide-ranging passages on books, writing, publishing and reading, lightly written and deeply thoughtful, with a wonderful index of literary concerns. At the beginning of the book, Robyn has somehow identified Charles as the author, under his pseudonym Jack Robinson, of some of her favourite books, books that I incidentally also have enjoyed, and Charles’s relationship to this Jack, and his long history as a writer and as the germ and motor of CB editions, one of the smallest and best publishers currently operating in Britain, is seamlessly conjoined both with his history as a reader and lover of books and with what we could call, for want of a better term, his social conscience. Charles seems to have an authenticity, despite or because of his duplicities, that I fear I will never attain, I think as I wait for him to arrive […]’ – Thomas Koed, Volume
“‘The characters in this book are fictional and bear no relation to actual persons, living or dead.’ These disclaimers are there, I assume, in case of libel actions, but I’ve always believed they are part of the fiction.”
I have met Charles Boyle on a handful of occasions at book events. The first time was a gathering linked to a literary prize I was helping judge and for which one of his novels had been submitted, albeit under a pseudonym. The prize was to reward the publisher as well as the author. In this case, Boyle was both.
“In 2007 I published four books under an imprint I made up on a whim and two of them were by me. I planned to take copies of the books into local bookshops and humbly suggest they might like to stock them … In a bookseller’s book, self-published authors are shady characters. They can come across as a little desperate – with reason, but it’s not a good look. So, Jack Robinson.”
My impression of this creator of CB editions – which publishes, among other fine authors, himself and Will Eaves (The Absent Therapist, Broken Consort, Murmur) – was gleaned not so much from our brief conversations but from the esteem in which he is obviously held by those who know him better. I detected no artifice in his public persona but rather a desire to remain in the background. He appeared more embarrassed than anything when presented with a special recognition award.
As part of my coverage of the prize I invited Boyle to write this guest post in which he indicated his intent to wind down his publishing activity. As a reader, I am pleased it does not yet appear to have happened, not least because this latest book by him is an absolute gem.
The Other Jack offers a window into the author’s thoughts on a wide variety of literature, including literary history, habits and tropes. It is framed around conversations with a young woman, Robyn, who the narrator meets in coffee shops. The reader may assume it is autobiographical, although if Robyn exists she too has a pseudonym.
“Exposing the artificiality of conventions involves even more artifice than was originally required”
The book is about: books, publishing, readers, writers, class, prejudice, rivalries, and what the author describes as poshlust. There are regular mentions of Stendhal, an ‘obsession’ that the narrator admits to and, in certain ways, appears to learn from personally. Impressions gleaned of Boyle are of a fierce intellect but self-deprecating demeanour. His writing oozes wit and intelligence while never appearing clever for the sake of it.
We learn that the author grew up in Yorkshire, boarded at an all boys school – although the only further abuse mentioned of his time there was being beaten for tardiness – and then went up to Cambridge.
“I read Dostoevsky and a whole shelf of fat black Penguin Classics in translation when I was at Cambridge, a period in my life I have few fond memories of. Very long books are often read by people at times when they were unhappy and perhaps lonely.”
Now living in London, this straight, white man is searingly aware of the tribe he fits into – supposedly well-educated Guardian readers who like to grumble when their views are not more widely agreed with. And yet, this book proves that Boyle thinks more deeply and possesses an understanding of alternative views, something that can appear absent among his cohorts. Although about him, this book is as much a take-down of his ilk as about the literati he could claim a valid place with. He offers nuggets of rebellion against what may be expected by ‘serious’ readers.
“In bookshops I often read last pages. I take browsing seriously. In life you can’t know how it’s going to end but in books you can, and I’ve never seen any reason not to … skipping to the end before the author is expecting me there – getting the ending out of the way – protects me against anticlimax. Endings so often disappoint.”
The book is structured in bite sized musings that circle and segue effortlessly. There are reflections on: dead authors, death, pretentious posturing, sticking pins in those who readers are suddenly encouraged to condemn.
On getting published, Boyle writes:
“Is serial rejection a calculated initiation rite? A way of culling down to the ones who just won’t go away?”
On banning books, he points out the double standards and conceits.
“The trial of Madame Bovary for obscenity in 1857 was an attempt not to ban its publication – photo studios and shops selling pornography were flourishing in Paris at the time – but to prevent women from reading.”
A century later, in the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover for obscenity, the jury were told:
“You, sir, may be trusted with this book, but heaven forfend that it should be read by women and the working classes.”
I have quoted widely here yet have barely skimmed the surface of the many subjects brought under the author’s piercing lens – and wryly shared. Robyn requests that he mention umbrellas less frequently yet each inclusion added merit to the discourse, as was the case for each topic breached.
A book about books by a writer who writes with elan and repartee. A joy of a read for readers who enjoy not just stories but what is behind them. - Jackie Law
https://neverimitate.wordpress.com/2022/02/02/book-review-the-other-jack/
Charles Boyle is a modern man of letters, editor, publisher, typesetter, designer and author. He is one of our leading writers of crossover fiction that slides into factual writing like Geoff Dyer and Nicholas Royle.
He has adopted different personalities for his writing as Jennie Walker and Jack Robinson. As a self-published writer he avoided identifying with his identity. Recently, he has republished Leila Berg’s wonderful memoir Flickerbook, a collection of glimpses of life in the North.
The Flickerbook technique of glimpses of other places and times is evident in The Other Jack. Charles Boyle’s latest book is written under his own name but there are elements of the elusive here; his coffee companion Robyn is briefly sketched out. She acts as a humanising foil, preventing him from heading into the clouds of the literary world:
“All writers have been rejected by a publisher at some point. And it’s hard. However sympathetically the rejection is expressed, you can’t help but take it personally. Harder than it is for the beggars on the street? Robyn asks. Who watch people hurrying by and not deliberately making eye contact.”
It is a dérive in a coffee shop.
Another writer Charles Boyle has published is David Markson of This Is Not a Novel and The Other Jack shares many of its features, most of all the deadpan humour and the jump cuts that are more usual in film. If the paragraphing is brilliant, so are the phrases and the sentences; “we are both certifiably middle class,” a neat ambiguity; “books can also arrive too early or too late,” “talk is everyday magic; “what would it take for me to be out of character?”; and “cooking is literary in a way that plumbing is not.” Each phrase leads into wider reflections and prompts and questions from Robyn. Charles Boyle is a master of the epigrammatic form.
This is a book of many directions and many twists and turns through the mind of Charles Boyle. The character that emerges is tolerant with a droll sense of humour, and a willingness to add a counterpoint to every point. Throughout his bookishness is undercut by tiny events or non-events from the “real” world:
“A woman at an outside table is reading a book, so lost to the world that she doesn’t even register how her body shifts in her chair to accommodate a stiffness in her elbow.”
Any Cop?: Yes, a book that deserves coffee shops of readers for its quiet subtlety. If you like the works of Geoff Dyer, Cees Nooteboom, and Nicholas Royle’s White Spines, you will enjoy this and read it again and again and again for its wisdom. - Richard Clegg
I take a seat at an outside table at this small café. I am a little early. I have bought myself a coffee to drink while I am waiting for Charles Boyle, whose book The Other Jack I have just finished reading. The book takes place, if that is the right way to put it, almost entirely at or in a series of cafés, where Charles meets, in the present tense, a young woman, Robyn, who may or may not exist and may or may not be called Robyn, to discuss all manner of things to do with books, in particular the relationship between a reader, such as Robyn (who insists she is not a writer), and an author, such as Charles (who, as with all good writers, is really more of a reader). Planning to meet Charles in a café seems to me therefore quite appropriate, as does the lingering uncertainty about how much of what I am writing is fiction and how much is true, wherever we might mean by that. This sort of uncertainty is very playfully handled in The Other Jack, both with regard to the narrative, so to call it, of the book itself and with regard to the more general, indeed universal, ‘problem’, so to call it, of all literature’s relationship to ‘reality’, a relationship that is always reciprocal, if often rather one-sided, and therefore always changing, even if a text itself does not change. Charles doesn’t make this ‘problem’, or any of the other ‘problems’ of literature any less insoluble, but rather reassures us that these so-called ‘problems’ are rather the reason for literature, literature’s motive force, if you like. In the book, which is largely about why books are written and otherwise about why they are read, Charles tells Robyn that he is thinking of writing a book about the conversations they are having. “When I say it’s a book about what we talk about when we talk about books, and then list a random number of subjects, some more obviously book-related than others, I mean that it’s about the talking as much as about what’s being talked about, so about misunderstandings, silences, evasions, forgetfulness, differences that we hope will be reconcilable ones but may not be and sudden unaccountable enthusiasms. Even if much of the time I am talking to myself.” The book presents as a wash of short wide-ranging passages on books, writing, publishing and reading, lightly written and deeply thoughtful, with a wonderful index of literary concerns. At the beginning of the book, Robyn has somehow identified Charles as the author, under his pseudonym Jack Robinson, of some of her favourite books, books that I incidentally also have enjoyed, and Charles’s relationship to this Jack, and his long history as a writer and as the germ and motor of CB Editions, one of the smallest and best publishers currently operating in Britain, is seamlessly conjoined both with his history as a reader and lover of books and with what we could call, for want of a better term, his social conscience. Charles seems to have an authenticity, despite or because of his duplicities, that I fear I will never attain, I think as I wait for him to arrive. All I have ever done is imitate and appropriate — perhaps all that all writers ever do is imitate and appropriate whether they know this or not — and anything that may have been mistaken by anyone for originality on my part has merely been the measure of the failures and shortcomings in my imitation and appropriation. It is little wonder then, as I have got better at writing — if indeed I have got better at writing — that I have appeared less and less original, and appearances, after all, are the measure of originality, I suppose. Perhaps originality isn’t the thing. On the basis of the conversations between Charles and Robyn in The Other Jack, I was looking forward to talking with Charles Boyle, but there is, I suppose, an unspoken limit on how long I can sit at this café waiting for him to turn up and it is hard to know how long I should continue to do so after it has become nothing less than certain that he isn’t going to appear. The mistake, I’m sure, must be mine. Also, it is beginning to rain, the tables inside are all full, and as I failed to mention arriving with an umbrella it would be inappropriate to produce one now when I need it (Chekhov’s gun ought to work backwards, too). I am half way home when I realise I have left my copy of The Other Jack on the café table. No-one came running after me with it as at the start of the book Robyn came running after Charles with the book he had left on his table. To continue writing would involve making stuff up. - https://volumebooks.online/p/the-other-jack
2001. Carcanet, 2021
The acclaimed poet Christopher Reid distils Charles Boyle's six books of poems into The Disguise: Poems 1977-2001, recovering a notable one-time poet, now known as a publisher and writer of fiction and non-fiction, from poetic neglect. Charles Boyle established a reputation as a sharp, wry, disabused observer of social mores. Paleface, published by Faber, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, and The Age of Cardboard and String, also from Faber, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Award. But in 2001 the well ran dry. Since the first year of the twenty-first century he has not put poetic pen to paper even once. The poems remain vital and fascinating, but they have about them also a kind of archaic cast: here we find the quintessential white male Englishness from the late twentieth century on display as if in a museum. Here too is the excitement of abroad (North Africa especially), and there are ghosts, absences, exile, and evasions: in hindsight, these poems offer clues to their own disappearance after thirty notable years spent partly in the sun.
'Boyle the prose writer may be indispensable, but he couldn't have done it without the poems of this welcome Selected behind him.' - David Wheatley, The Guardian
'This is the business. From the start, you realise that you are in the presence of a sharp, subversive and observant intelligence, a writer with an ear for a story and the easy narrative manner of someone who - it comes as an instant relief to notice this - isn't going to bore you once.' - Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian
Here is one I prepared earlier: a selection of poems written by me between the early 1970s and 2000 and chosen by Christopher Reid, who is operating here almost as my literary executor. Or executioner.
The haircuts! The clothes! The shoes! There were cringes and blushes as some of these poems rose to the surface, but that’s only natural. The times were different. (Not a line to be used as an excuse, ever.) A number of the poems are set abroad; now, the poems themselves can feel like a foreign country. Who was this person? Me. Not all the features I recognise are ones I have to be happy with. It’s like looking at my knees.
The cover is good. And some of the later poems are not half bad. There was development, of a kind. I grew up, a bit. And then, after 30 years of poetry, I stopped. I write briefly about this in a note at the end of the book, so to say more here would be a spoiler. I do sometimes wonder whether if I tripped on the pavement and banged my head on a kerbstone, I might start writing poems again (in Latin?), but I’m not going to deliberately start banging my head.
Around 160 pages feels right. Pick-’n’-mix. Poems are fugitive and their natural habitat is the edgelands, jammed up against prose and artwork and other poems in little magazines – in the reading of poems, nothing really compares to stumbling upon a new truffle, often by a writer I’ve never heard of, in a fly-by-night journal. But they do crave one another’s company. If they’re lucky, a merciful publisher gathers them for shelter in a collection, and then the poet gets restless and starts wandering out to the edgelands again. A Selected may come when the single books start getting out of hand; it’s a form of stock control. Because by temperament I’m a chucker-out rather than a hoarder there will not, I promise you, be a Collected.
Michael Schmidt published the first four collections from which this book is selected, and then I sallied off to Faber for the last two books. Those who have had the good fortune to be edited by Christopher Reid, as I was at Faber, know that there is no more conscientious, acute and generous editor in the business. I am deeply grateful to Michael, and Christopher, and Will Eaves, who combined to cajole me into this. For any ridiculous haircuts that remain in the text, I alone am responsible.
https://carcanetblog.blogspot.com/2021/02/charles-boyle-disguise.html
Charles Doyle, The Manet Girl, Salt, 2013
The stories in The Manet Girl explore sexual relations – from both male and female points of view – in the present, but sometimes with a backdrop of several decades. Stories of desire and confusion – other men and other women – sit alongside stories of art – galleries, studios, allusions to painters – which gets in the way as least as often as it illuminates. Choices are made, in the knowledge that distractions may be the most important things of all.
Some of the tightest, cleanest writing I have seen in a long time ... This is a little marvel of a novella. It’s funny, clever, illuminating, deeply kind-hearted, and doesn’t outstay its welcome. It’s not self-indulgent: things happen in it, surprising things, like in an old-fashioned novel, yet it’s perfectly contemporary; and every word has been chosen with subtle care. - Nicholas Lezard
Ingeniously observed, clever, elliptical and funny. It’s like the best moments from a novel – minus the padding. - Geoff Dyer on Days and Nights in W12
Much cooler and funnier than Sebald’s baroque and melancholy meditations on place, Days and Nights in W12 lies somewhere between Walter Benjamin’s musings on Paris and Berlin and the wonderfully crazy mini-monologues that make up Thomas Bernhard’s The Voice Imitator. There is nothing else like it in English. - Gabriel Josipovici
Writing as Jennie Walker:
Jennie Walker, 24 for 3. Bloomsbury, 2008
'Very original ... I loved it' - Mick Jagger
'This is a little marvel ... funny, clever, illuminating, deeply kind-hearted' - Nicholas Lezard, Guardian
'A lovely little novel ... written with beguiling simplicity' - Lionel Shriver, Daily Telegraph
A perfectly-crafted, funny and moving masterpiece about love, family, passion and whether or not one should always play by the rules.
Friday: as a Test match between England and India begins, a woman's attention is torn between her husband's insistence on explaining the rules of cricket, her lover's preference for mystery, and the worrying disappearance of her sixteen-year-old stepson.
By Tuesday night the outcome of the match will become clear - but whatever happens, the lives of the players will be changed forever.
Writing as Jack Robinson:
Jack Robinson, Blush [images Natalia Zagórska-
Thomas]. CB Editions, 2018
A chink, a gap, a little slippage between me and the other me, the one I’m performing – where the blush gets in.
A blush is a gulp, a glitch, a stammer, a flutter, a flinch. A blush is hot. A blush is an index of confusion. A blush, acording to Darwin, is ‘the most peculiar and the most human of all expressions’. A blush says something and it speaks true. And as with many common species of songbird and butterfly, its numbers are in decline.
Texts by Jack Robinson – with citations from a range of fiction and non-fiction – and colour photographs by Natalia Zagórska-Thomas – including many of her own artwork – investigate the cultural and social history of the blush from the late 18th century to the present day.
‘Unlike conventionally analytic studies that falter when they reach the 20th century, Blush’s visual and textual explorations quietly pledge to beguile, belie, play around with, and generally embody the contradictory shamefulness and shamelessness bound up in a modern-day hot red cheek. [...]
‘This is as much formally experimental art and social commentary as it is cultural criticism; through their ‘misunderstandings’, the slippery meanings of Zagórska-Thomas’s images and Robinson’s text belie the slippery contradictions of the blush with its simultaneous modesty and desire, voluntariness and involuntariness, affect and effect, innocence and guilt. [...]
‘[Blush] isn’t totally coherent, but neither does it claim stylistically to be so; perhaps, more importantly, its lack of coherence expresses the point it tries to make: if “adolescence is Early Modern”, then a more contemporary time, “after adolescence”, is one where “we do have some idea, but we are lost, basically”. “Sallying” together with this text is a picture of a very nice-looking white bag, open, with a rich pink interior, unattended on a toilet floor.’ – Will Forrester, Review 31 (full review here)
‘In Blush, Jack Robinson (one of the pseudonyms of Charles Boyle, publisher of CB editions), provides a subtle and insightful phenomenology and social history of blushing alongside witty and equally subtle and insightful images by Natalia Zagórska-Thomas, each and both displaying the virtue of lightness that lends their work a polyvalent concision that enables it to keep generating meaning for a considerable time after the reading/viewing has been ostensibly completed. – Thomas Koed, Volume
‘An elegant, intelligent and beautifully illustrated essay about that exclusively human trait, blushing.’ – David Collard, Review 31 Best Books of 2018
‘If Blush teaches us anything, it’s that kitsch should not be underestimated. Cuteness can sicken an audience if it’s allowed to splash too freely in its own excesses. Robinson’s mild-mannered tone curdles in the presence of Zagórska-Thomas’s unsettling photographs, which seem intent on excavating the obscenities that roil under any dainty, lacquered surface. In this sense, the book constantly points to blushing’s abiding context, that of the tactile and libidinous body. One image shows long maroon hairs sprouting from a toothbrush; another features a white briefcase that has split open to reveal a lewdly magenta interior. These images suggest that fascination with the blush is perverse. Its “impure and imprecise” emotions vibrate, magnetized, between the poles of sex and willful denial.’ – Zoë Hu, The Believer
Jack Robinson, An Overcoat: Scenes from the
Afterlife of H.B. CB Editions, 2017
In love, thwarted, ridiculous – the wind has changed direction and he is stuck here for ever.
In June 1819 Henri Beyle (aka Stendhal) is rejected by the woman he loves. But quitting is not an option, and Beyle finds himself stranded in an afterlife populated by tourists, shoplifters, characters in novels he hasn’t yet written and impostors who have stolen his pseudonyms.
Footnoting a host of other writers, An Overcoat is an obsessional play upon the life and work of one of the founders of the modern novel.
‘I read it with an idiot grin, delighted by every sentence, each of which has been constructed with remarkable care, not just for its own sound and plausibility, but to reflect the daily realities of life ... I can’t think of a wittier, more engaging, stylistically audacious, attentive and generous writer working in the English language right now.’ – Nicholas Lezard, Guardian (full review here)
‘The most innovative, intelligent, vertiginous novel to appear in years.’ – Frances Wilson, Times Literary Supplement
‘... its delightful hop, skip and a jump along that unstable line that separates fact from fiction ... Neither-one-thing-nor-the-other of the year.’ – Jonathan Gibbs, Books of the Year 2017
‘An exquisite collection of red herrings caught in a very loosely knotted net by a well-known escapologist. They are prompted by reflections on the life and afterlives of Henri Beyle, aka Stendhal ...’ – John Sandoe Books
‘This is a very European book and for that alone it ought to be banned’ – Marius Kociejowski
We had the recent post* about the after-dinner cigar, and one from a short while back on the connections between or among Brookner, Sebald and Stendhal, and yesterday I enormously enjoyed reading a text** by Jack Robinson (Charles Boyle) from CB Editions, An Overcoat: Scenes from the Afterlife of H. B.,*** which I discovered by chance in the Guardian Review.
The text is powered by its footnotes - and what pleasure there is in finding on pp. 4-5 a quotation from Brookner's 1980 TLS review of a Stendhal biography, collected in Soundings: 'Anita Brookner', says Robinson, '...approves [Beyle's] furious attempts "to measure up to the rules of the game, even when [my [i.e. Robinson's] italics] there was no game being played".'****
Though Brookner isn't directly referenced again, the italicised line is mentioned twice more, on p. 81 and p. 128.
The other echoes are numerous.
Beyle, while watching a mosquito bite on his ankle, remembering that it is always better to be in love than not in love - even if there is no chance, ever, of that love being reciprocated (p. 61)
made me think of Stendhal-fan Sturgis in Strangers, wishing that he were in love:
Only in that climate of urgency could he make decisions. (Ch. 15)
There are other lines that might be applied to Brookner:
More than a spy, Beyle is a double agent, working for both sides (... Classicism/Romanticism, art/life), and he knows it's pointless to deny it. (p. 84)
and:
Beyle asks if I've read Flaubert's letter to Louise Colet in which he spoke of writing 'a book about nothing, a book ... held aloft by the internal force of its style' (p. 37)
Lastly we have Beyle's final collapse, discussed in an earlier post, and in An Overcoat confirmed to have taken place in the rue Neuve des Capucines, though the question of where he was taken afterwards isn't entered into.
An Overcoat is brilliant, absorbing, strange, and highly recommended - not just for Brooknerians.
***
*Disappointingly no one could identify the cigar quote, but An Overcoat sent me back to the Brookner essay mentioned by Jack Robinson. Here Brookner, some years before A Friend from England, uses the cigar line, describing it as a 'fine dandyish moment'.
**Not a novel - too short, and too essayish. A novella? Autofiction? Travelogue? 'Fiction / non-fiction', it says underneath the book's barcode.
***I.e. Henri Beyle
****The quotation in Soundings is very slightly and unimportantly different. Perhaps the original TLS piece was differently phrased. On another point, the games-playing line recalls a similar one highlighted in a post of mine on Brookner and Rosamond Lehmann.
https://brooknerian.blogspot.com/2017/05/stendhal-again.html
Jack Robinson, Good Morning, Mr Crusoe: The
Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of
Robinson Crusoe, published in the year
MDCCXIX, which for 300 years has ... and
Women. Printed for CB editions in MMXIX. CB
Editions, 2019
Exactly 300 years ago, in April 1719, Robinson Crusoe was published. Given the national nervous breakdown we are living through, literary anniversaries are easily overlooked, but Jack Robinson has remembered his namesake’s birthday and in this cheeky polemical essay he celebrates it with a vengeance by making Defoe’s novel responsible for the mess we currently find ourselves in.
For Defoe’s contemporaries, Crusoe was a parable about pious economic rectitude. For the 19th century, it became a study of romantic solipsism: Rimbaud, coining a verb, said that his mad heart “robinsoned” around the world. In the 20th century, it warned about civilised man’s regression to barbarism. In Michel Tournier’s novel Friday, the castaway coats himself with mud and ritualistically humps the earth, thrusting his penis – for want of better outlets – into a mossy crevice.
Or did Defoe’s stolid hero get through his ordeal by concentrating on humdrum manual chores? A postwar critic admired his endurance and remarked that Crusoe was one of the few books that had something to say to a survivor of Auschwitz.
Jack Robinson – the jokey alias of Charles Boyle, a witty and ingenious dropout from the publishing trade – is unimpressed by the rich, imaginative afterlife of a story that soon became a myth. He considers Defoe’s novel to be “a dull thing” and questions its elevation to “the sacred status of Eng Lit”; what matters to him is its malign influence – its xenophobic propaganda and its pandering to the delusions of imperial Britain.
Forget about the desert island as a symbol of ego or Crusoe’s solitude as a terrifying test of sanity: in Robinson’s view, the book, written by a slave trader, was intended as both “a prospectus for potential investors” in the South Seas and a manual outlining the DIY skills that colonists would need to conquer the wilderness. In 1903, a schools inspector trumpeted the novel’s educational value by declaring that “nothing, not even football, will do more to maintain and extend the dominion of the Anglo-Saxon than the spirit of Robinson Crusoe”. Dominion back then was a synonym for colony; football, with its tribes of baying hooligans rallied by the likes of Tommy Robinson, can be fascism by other means.
Crusoe’s staunchly Anglo-Saxon identity is manufactured… this insecure fiction explains his prickly mistrust of others
Much of this has been said before. The novelty here is the way Jack Robinson uses Crusoe to analyse the mad act of self-maiming we call Brexit. As he demonstrates, all the blinkered mental preconditions for the Leave campaign exist in the novel. Crusoe fancies himself the monarch of his paltry terrain, although his only subject is the enslaved Friday: “sovereignty” is for him a mystical value, as it remains for atavistic fogeys such as Jacob Rees-Mogg. The alien footprint on the beach alarms Crusoe because it announces that his realm is about to be besieged by migrants, probably of a different race. His panic is hypocritical, since his own father is “a foreigner from Bremen” and his surname sneakily anglicises Kreutznaer, a fact that prompts Robinson to point out that the portly oaf who blathers loudest on behalf of the Little Englanders was exotically christened Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. (I’d suggest tsar Piffle as a useful abbreviation.)
Crusoe’s staunchly Anglo-Saxon identity is manufactured and this insecure fiction explains his prickly mistrust of others. In one of his acutest perceptions, Robinson says that this autocratic man has a “sense of embattlement” that is “the obverse of his sense of entitlement”. Hence his bristling paranoia: he spends years reinforcing a stockade to keep out imaginary enemies, labouring over a wall that is an almost Trumpian hallucination.
In 2014, David Cameron wrote a patriotic op-ed about Magna Carta for the Mail on Sunday, in which he argued that freedom, football and fish and chips were “what sets Britain apart”, a phrase that evokes Defoe by equating uniqueness with insularity. Then, having called the 2016 referendum and excused himself from managing its aftermath, Cameron retreated to write his self-justifying memoirs in a “double-glazed, sheep’s wool-insulated, Farrow and Ball-painted ‘shepherd’s hut’” – Crusoe’s rudimentary cabin fitted out with expensive modern frills.
After he published Crusoe, Defoe went on a tour around what he called “the whole island of Great Britain”. Although he dismissed the Scilly Isles as irrelevant “excrescences”, he described the rest of the crumbly landmass as a self-sufficient fortress, “one solid rock formed by Nature to resist the otherwise irresistible power of the ocean”; as proof, he pointed out that the Roman general Agricola only subdued Britain at his seventh try.
Brexit demonstrates the persistence of that insular worldview, with EU bureaucrats replacing Roman legions, the Spanish Armada or the Luftwaffe as the extraterritorial menace. We are all marooned on Crusoe’s island and our self-proclaimed leaders seem determined to ensure that we will never be rescued. - Peter Conrad
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/21/good-morning-mr-crusoe-jack-robinson-review
In this half Circle I pitch’d two Rows of strong Stakes, driving them into the Ground till they stood very firm like Piles, the biggest End being out of the Ground above Five Foot and a Half, and sharpen’d on the Top: The two Rows did not stand above six Inches from one another. Then I took the Pieces of Cable which I had cut in the Ship, and laid them in Rows, one upon another, within the Circle, between these two Rows of Stakes, up to the Top, placing other Stakes in the In-side, leaning against them, about two Foot and a half high, like a Spurr to a Post, and this Fence was so strong, that neither Man nor Beast could get into it or over it.
What happens when you read this? You might only skim the haze of words, taking in the gist of what they describe, but please look again: how precisely, how practically this ensuring of essential “Security from ravenous Creatures, whether Man or Beast” is delineated. Defoe’s labour to describe labour is a constituent characteristic of Robinson Crusoe, and there is a mighty gulf between the shorthand “Robinson Crusoe” strutting about subduing people with fewer clothes on than he has, and the book itself, the Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner (1719), the driven penwork of a tired man trying to feed his family.
When you take up Crusoe, there’s that barrel teeming with fish to be shot first: the participation in slavery, the racism, the omission of the female half of humanity, the arrogant colonialism, and the boring religious bits. Enter “Jack Robinson” – a pen name for Charles Boyle, a poet, novelist and independent publisher – whose case in Good Morning, Mr Crusoe is that Defoe’s story has shouldered its way into the literary canon on false pretences. Reading it is a “dull plod”; it “surfed a wave of approval in which some ugly flotsam was swept up, and still is”. That “flotsam” covers many things that Boyle dislikes in modern Britain: public schools, academic literary pretensions, racism and “white male privilege”: “from the time of Crusoe’s publication until very recently, the whole business of books has been largely controlled by middle-class white males; and that literature has been awarded a shiny badge and Robinson Crusoe has been given a reserved seat has suited... - Min Wild
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/heres-to-you-mr-robinson/
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