Nicholas John Turner - a novel unlike any other. With keen intelligence, stylistic flair, and a bold philosophy of literary possibilities, Nicholas John Turner has crafted a globe-spanning, time-bending narrative that throws its own readers into the action and scours the darkest reaches of the human psyche: jealousy, betrayal, duplicity, cowardice, and — above all — vanity.

Nicholas John Turner, Hang Him When He Is Not There, Savage Motif, 2016.
excerpt


The debut collection of fiction by Nicholas John Turner describes a world on the fringes of great art; editors, audiences, academics, amateurs, lovers, failures, onlookers and innocent bystanders. Each of these elusive stories emerges from its narrator's mind and works its way under the reader's skin. From a Centenarian stuck in a shrinking Parisian apartment, to twins arranging escorts on the Caribbean Coast; in place of clear narratives, straightforward logic, and neatly extractable meaning, Turner imposes the strange and irreducible philosophies of his marginal narrators. The effect is a series of curious and intimate profiles that brings an unnerving denominator to the surface, and takes the reader where mere pointing will not. Darkly comic, intellectually playful, its complexity unfolding with originality and deftness, 'Hang Him When He Is Not There' is a meditation on the relationship between artists and subjects, creations and beholders, and ultimately between violence and victims.


New Year’s Eve, 1989. At a residential care home in suburban Australia, fireworks explode in the distance while an elderly man dies in troubling circumstances. Decades later, a proof-reader, disfigured by a childhood accident, prepares to meet a celebrated and reclusive novelist. Between these two figures a subtle and intricate web is woven, implicating the members of a mystical cult, the victim of a beheading, an impostor artist, and the enigmatic presence known only as Agent Vell…
Hang Him When He Is Not There is a novel unlike any other. With keen intelligence, stylistic flair, and a bold philosophy of literary possibilities, Nicholas John Turner has crafted a globe-spanning, time-bending narrative that throws its own readers into the action and scours the darkest reaches of the human psyche: jealousy, betrayal, duplicity, cowardice, and — above all — vanity.

Originally published in Australia in January 2016, and largely overlooked at the time, this debut seems – at first glance – to be made up of free-standing short stories. On reading, and re-reading, however, the links and reflections begin to become apparent. Those gathering certainties are then complicated again . . . . This is the novel as hall of mirrors, and it rewards you for following it to the end. - The Republic of Consciousness Prize 2019 longlist

To say that a début work of fiction is both brilliant and uncategorisable is to announce an important new writer. One can only say it is concurrently properly clever, properly playful and properly dark, and perhaps list a few precursors, mainly those who willingly or not broke fiction so they could rebuild it. Think Kafka, Beckett, Borges, or more recently Pynchon, Foster Wallace, David Mitchell. It’s elevated company indeed; but based on this first book, it will soon be deserved.— Neil Griffiths

Turner just upends everything. His language is like a taut but complex tool of excavation that just keeps burrowing into deeper terrain. Hang Him When He is Not There is original and disorienting and uncompromising with valuable insight into creative imagination and the reader/text relationship. This guy means business.— Sergio de la Pava

One of the boldest Australian literary débuts of recent years. … Intricately patterned, intertextual, reflexive, multivocal, bleakly mordant… a narrative splayed and atomised, yet strung together by tangling motifs and voices; a fiction that forks in multiple directions before coiling back together in a snake-like constriction; [a novel that] doubles and fractures the shards of narrative until the whole comes to resemble a mirror that has been smashed and then imperfectly restored.— Shannon Burns

Hang him when he is not there, Nicholas John Turner’s debut fiction collection (Savage Motif 2016), challenges and intrigues the reader from its very opening, ‘Prologue’. Is this a prologue to the collection as a whole, a story titled ‘Prologue’, a bit of both, or something else entirely? The conversational tone, a first-person direct address to the second-person reader, exemplifies much of the writing that is to follow, while also hinting at some of the themes the collection explores as a whole—most particularly old age, death, and the transitory places where we are cared for as we wait to die. That ‘last room’, as the prologue’s narrator describes it.

But of course the very idea of “the second-person reader” is a simplification that masks the smart and playful voyage we’ve begun, since the narrative ‘you’ actually implies multiple readers—a fictional addressee in addition to our readerly self—and the question of whether these are intended to be distinct. Later in the book, in the final story ‘All That Remains’, this mode of address returns in a series of passages that are signed-off as letters, and questions of perspective and identity are posed and investigated more directly, which for me brought to mind another literary collection released in 2016, Michelle Cahill’s wonderful Letter to Pessoa.

The book’s back cover summarises the nature of just some of the stories inside: ‘A journalist waiting in the house of a great, unknown novelist’; ‘An old woman lost in the words of Günter Grass’; A filmmaker exiled in a rhetorical cult’; ‘News of a beheading’. What we don’t see, until we delve deeply enough, is the gentle circularity that links some of the stories into a profound and thoughtful whole. Alongside death and ageing, a preoccupation with the nature of reading and writing reveals itself across multiple stories. In ‘Polisher (Vanity is the snake you breed to bite you)’, the narrator is a polisher of autobiographies who also performs lucrative government work as a spin-doctor of sorts. We find him on his way to South Australia “to conduct a series of interviews with Australia’s most celebrated writer, who until then had worked under a pseudonym and never spoken publicly”. Through seamless shifts between two time-streams, we already know that the celebrited writer, Marcello, has died, and there are amusing touches of satire in the desperate literary underworld and political intrigue that threads the story. One particular feature is either a brilliant masterstroke or a happy accident. The narrator writes: “After long evenings of dictation I would go back home in the morning and proof-read the articles for which I was well paid”. The idea of being well paid for this is a literary in-joke in itself, but what struck my attention was a handful of typos on the preceding and following pages. A carefully-placed metafictional device or just ironic chance? Later, the narrator asks if he should be called a “mere ‘polisher'”, just as the glaring typing errors have begun to show him as a fraud. I’m still not entirely sure if this was purposeful, as errors also creep into some of the later stories, but if it is a happy accident, then so be it—the effect was joyful.

It’s difficult to provide plot specifics beyond this, because it’s in the deep characterisation effect of each narrator’s meandering thoughts that this collection’s real power lies. While this is experimental writing, it’s not a difficult read or one that pushes the reader away; dark comedy and recurring themes pervade the work and the reader’s challenge isn’t caused by difficult writing, it’s in the move away from a traditional plot-focus and into the lives and minds of the stories’ various narrators. This is a curious book that will get you thinking and feeling without pushing you away or making you work too hard for the pay-off.

At times, it seems like Turner is asking us too directly whether all this literature stuff is worthwhile. In ‘Local Anaesthetic’, in which the character Errol Doyle dies—and his is a name worth noting for connections to other stories—the character Ursula is deeply engrossed in a Günter Grass novel, Local Anaesthetic. We’re told that “Ursula did not read in the conventional fashion of left to right, top to bottom. Instead, she merely opened a page and scanned, seemingly randomly, her eyes following no obvious pattern, and pausing only briefly between movements”. So should we do the same? Is Turner’s careful arrangement of words, non-linear as it may seem at times, better replaced by our own random non-linearity? Perhaps this line is just a recognition of the reader’s agency in creating meaning from a work, and how ultimately the writer has little control over it.

Towards the end of the final story, as multiple connections come streaming together into this book’s coherent whole, Turner’s narrator writes about writing and reading as “the reflection of each other”, and refers to the act of reading someone’s work as an act of obliteration. But by reviewing this book, and hopefully encouraging you to read it, maybe I can enable its re-creation in your mind. Enjoy! - Daniel Young

daniel-young.com/reviews/review-of-hang-him-when-he-is-not-there-by-nicholas-john-turner/

Now I’m for sure going to struggle to explain the way she just sat there, okay. So just you try to be patient now because I do have something to say here and you might be glad you listened. (1)

How we approach a short story, any story, influences our interaction with the text, where pre-reading judgements affect the intercourse between the author and reader. My approach to this collection was of a reader expecting to notice characteristics of the archetypal short story. As I immersed myself into the act of reading, I experienced subtle and then significant movement from being resistant to being enticed by the author’s voice and style.

Let me explain. The Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines the short story as ‘a very brief story with immediate point’ (1964: 976). The Collins English Dictionary defines the short story as ‘a prose narrative of shorter length than the novel, esp. one that concentrates on a single theme’ (1991: 1431). But, on defining a short story, A Dictionary of literary terms and literary theory says ‘when it comes to classification this is one of the most elusive forms … One is confronted with the question: how long (or short) is short?’ (Cuddon 1998: 815). So it’s not that I was confounded by the length of the stories, this being a matter of subjectivity; or that I was deterred by the language, this being easy, conversational, vivid:

I took Maria-Elizabeth for a walk along the beach and I showed her the scar on my nape where I’d been stabbed and she ran her finger around the thin lips of hardened tissue and I felt like she was pressing a coin or an amulet into me. (70)

What threw me were my anticipations, balanced against my understandings of the general principles of writing a short story. Namely I was chasing what American short story writer and poet Raymond Carver meant when he described his approach to writing the short form: Get in, get out. Don’t linger. Go on. (1981, 1)

While stories in Hang Him When He Is Not There find intensity in the everyday, the author lingers. Sure, the innocuous narrator sends a chill along your spine without drawing attention to it, as in a mystic’s act:

Walking alone one afternoon, I became lost, and woke in a trailer with a woman asleep on the other side of the cabin. Her tracksuit was blue and came off without her waking. (55)

The narrator does not expound the rape beyond these two sentences, and simply moves on, immediately, to explain life in the mystic household:

Fights in the house never crossed the sexes, occurring only between women, inexplicably, or between men…. (55)

My resistance linked to the fact that these short stories do not adhere to what author Paul March-Russell fondly posits as literary fragments (2009: viii). These stories do not boast precision. In their elaborations, they read like excerpts of a novel.

The prologue sets the tone of the prose, of an author fascinated with text. The subject matter is abstract, about a woman stuck in a place:

By the look on her face if you’d asked me six months ago I’d have said without a doubt that she was stuck in the last room, if you know what I mean. I’ve seen it a thousand times, the same look, like they’ve been walking forever through some mansion that’s always had a million hallways and rooms and attics and dungeons, and they’ve always just without really knowing why been going through this doorway or up that stairwell, not really chasing anything in particular, just moving from place to place, and now suddenly for the first time they’re standing in a room that doesn’t seem to have any way in or out, no doors or passages… (1)

The rest of the stories mostly go likewise. Told in first (sometimes second) person narration, voice is bold yet easy, conversational. Vignettes read like chapters of a fat novel, one that promises a titillating climax. The assemblage is not a tome but is loquacious in a ‘maddening’ or an enthralling way.

Returning to my approach, and subsequent inner scrutiny, I cast a spotlight on my immediate disposal to question, and linked it to what Wenche Ommundsen suggests on conditioning factors in the author/reader relationship, i.e., the ‘textual intercourse’ between the author and reader, and how it interacts with dynamics such as the ‘genre to which the text is perceived to belong’ (1993: 74). Generic expectations in the reader’s approach (anticipation of what is preconceived as fantasy or science fiction or short fiction, for example) ‘condition the reader’s reception of the individual text’ (74). As a writer of short fiction I approached the collection seeking short stories.

But the separate narratives possess none of the characteristics of a typical short story: not a ‘combination of the compact form and the possibilities for innovation’ (Thomas 2016); not ‘pocket sized epics … sympathetic to a sustained, intensive vibe’ (Rintoul 2016); not ‘a glimpse … of a wider story’ (Horn 2016). These vignettes do not ‘throw the reader straight into a world, and pull them out again just as quickly, leaving them asking questions, and constantly thinking’ (Canlin 2016); rather, they ceremoniously paint portraits in intricate detail. They coax the reader into an absorbing world, and entertain them with possibilities:

I knew Jimmy pretty well for a while there back when I was just starting out at my job. We used to hang out in our lunch breaks sometimes… I mean I always knew he had some problems and I always felt for him. He’s one of those guys you kind of feel a bit close to because he never talked any shit… Shit. Beheaded. What the fucking hell. What the goddamn fucking… And Jimmy of all people. (37 – 38)

Possibilities emerge when the narrator’s monologue transverses (with levity) from the telegram of a beheading to a drinking problem:

And so look it’s not the kind of thing I just go about saying to people but I think we’re sort of at the point where I don’t feel like it’s much more of a thing for me to just admit that I’m an alcoholic… I’m just a guy that actually needs a little drink like on a regular basis… (42)

With each idiosyncratic narrator, the author takes a risk because, like most human relationships, literary communication mediates a precarious balance of power: power to narrate, power to interpret, power, finally, to accept or decline the roles offered by one’s partners in the literary act (Ommundsen1993: 68). The author, with his experimenting, disremembers the reader’s supreme power to abandon the text (71).

Flashback to my initial resistance… As I mulled upon my power to abandon the text, and then chose to reconfigure my approach, I stopped my pursuit of the archetypal short story. This release of readerly expectation changed everything. No longer salivating for condensation, precision, careful use of textual space … I began to savour the narrative. The text started offering itself as an object of desire. It seduced me; played upon me like the body of a lover (Ommundsen 1993: 71). Suddenly I was willing to engage with the literary act and give this text a ‘fair go’ (75).

I at once recognised postmodernism at work, in March-Russell ‘speak’:

The postmodern is … undecidable (2009: 222–223): The prologue and stories such as ‘Local anaesthetic’ (about Errol Doyle and his immobility—or his passing, or Ursula and her reading—or her death) and ‘I want to be honest with you, sir’ (about a beheading—or an alcoholic) leave meaning to be uncovered.

The postmodern is … decentred (March-Russell 2009: 224): Nearly all stories in their ‘undecidability’ dissolve centralisation; the narrator throws text off-balance and proposes new centres of meaning.

The postmodern is … simulation (March-Russell 2009: 226): An unpredictable narrator draws a thin line between reality and the hyperreal.

The postmodern is … surface (March-Russell 2009: 229): The narrator, in stories such as the mystic who rapes, is capable of hinting at underlying truth while staying inexpressive, revealing something disturbing with emotional detachment.

“I stopped my pursuit of the archetypal short story. This release of readerly expectation changed everything. No longer salivating for condensation, precision, careful use of textual space … I began to savour the narrative.”

I recognise postmodernism (Roland Barthes in particular) in snippets of Turner’s text, recitations within stories, a narrator talks of ‘fictions’, ‘literary sketches’, ‘prose’ (93), where a finished text offers ‘a feeling of content or justice, the end of an itch or an illness, the trueness of a plane’ (8). I ponder if this inner gaze refracts to Turner, whose delight in language brings to fore postmodernist Barthes’ idea of play, enchantment with unique articulation.

Turner offers in his text a language whose ‘forms can be filled in different fashions’ (Barthes 1985: 26). No longer resisting, I begin to appreciate the level of detail in describing:

– a mother: She is a horror of obesity, balancing even as she sits, knees splayed, the shapeless dreams of an Islander woman draped over her Danish flesh … Her ears, alone, are small and elegant. (7-8)

– old age: the weather is a mood but it’s also a pain. A pain in my joints, to be precise. (94)

– masturbation: Gabriel was sitting on the floor massaging his testicles with his back against the foot of his bed and he was wearing only a t-shirt. His heels were tucked up against his buttocks and his other hand was splayed on the floor beside him and his eyes were closed. (65)

– relationship with a father: he used to sometimes throw his half-full dinner plate on the ground and leave the table and go and sit on his armchair on the other side of the room and watch my mother and sister and me in reverse … It was a bit of a game for my sister and me. Scary but still a game. And kids like that stuff. Though my Mum always struggled to keep her face straight and sometimes she went red and laughed and coughed because she was trying to stop it. And there were tears of effort and coughing or choking and occasionally she just got up and covered her face and ran off. (39–40)

– fear and respect: And maybe the difference is that sympathetic people understand your fears and show you with everything they do and don’t do that they know what scares you. And with their own behaviour towards you they sketch the outlines and shadows that make a really accurate sort of image of your fears… (44)

– anal rape: That morning one of the older men in the house had come into a room where I was laying down and crawled onto my back. He ripped my shorts with his ropy, hairless, grey arms … I protested in good faith, scratched him at the hip … bit a cheek, then let myself be held, in silence, as the man’s old body wound down, slowly eased its vigour, and dripped off me like a wet shell. (56-57)

– A wife’s contempt ‘as sincere as death’ (94).

Metafiction is present in direct reader address:

The smell was foreign and putrid. Around a thin wall my mother sits (she, alone, is always in the present—not a memory but a fixture)…I was indeed a proof-reader. (7–8)

As I read, a pattern emerges. Nicholas Turner’s debut collection is not quite a story cycle. A typical story cycle in the literary world contains narratives held together by the arrangement of stories, thematic ties or collective protagonists, where a set of related tales constitute a closed and sufficient unit. Recurring themes of death, near death, psychological deficits of primary and secondary characters—whether novelist, mystic, doctor, nurse or resident of an aged-care nursing facility—loosely bind some stories in Hang Him When He Is Not There. In fact two fictions, ‘Local anaesthetic’ (21) and ‘What he meant when he said’ (105), offer recurring characters, location and events.

In ‘Local anaesthetic’, a young nurse at the Lady Flinders nursing home secretly assumes the role of psychologist, nudged by the nursing home’s director to reportage on the patients:

The nursing home’s director, having secretly employed the young nurse in the role of psychologist, accepted her analysis late one evening in his office. (33)

In ‘What he meant when he said’, it turns out the young nurse’s name is Jennifer:

Having majored in psychology during her undergraduate degree, Jennifer was occasionally asked to examine guests at the Lady Flinders, and provide reports in secret to the director. (110)

Both narratives mention the same author, Gunter Grass, and the author’s books: Local anaesthetic and Cat and mouse. However, each narrative offers a different protagonist with their unique storyline. The young nurse is merely a recurring secondary character, who in ‘What he meant when he said’ ends up becoming a successful novelist!

On rethinking the works, I arrive at an edifying conclusion that renders my experience of the collection charming. Hang Him When He Is Not There is literary and postmodernist: ‘untethered from its origin’, ‘forever resituating its destination’ (Ommundsen 1993: 59). It plays with hyperreality: what is real or imagined?

The narrator reminds me of Jorge Luis Borges, who in ‘Borges and I’ conducts a monologue with the self, and concludes, ‘I do not know which of us has written this page’; of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955)—whose narrator’s peculiar foreword endures in a thorough playfulness of text across the entire narrative, despite the work’s sombre topics (paedophilia and murder); of Gerard Murnane in A million windows (2014)—who lends his novel to a certain peculiarity, fitting the very description of a novel only in being fictitious prose of book length.

Like Murnane, Turner encloses characters, actions and some realism that loses and finds itself in the narrator’s ‘non-sentences’ and play with trust and mistrust in the writerly/readerly relationship:

I’m returning from the bathroom. I am wet. I pretend I was not expecting you, but I was. I am. I am always expecting you. I am only surprised when I emerge from the toilet and you are not there. I’m emerging and you’re there, that’s how I know it goes. (103)

Sporadic moments of frustration remain in this gem where I wish for language restraint, a tighter edit; where long sentences interrupted with the narrator’s bracketed thoughts disrupt this reader’s flow; where the final chapter ‘All that remains’ reads like a postscript, cut scenes from a finished film …

But I no longer question the author’s intentions, capabilities or psyche, his world views or moral concepts. With the narrator’s oft direct address, I am an active reader, never a passive bystander observing the textual spectacle from a safe distance … (Ommundsen 1993: 77).

Foreshadowed by its quirky name, Hang Him When He Is Not There is darkly humorous, impish, elusive and intimate. Its inescapable narrator stays accessible, conversational in his or her logic, or illogic, irrespective of topic: an escapade, a rape, a beheading. Characters circumvent a literary or scholarly world: journalists, novelists, ghost writers, film makers, academics … This collage of short fiction is a fresh, electrifying, perplexing, flamboyant cornucopia of self-reflective text. - Eugen Bacon

www.anticmagazine.com.au/a-review-of-nicholas-john-turners-hang-him-when-he-is-not-there/

Hang him when he is not there is the debut collection of fiction from Brisbane-based writer Nicholas John Turner.  Combining eight works of short fiction, the book is described as exploring “a world on the fringes of great art; editors, audiences, academics, amateurs, lovers, failures, onlookers and innocent bystanders”. But this intricate and subtly interwoven series of short stories is also a succinct yet detailed examination of the human psyche.

From the staff and residents of a nursing home to a self-aware alcoholic isolated by his own consumption, all the characters are abruptly realistic and their descriptions, at times, border on grotesque due to the unashamed portrayal of human flaws.  The book is divided, with some stories taking the form of marginally more plot-focused third person narratives while other pieces are heavily character-driven works of first person fiction.

This change in point of view between stories makes for interesting reading. It allows readers to follow the strangely connected lives of remarkably average characters in Local anaesthetic and What he meant when he said, while the circular, neurotic writing in I want to be honest with you, Sir and No time to call home engrosses the reader in separate worlds of isolation.

Overall, the stories focus on character, interactions and the impact of art. This pull away from the conventional plot-driven narrative, in parts, makes it seem like the stories end before the plot points have been resolved. But this technique is remarkably effective in creating the illusion that you’ve peered through a window into each characters life, if only momentarily. In this sense, the book accurately portrays the somewhat fleeting nature of human interaction as the reader forms only a brief connection with each character before being thrust into the life of another. 

Despite the complexity of the underlying themes and the sophistication of the interweaving stories, this series is not pretentious in its execution and makes for leisurely reading. Turner uses humorous, cynical and suitably jarring metaphors throughout to describe remarkably ordinary characters in vivid detail and he allows characters to reveal their innermost insecurities subtly and without warning.

Hang him when he is not there is not a safe first work of fiction. Rather, it takes risks and challenges conventions mostly masterfully. It’s anything but formulaic, denying expectations of the usual literary form and replacing them frustratingly beautiful snapshots of mediocre lives. - Bonnie Stevens

http://www.mousmagazine.com/articles/hang-him-when-he-is-not-there

Brisbane author Nicholas John Turner’s debut self-published novel Hang Him When He Is Not There has sold into the UK and Ireland to Birmingham-based small press Splice.

UK and Irish rights were negotiated by Martin Shaw, literary agent at Alex Adsett Publishing Services, and acquired by Splice commissioning editor Daniel Davis Wood, who said it was ‘a genuine privilege to bring this dazzling, daring novel to readers on this side of the world’.

Turner originally self-published the book in the Australian market in 2016, before approaching Shaw in late 2017 about a future writing project. ‘I replied that first off I really should look at his first book … and I was completely taken aback,’ said Shaw. ‘The intensity of reading experience that [Hang Him] affords is simply astonishing. I’m delighted that Splice has picked up on the praise and will bring the book to an international audience later in 2018.’

The novel garnered a positive review in the Weekend Australian from critic Shannon Burns in early January 2018, which Davis Wood said was evidence of the book’s appeal: ‘As a rule, self-published novels aren’t reviewed in places like the Weekend Australian. The fact that the rule was broken for this novel tells you something about how exceptional it is. And the fact that it received that acclaim two years after its first publication, because a handful of early readers in Australia kept insisting that it was one-of-a-kind, shows you that it has an unusual power to get under a reader’s skin and stay there,’ he said.

Davis Wood added, ‘Readers who have an ear to the ground already know that Australia is fertile territory for experimental literature at the moment, and writers like Jack Cox, Jen Craig and Jane Rawson have managed to build small but dedicated audiences over here. Nicholas John Turner belongs in their company, and I’m honoured to be able to offer Hang Him to a local community of readers who seek out challenging, unconventional books like this one—books that turn our preconceptions of literature inside-out and expand the limits of what the art form can do.’

The UK and Irish edition of Hang Him When He Is Not There will be a lightly revised version of the self-published text and will be released in the UK and Irish markets in October. - Martin Shaw

https://www.booksandpublishing.com.au/articles/2018/05/30/108428/shaw-sells-self-published-debut-novel-to-uk-small-press-splice/

This book is one of the first three published by a welcome addition to, and supporter of, the vibrant UK small press scene: Splice.

Splice’s innovative and model operates on three main pillars: the publication of original fiction (starting with three short story collections in 2018 of which this is one); a weekly online review concentrating on other small presses; finally an annual anthology where the previous year’s authors “splice” together their work, and those of another writer who’s work they wish to showcase.
The publication of this book is an interesting story - originally self published in Australia in 2016 and (for a self published book) gaining a surprising amount of coverage, it was picked up by a UK agent (as part of a discussion about a future project) and then the UK and Irish rights acquired by Splice.
Splice appear to have lightly edited the book: when I compare to reviews of the Australian edition I noticed that the chapter headings have been removed and also that the book appears to have had some typos removed (itself a self referential feature given that the narrator of an early chapter is a well paid proof reader)
This is a book which I found very difficult to categorise and one that I think sets out to deny or even deconstruct categorisation. It is perhaps telling that the book’s back cover describes it as a novel, and the publishers website as a short story collection, as it is simultaneously both and neither.
In form the book opens with a brief, enigmatic but moving prologue, continues with seven short stories and concludes with an eight chapter which is effectively a collection of flash fiction pieces, mainly epistolary in nature. Some of these are clearly linked, others not obviously so.

The prologue is narrated by a nursing home worker, reflecting on a patient previously in the “last room” (a sensitively explained idea for someone who has accepted they have reached the last stage of life) who has unexpectedly changed her outlook.
The first chapter is about a writer - a proof reader, facially disfigured in a childhood accident which killed his father, who now specialises in editing government announcements, has recently ghost written an autobiography, and is now visiting a reclusive author.
The second chapter is set in a nursing home around the death of a completely invalid male patient during New Year’s Eve fireworks, a death witnessed, possibly in some mysterious way provoked, by an eccentric female patient known for her aimless, but obsessive, reading of a Gunter Grass novel while she floats around the home and which takes place while the supervising nurses are occupied with baser matters.
Later chapters introduce, or at least appear to introduce us, to: an alcoholic visited by a mysterious messenger; a relationship originating among a cultish group of self described mystics; two brothers and their sexual adventures, and the mysterious artist lodging in the other room in their small guest house; a mysterious Agent visiting a Parisian who, in a double sense, literally entombed he and his wife in his apartment; what seems to be the lives of the two nurses.
At heart though I think the book examines the very concept of art, particularly literature, its creation and even more so consumption.
What does it mean to read a book, and how should a book be read.
This is a book which defies being read in a conventional linear manner, a manner which is described, perhaps exaggerated by the one of the nurses

The young nurse [who many years later - perhaps - becomes a leading literary author, only denied the Man Booker and Miles Franklin Prizes by her insistence on anonymity] likened her own personal experience of reading to the shuffling of a caterpillar, which first drags its back half up, then extends its front to advance. It had something to do with the burden of her mind, her cautiousness, and her desperation to comprehend everything around her before moving on. At the end of every page she .. glanced over to confirm the page number. Then she checked the number on the next page, to ensure that the one correctly followed the other
And our proofreader comments on our innate tendencies as a reader to want to impose order even when it may not be intended.

Even the most highly channeled mind is a relentless assembler of information, a stubborn maker of stories.
His own work taking him to the opposite extreme

I was indeed a proof reader. But even within that specialisation I was a specialist, capable of living for hours, days, weeks or even months among the fine structural details of a text without once concerning myself with its ultimate relevance or value or meaning. Perhaps the true act of reading is instead embodied (again with that phrase having a double sense) in the approach of the female nursing home resident, one that is diagnosed by the female nurse as “having evolved to service her psychological disingenuousness” but one better suited to a narrative like this which consciously defies any quest for straightforward narrative linearity

Ursula did not read in the conventional fashion of left to right, top to bottom. Instead, she merely opened a page and scanned, seemingly randomly, her eyes following no obvious pattern ........... She is looking for proof of her own life there, as a bee looks for flowers that resemble itself. Which is to say, not by visiting each flower on a single plant in a meticulous and ordered and exhaustive manner.

Ultimately the book itself challenges the very act of reading, and by extension, surely even more so the action of reviewing, as a naturally destructive one.

Given that writing and reading are the reflection of each other (like throwing and catching, speaking and listening....) the phrase “I am reading someone” ... must imply a kind of uncreation (anticreation) or else negation (obliteration?)

Perhaps acting here like the bee “looking for a flower that resembles” myself, and drawing in my own University training in quantum mechanics, I was reminded here of the Copenhagen interpretation of that subject, and in particular the idea of wave function collapse (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_...)
By the very act of reading a book and more so by rendering my reading and interpretation into a review, am I simply collapsing the distribution of possible interpretations that were built into the author’s creation of the book into a single measure of that book.
Ultimately this is a book which itself is acts as a proof of the assertion at the heart of Splice’s reason to exist which is “to attract adventurous readers to the innovative and unconventional works of literature that exists outside the publishing mainstream - works that usually come into being from writers and publishers involved in Britain’s community of small presses”. - Graham Fulcher

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2543851914

Nicholas John Turner is based in Brisbane, Australia. His non-fiction has appeared in various magazines and news publications, and he is a co-founder and contributor to the celebrated amateur sports publication, Match Day Burger, which the Guardian UK described as "some of the best sports-writing on the web". ‘Hang Him When He Is Not There’ is his first published work of fiction.