Chris McCabe playfully reclaims the inventive spirit of the founding text of Modernism; Ulysses. Tracing the same structure as the original, McCabe describes the events of the following day, 17th June 1904. Stephen Dedalus wakes up, hungover, with scores and debts to settle, unaware that Leopold Bloom is waking up in Eccles street with his own plans for him

Chris McCabe, Dedalus, Henningham Family Press, 2018. 
chris-mccabe.blogspot.com/




Chris McCabe playfully reclaims the inventive spirit of the founding text of Modernism; Ulysses. Tracing the same structure as the original, McCabe describes the events of the following day, 17th June 1904. Stephen Dedalus wakes up, hungover, with scores and debts to settle, unaware that Leopold Bloom is waking up in Eccles street with his own plans for him.
Dedalus is shot through with cut and paste disruptions from the Digital Age. From ’80s Text Adventure gaming to Google maps and pop-ups. McCabe picks up the tradition of Laurence Sterne and B.S. Johnson, underpinning the paragraphs of his storytelling with concrete poetry.
This novel is haunted (by Hamlet). This novel has a subconscious. This novel has therapy. This novel gives right of reply to Joyce’s self-portrait and questions the foundations of narrative storytelling. This truly is a hotly anticipated moment in Fiction. 

“Parts of this book will remain with me, and pollute my reading of Hamlet and Ulysses, forever. I also add it to my personal library of Great Books About Dead Fathers.” – Max Porter

Chris McCabe fortunately has the talent to match his chutzpah and, in dismantling and reassembling Joyce’s novel, he has created a complex and original work of fiction that is much more than pastiche.
- David Collard


Not June 16, 1904, but the day after. Much has happened in the last twenty-four hours, as we know. Yes, a sequel to Ulysses, and Chris McCabe earns the right to such hubris. A little easier, much shorter, but there are flashes of great beauty. And how delightful it is to take up with Dedalus and Bloom again. - The Republic of Consciousness Prize 2019 longlist


Toni Morrison said she wrote her first novel because she wanted to read it. With Dedalus, my first novel, I wrote it because I'd read Ulysses so many times. It might have been unhealthy to read Joyce's all-consuming magnum opus for what may have been the tenth time. I bought my first copy of Ulysses when I was seventeen (I now have three). It has lived next to my bed where I should keep my medication. It's spine is fluffing up like the back of a pigeon.
From my first reading I've revisited this book so many times the Dublin it depicts has become more familiar than the road I live in. In 2014 I thought that rather than reading the book again I'd write a novel in response, set the day after, on 17th June 1904. That might just get it out of my system. Four years later and the book has been published by Henningham Family Press in a lovely edition.
But writing any novel is always a work of obsession in itself, a language world created and lived in by a writer who hopes – in however a distant future – that some readers might also want to live in it. And to write this book, to go beyond reading it again, I had to sharpen my knowledge of Ulysses to the point where I could convince myself that Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom were breathing again.
I also read (and re-read) many books about Ulysses including Harry Blamires' The New Bloomsday Book (Routledge, 1993), Declan Kiberd's Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living (Faber, 2010), Kevin Birmingham's The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses (Head of Zeus, 2015) and returned again to Richard Ellman's magisterial biography James Joyce (Oxford, 1983).  At the same time I taught a year-long course on Ulysses for the Poetry School which culminated in my students performing a spoken word piece called Bloomsound at the Blue Elephant Theatre in Camberwell on Bloomsday 1914. To write Dedalus I carried around my old edition with me (half a kilo on the scales – I've weighed it) for the best part of that year.
I also took two research trips to Dublin. I was shown around the James Joyce Centre by writer, poet and musician Jonathan Creasy, seeing the original door for number 7 Eccles Street and Joyce's desk. I took my copy of Ulysses to the top of the Martello Tower watching my wife Sarah swim the Forty Foot below. I drank the aptly named Nora's Red Ale in the Lincoln's Inn pub where Nora had worked in a previous life of the building. Bought a lemon soap in Sweny's pharmacy. Walked Sandymount Strand, kicking the sea's rejectamenta in the footprint's of Stephen.
I was excited by the idea of what might have happened on the day after the now iconic 16 June 1904. Had Stephen had a secret punt on the Gold Cup and won? After leaving Bloom on Eccles Street does he do what he says he's not going to do and spend another night at the Martello Tower? Does he revisit the prostitute in Monto who he owes money to and pay her back? And despite his crippling hangover does he make it to teach in the boys' school, hitting the bottle again in the afternoon (it's a Friday after all)?
The publisher of the book, David Henningham, gave me the language for the ongoing joke in Dedalus: yesterday was an uneventful day, today something might happen. Pursued by the ghost of his dead mother and of Hamlet, things kept happening to Stephen in ways that surprised me and made me laugh. It might also be that Stephen could fall in love on the day after Joyce had first gone out with Nora Barnacle.
The idea of 'the day after Ulysses' led me to consider what Joyce might have experimented with in the era if the internet. In my Wandering Rocks section I used a ‘chain’ technique to bind the characters through language rather than time: specific word in each section is used to transitions the voice to the next character who picks up the same theme. In the way that the internet allows for both fictional and real – dead and living – to live side-by-side, I placed contemporary Dubliners alongside Joyce's characters and added comments found on Twitter. Joyce would have loved Twitter I think, it added to his notion of the litter in 'Litterature'

      Each time I re-read Ulysses I'm surprised that the book is less visual than I remember it. I don't mean in terms of its ability to clearly depict character and scene and for its deep imagery (all of which is there with bells on), but that Joyce doesn't play around too much with typography or visual poetry. This may have to do with his near blindness which led to a much deeper interest in language as sound. When writing Dedalus I wanted to push my novel through the lens of concrete poetry, and to learn from novelists who've explored this area before, from Laurence Sterne to B.S. Johnson (both of whom are massive influences on Dedalus). For me the natural home for visual poetry is within the experimental novel and I didn't write the poetry sections separately from the others, they all poured down the same outflow into my imagine Liffey.       
For my response to Sirens I created a series of sound poems that recycle the language of each section of Dedalus (my own novel) up until this point. The opening section is an overture of the corresponding section in Ulysses and captures the sound of Bloom urinating in a public toilet at Temple Bar. Each section then recycles the language of the sections of Dedalus, playing the sounds of: Bloom zipping up his trousers; whistling; coins rattling in his trousers; the sound of a trumpet; throwing cash to a busker; a literal gust of wind; the bells of the church sounding out Bloom’s relief that he’s spoken to Molly earlier that morning; a seagull over the Liffey and Bloom’s double-checking that he has Molly’s lotion in his pocket, which he's just collected from Sweny's.

      In the Oxen of the Sun episode Joyce famously used George Saintsbury’s Specimens of English Prose Style to pastiche the history of literature up until he was writing his own book. In Dedalus I have continued this experiment using the first pages of fiction writers who wrote in the decades following Joyce, selecting one writer from each decade up to 2014: Marcel Proust, Remembrance of  Things Past (1913); Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (1925); Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind (1936); George Orwell, 1984 (1949); Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955); Williams Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959); Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (1963); Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973); Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985); Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces (1996); Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006) and Eimear McBride, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013).
I've had the pleasure of working with the Henningham Family Press on a few previous occasions, including in my role as National Poetry Librarian at Southbank Centre's National Poetry Library. In 2013 I worked with David on making a limited edition artists' book called Clotted Sun which included mini poems from poets buried in West Norwood Cemetery. I write about David in my book In the Catacombs: a summer among the dead poets of West Norwood Cemetery (Penned in the Margins, 2014):
To work with David is to enter into a dialogue in which all book-making dreams are possible - the painful part is having to make a decision ... There is not enough said about the real geniuses in the art of bookmaking (Stefan Themerson and Ron King are two of my 20th Century heroes) and David Henningham ... excites with the same boundless imagination. He is able to make anything, manifesting the spirit of a text in a way that satisfies the eye, hand and mind.

     As these images show David has created the cover for each book by hand, using transparent yellow paper with gold foiling. The pages are litho printed. What has been a further joy is working with David on the text itself. David has a great editorial eye and brings his imagination to the possibilities for both narrative and stylistic technique. Hardly surprising given that he's a poet and the author of a novel called Foulness (publishers get in line to sign this).
David set me a challenge: to write notes for the novel like those in The Waste Land. I took the spirit of that but did something else, creating a subtext in which the characters of Stephen and Bloom are lost in the world of 1980s computer gaming. David responded again, creating a series of visual images which are part map and part exhibition vitrine : in each one can be seen tiny figures (of Dedalus, Bloom and other characters) trapped inside.
When Joyce created Ulysses he had little idea how his cultural creation would expand into the psyche of each successive generation. Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom have become bit parts in an industry, celebrated in carnival, imitated and expanded into art. As Stephen says to his therapist in Dedalus: 'My whole being is fatuous. My creator devised my first conception under the title Stephen Hero : what more apt metaphor for the burning of the wings of ambition?'
Stephen's ambition means he could never accept that he isn't the main character in Ulysses. Joyce's joke is that Stephen plays second fiddle to Bloom. Dedalus is Stephen's book and  – after so many years of joyous reading of Ulysses – is dedicated to James Joyce. I'm spending this year with Finnegans Wake. - Chris McCabe
http://chris-mccabe.blogspot.com/2018/05/writing-dedalus.html

      “Too poetical that about the sad. Music did that. Music hath charms. Shakespeare said. Quotations every day in the year. To be or not to be. Wisdom while you wait.” – James Joyce

“What is modernism?” was one of the questions addressed during the recent BookBlast 10×10 Tour talk held in Waterstones, Norwich, featuring Galley Beggar Press authors Alex Pheby (hailed as “the new Beckett” by Stephen Bumphrey on BBC Radio Norfolk), Paul Stanbridge and Paul Ewen.
“Modernism consists of fragments put back together to make a whole out of disunity,” was one answer, “Being aware of the text and stepping outside it,” was another . . . along with stream of consciousness, multiple points of view, dense allusions, ambiguity and a phenomenal play of words on the page.
Stephen Dedalus features in Ulysses – one of the most demanding works written in the English language at a time of particularly momentous change. It is considered to be the greatest novel of experimental modernism. In his tribute to James Joyce’s masterpiece, Chris McCabe “plays around with ideas of what James Joyce might have done in the age of the internet and social media, which both became integral to the content of the novel.” Dedalus is a superb book in its own right and not just clever pastiche. It is beautifully produced. A weird and wonderful, leftfield and surreal read.
Dedalus wakes up in the Martello Tower with a hangover and winnings in his pocket, and gets on with his day. “His wet trousers clung to the back of the chair, slack legs swinging. Seasand and airdew. Those trousers which were not his own. Bracken on his breeks. Along the dawnblue bay he’d walked back from Bloom’s, and mishearing his name the name had stuck : Leonard. Stephen thought sleepily of the silent couple asleep in a doubledream of catpurrs and silences. In the sourbreath of parental love.
Leonard. Good Samaritan, pockets lined with sumac. Greasy nose. Exposed offal. That kindness of the innkeeper. Sadness frothing from his eyes like overboiled eggwhites. His wife a regular Lilith. Mattress like a compactus on her back. Was it a stage for me to enter into, adulterous? Perhaps he wanted me to watch?
Could have saved money in Monto. Stephen tried to lift himself up from the bed . . .”
Haunted by Horatio – Hamlet’s trusted friend and confidant – and the ghosts of his mother and Leopold Bloom, Dedalus goes about his business. “The morning, in russet mantle clad, led him foot-by-foot to the tepid beach.” He gets to school to teach a class of boys, “Youth to itself rebels” . . . encounters characters past and present in central Dublin: Molly Bloom, Ryanair hostess, boy scout leader, pub landlord, I.T. helpdesk advisor, man at the Chills concert, sirens . . . references modern classics Lolita, The Bell Jar, Gravity’s Rainbow and others . . . heads to Westland Row Station and Kennedy’s bar . . . converses with Sarah Bernhardt . . . feasts on language, image and metaphor interspersed with concrete poetry, and engages with the mind of Chris McCabe as he goes.
We are more self-aware and self-examinatory than ever before, yet the world around us is polarising into rigid dichotomies across the mainstream. As globalism streamlines and blandifies Western society, the demand for eclectic, nongeneric, unconventional writing grows. Anti-plot and anti-genre, Dedalus captures the gradations and nuances and profusion of creative acts, articulating perplexity, regeneration and renewal.
Dedalus is a feast of allusion and transdisciplinary collaboration, published in this centenary year of the first publication of Ulysses, (in serial form in the Little Review). Novels such as this give hope: experimentation and exploration are not dead. What unites mankind lies in the depths in content, not on the surface in form. - georgia DC
https://bookblast.com/blog/review-dedalus-chris-mccabe-book-of-the-week/

Chris McCabe, Triumph of Cancer, Penned In The Margins, 2018.


The Triumph of Cancer blurs the borders of science and poetry, working with forensic attention to capture the `inscape' of the living world. In this powerful new collection, presented as a museum of artefacts, Chris McCabe returns to the site of personal trauma to confront disease head-on. Elegies for his father, poets and celebrities mingle with still-life portraits of organic and synthetic subjects. These poems move with lyric grace and surgical precision against a backdrop of terror and cancerous global politics, showing McCabe at the height of his powers: dextrous, darklycomic and a true original.


Join award-winning indie publisher Penned in the Margins for the launch of Chris McCabe’s powerful new collection of poetry in the unique (and macabre) surroundings of the Pathology Museum at St Bartholomews Hospital, Smithfield. Chris will read from the book, followed by a discussion with poet and science historian Dr Richard Barnett.
Refreshments will be served.
Presented as a museum of artefacts, The Triumph of Cancer blurs the borders of science and poetry, working with forensic attention to capture the ‘inscape’ of the living world. In this powerful new collection, Chris McCabe returns to the site of personal trauma to confront disease head-on. Elegies for his father, poets and celebrities mingle with still-life portraits of organic and synthetic subjects. These poems move with lyric grace and surgical precision against a backdrop of terror and cancerous global politics, showing McCabe at the height of his powers: dextrous, darkly comic and a true original.

The scientific language used by doctors to describe cancer—the uncontrollable growth of a single cell—is often mystifying and alienating. Can the experience of cancer better be expressed through poetry? McCabe’s latest poetry collection The Triumph of Cancer, a work searching for ways to articulate his father’s brain cancer, and in turn his own grief, attempts to deal with this question.

Pain is often thought of as a unique experience that cannot be communicated or shared through language in a way that does justice to the feelings of the sufferer. The same can be said of cancer. The longest poem in the collection, ‘Cancer’, begins to work through the ineffability of the illness:

The mind says : I will fight this to the last of my
………enzymes
but what is it, exactly, that I’m fighting? The doctor blinks.
If he was a theorist, he would answer : cancer is rhizomatic, the
………root stalk
like the surface of a body of water, spreads towards all available
space, eroding what’s in its way.

McCabe’s elegies for his father, and for famous poets struck down by cancer, push poetic language to map and mirror what happens to the body when cancer invades it. The poet explores the connection between poetry and science, writing the body in a way that we can all understand. In ‘Hodgkins’, the growth of cells ‘disperse like salmon up spinal fluid, stake out the brain’, and in ‘Snooker’, they’re a bunch of balls which ‘mutate into reds & the white/ swallowed in reds endless reds’. In ‘Worm’, the image of an injured and regenerating worm merges with the medical image of growing cells: the worm, ‘cut by boys into tapas rings’, ‘divided & multiplied/divided & multiplied/divided & multiplied.’ Here, form mirrors the mutation and growth of cells, and the text like body becomes a living, breathing and growing organism. In one particularly ugly poem, in which ‘an unaccepted pint is a cubed kestrel’, McCabe mutates Hopkins’ sonnet ‘The Windhover’ and makes a tumour out of it.

The effect of blurring science and poetry is not to reassure the sufferer, as we might expect, or to destigmatize the language of illness from metaphors of battle and invasion, but instead to unsettle the reader. For McCabe, cancers are ‘concealers of threat’ and ‘terrorists’. The collection feeds this atmosphere of terror with poems revealing cancerous global politics— images of shattered snow globes drift in and out between flashes of scattered bodies and bombs. The triumph of cancer is the triumph of terror—the fear arising from knowing ‘you can get it anywhere’, that it can take people before their time, and that it can attack anyone:

We must think of cells, in the
………end,
as the novice on the ice rink, life as the lines left in the surface,   
after the dance. This is cancer’s triumph.

The collection is an uncomfortable read. But if McCabe explores the role of poetic language in expressing the experience of cancer and pain, he also tests the role of art in helping overcome trauma for the sufferer and the bereaved. Varying linguistic registers in the collection face cancer head-on with dark humour. In ‘Cinema’, an elegy for his father’s voice lost to cancer, memories of conversations with his father on the way to watch a film are pitted against medical voices: ‘What exactly is the treatment here going to be then? Quite simple really: we’re just going to show you some film.’ McCabe uses broken images, layered allusions and references to other literary texts to confront cancer with a darkly comic tone, like the darkly ironic end to ‘Cinema’:

Anecdotes on Joyce & Sterne. Stein at breakfast. Unasked for Hopkins. Cancer, in the end, was more avant-garde.

The collection’s relationship to elegy, cancer and the role of art in helping overcome trauma is complex, but certainly not unrewarding to unpick. Moments of terror and pessimism are frequently undercut by linguistic experimentation and sarcasm. The collection becomes a medium for the poet to find the right language to feel in control of cancer, and to begin to come to terms with his father’s death. Poetry becomes a way not only to express pain, but also to overcome that pain— as the hopeful end of ‘Body’ articulates:

With each death a desire for body. For witness. For song. - Molly Moss

https://www.thelondonmagazine.org/triumph-of-cancer-chris-mccabe/In his fifth book of poetry, The Triumph of Cancer, Chris McCabe explores cancer in its physical intricacies down to an atomic level, as well as in its metaphorical possibilities socially and politically. As the poet reminds us, it only takes one cancerous cell for malignancy to ‘spread… sideways out, like fingers, outwards’, and in the collection this much is true for victims of cancer as well as for anybody trying to navigate a world caught up in self-perpetuating chaos.
McCabe is at his strongest in moving elegies for his father, particularly the opening poem ‘Crab’, which ties the etymology of ‘carcinogen’ to the memory of a family holiday, and ‘Cancer’, which flits between images and time-frames along an abstract Tube journey. As the speaker rides through tunnels, as if through the veins of a body in the process of self-sabotage, the poet balances the simplicity of a regular commute – ‘I take cash from the ATM, switch to the DLR & check my texts’ – with the heavy conceptual weight of the topic undertaken: ‘And the tube started. To say she alighted would simplify how heavy / it feels to move forward alone, away from the dance of endorphins.’ T.S. Eliot’s influence is felt in the poem, from its epigraph to its Prufrockian reflections and the narrator’s tour through half-deserted platforms, and imagery reminiscent of Four Quartets (‘In my commute begins / the death in my prime’). The mind, in this poem, is unable to stay still when forced to dwell with something so incomprehensible. ... - Dominic Leonard
https://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=10425


Chris McCabe, Cenotaph South: Mapping the Lost Poets of Nunhead Cemetery, Penned in the Margins, 2016.

Step through the iron gates of one of London's most spectacular Victorian cemeteries on the hunt for the lost poets of Nunhead.Literary investigator Chris McCabe pushes back the tangled ivy and hacks his way through the poetic history of south-east London, revealing a map of intense artistic activity with Nunhead at its heart: from Barry MacSweeney in Dulwich to Robert Browning and William Blake in Peckham.Join McCabe on a journey back in time along underground rivers, through Elizabethan villages and urban woodland. Discover the surprising lives and lines of writers neglected amongst the moss-covered monuments of Nunhead Cemetery: from the 'Laureate of the Babies' and a New Zealander soldier-poet to those who chronicled London at the height of her industrial powers.But this is also a personal journey that highlights poetry's force in overcoming trauma; McCabe's exploration of Nunhead Cemetery is interwoven with diary entries that document his mother's illness.In this latest instalment in an ambitious project to plot the dead poets of the Magnificent Seven - London's great Victorian cemeteries - McCabe drills deep into the psyche of the city, and into his own past.Encounters with the dead and forgotten are charted in sinuous prose and with a wry humour that belies his meticulous research. Cenotaph South offers a powerful meditation on art, writing, memory and community, confirming McCabe as contemporary poetry's most innovative thinker. This is essential reading for anyone who has ever wondered what lies behind the canon, or beyond the cemetery gates.

Cenotaph South: Mapping the Lost Poets of Nunhead Cemetery from Penned in the Margins on Vimeo.






    Chris McCabe, In the Catacombs: A Summer Among the Dead Poets of West Norwood Cemetery, Penned in the Margins, 2014.









      Opened in 1837 and inspired by the Pere Lachaise in Paris, West Norwood became known as the Millionaire's Cemetery. But within its opulent grounds there are twelve buried names whose currency is language: these are the dead poets of West Norwood. In the first instalment of a project to map the Magnificent Seven, Chris McCabe takes us off the main track of London writing and asks why the works of Hopkins, Tennyson and Dickinson are still read above those buried in this suburban enclave of South London. Join McCabe on the hunt for a great lost poet, as he walks the winding Gothic paths of the Cemetery and makes an unexpected discovery underground in the catacombs. The stories of those loved and dismissed by Charles Dickens are carefully uncovered; those who influenced Lewis Carroll and Winston Churchill; and those whose burial in the common ground has not been enough to silence them. A startling and original work of literary detection, In the Catacombs is written in a hybrid form - part literary criticism, part Gothic fiction- and places West Norwood Cemetery and its dead poets back into the foreground of the London psyche. - REVIEW A line by Andrew Marvell comes at me out of nowhere: "Insnar'd with Flow'rs, I fall on Grass." I think first of John Clare grubbing at the roadside. Then of the close reading and transfixed husbandry Chris McCabe brings to his task of subtle recovery, his passage among the suburban dead. This is a fine, achieved work, close-woven, elusive, engaged. A poet in another coat. IAIN SINCLAIR



   
    Chris McCabe, Speculatrix, Penned in the Margins, 2014.


      In his most daring collection to date, Chris McCabe delves into the shadowy recesses of London history, bringing forth unsettling anachronisms and revealing the city as a perilous place to exist. Taking its name from the term for a female spy, Speculatrix is at once the voyeur and the observed. Fame and death are McCabe's subjects, sifted and strained through his poems' urgent rhythms. At the heart of the book, a sequence of wild, neurotic sonnets tears at the corpus of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre to conjure a visceral landscape of decay and financial collapse. Extending the collection beyond his trademark urban locale are startling poems for the loved and departed: from the artist Francis Bacon to the poets Arthur Rimbaud and Barry MacSweeney. In Speculatrix McCabe has pulled out all the stops, showing why he is considered one of British poetry's most arresting and pioneering spirits.


     "Speculatrix, [McCabe's] blazing, breakthrough fourth collection, explores the sleepless metropolis by Jacobean torchlight. Breathtaking verse combusts in dark Thames pubs where revenge-tragedy dramatists drink with hedge-fund managers." - JEREMY NOEL-TOD
     
     "Deliriously anachronistic, Speculatrix is an act of witness as much to modern London as the early modern plays that inspire it ... One of the most original contributions to British poetry in quite some time." - DAI GEORGE


      This is a book of mirroring, of artful repetitions and binary reversals: life and death, men and women, dark and light, fecundity and decay ... McCabe approaches the actualities of love, death and loss with a steady, unflinching eye." - KAREN MCCARTHY WOOLF

    Chris McCabe, Pharmapoetica: a Dispensary of Poetry


This unusual and beautiful book is the product of a collaboration between the poet, Chris McCabe, and Maria Vlotides, artist and medicinal herbalist. Initially conceived of as an art installation, the project has evolved into a book containing images of Vlotides’ notes on the herbs, as well as images, and McCabe’s poems. For this project, McCabe escaped to the Cornish coast with his wife and four year old son, referred to as ‘the Boy’ in this chapbook.  His decision to write his poems via ‘the hunting gaze of his own young son’ as Vlotides puts it, contributes to the poems’ emotional centre of gravity, which elevates the whole chapbook to become a physical, magical touchstone. In making his son a kind of Everyboy, he universalizes him, so that readers can relate to his activities and observations, and to the parent-young child bond.
In Mario Petrucci’s sensitive, insightful introduction, he highlights McCabe’s particular gift which is to ‘tap down into deeper soils of experiential investigation and association.’ It’s the associations which create the magic. Daisies become ‘SM58 microphones, yellow,/the one-two sound-check explodes in white/word fronds’. He plants fennel seeds and the Boy waits for jellybeans to grow. While observing bay leaves, he discovers that ‘writing is a way to eat yourself.’
Les Murray, in an interview, writes: ‘We have three minds, I reckon, one of which is the body, while the other two are forms of mentation: daylight consciousness and dreaming consciousness […] The questions to ask of any creation are: What’s the dream dimension in this?’ McCabe immerses himself in all three dimensions in the making of these poems. ‘I’ve been in dreams all day’, he writes in ‘Rosemary’:

‘The Boy says: “Next time you see a circus
just knock it down”.
Sea-spray, my memory; sea-dew my eyes.’

The herbs are not always overtly discussed, but appear in the poems obliquely, like a ‘Where’s Wally’ cartoon: ‘I’ve hidden the fennel seeds in my poem’ he tells us in ‘Fennel’. Sometimes, the reader is offered a gift directly: ‘I offer this antioxidant to your anxieties / as a cardiac tonic for winter deliriums’ (‘Hawthorn’). McCabe draws on the notes given to him by Vlotides, who writes of the hawthorn: ‘A member of the rose family (it also has thorns, hence hawthorn) – rose having an affinity for the heart – these plants are indicated whenever the heart is affected whether physically [….] or emotionally.’ We also discover that hawthorn is linked to death and it’s a taboo to bring it indoors.
As well as allowing the reader observations of his son, McCabe offers starkly intimate revelations of his own, as in his poem, ‘St John’s Wort’ where we are reminded, ‘the mind has cliffs’.
The combination of science, nature and imagery is an intoxicating concoction:

‘Elderflower’s in the cider. 4% pollinated
with hoverflies & sulphites it attracts
surfers saturated with sand & alcohol for
the summer months.’

(‘Elderflower’)

A natural poet herself, Vlotides describes in her notes why she included daisies: ‘What really brings lawns to life, other than picnics, are the constellations of daisies that turn a green space into a reflection of the night sky’. There’s a link also between the Boy’s explorations and her own childhood discoveries: ‘I was astounded to discover as a child that each tiny yellow speck in its yolky core was in itself – botanically speaking – a flower, with its own male and female gonads. I was amazed that the simplest-looking of flowers was in fact an orgy of reproductive possibility.’
Physically, the book is a work of art in itself, opening out in both directions, effectively to form two books, one with poems, the other with images and notes. The paper is heavy, and the poetry section only has poems on the right-hand pages. All that white provides a space for each small poem to be seen as a precious gift.
Vlotides’ initial conception of the piece was to achieve ‘an interweaving of science, art, language, memory, the personal and universal: distilled and dispensed’. McCabe has used the resources she offered, the context of location and the presence of his son to produce ten poems which are startlingly arresting and varied. They begin in delight and end in wisdom, as Frost suggests the best poems should. McCabe is a natural aberrationist, giving way to undirected associations, from one chance suggestion to another, in all directions. But the theme keeps him on a steady course, in the same way a piece of jazz keeps a signature baseline. Each poem offers a little wildness and at the same time, fulfils us just as a glass of well water quenches a thirst. - Afric McGlinchey
     sabotagereviews.com/2013/12/04/phamapoetica-a-dispensary-of-poetry-by-chris-mccabe-and-maria-vlotides/


    Chris McCabe & Jeremy Reed, Whitehall Jackals, Nine Arches Press, 2013.
    
 ondon in the dark end-times of the late noughties; escaped war criminals and their hired thugs scavenge like hyenas amid the city’s smut and glitter, the system appears in nonchalant free-fall and words drop cheaply as grimy metropolitan rain. With this dystopian backdrop, where language is spun, redacted and renditioned, McCabe and Reed’s gritty riposte performs an angry and elegant resistance. 

The result of this psychogeographic collaboration between two of modern poetry’s most distinct voices is this - a poetry chain-letter that seeks to interrogate the city at one of the most peculiar and sinister points in contemporary history and to map the capital on foot, under their own light; poems as foundlings; the weight of language and place obsessively and voraciously explored. Beneath flagstones, in river silt and on the top decks of buses, the strange, dark energies of the city find their way into this electrifying exchange of poems.


 "McCabe and Reed’s wide-eyed, X-rayed Cubist vision of London is more than a cultural mapping. It is a significant addition to the poetry of London. Partly a response to Whitehall’s warring, it uncovers deeper historical and pyschogeographical interplay within the city. Horizontal and vertical layers of story are contextualized and abstracted to reveal multifarious states of being, control and flux. These anchored, edgy scripts of multiverse unearth deposits in angular localised texts that make you smile, laugh, wonder and leave you wanting more. A tour de force in every way." - David Caddy





    Chris McCabe, Shad Thames, Broken Wharf, Penned in the Margins, 2010.           
     extract


      Selected as one of 'The most beautiful books in the land' by Time Out Shad Thames, Broken Wharf is a play of voices that spans centuries of changes across the Docklands, allowing past ghosts to be heard above the white noise of the polemical present. Set in a pub that has stood on the site since the sixteenth century, we eavesdrop on a conversation between three characters - Echo, a middle-aged woman who has lived her life in the area; Blaise, a northerner who finds resonances with the more familiar docks at Liverpool; and the gregarious landlord, a Londoner with 'the knowledge'. Breaking into the dialogue, The Restructure is a sinister, all-knowing Public Service Announcement with 'advice' to share with anyone who'll listen - Commissioned by London Word Festival and first performed March 2010. Shad Thames, Broken Wharf is published as a boxed, limited edition mini-book. Each copy is signed, numbered and hand-printed, and contains a unique object (or objects) mudlarked from the shore of the Thames.

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.