Jack Messenger's Blog, page 2
January 31, 2019
Jack Messenger’s Four English Tales ebook is available free: follow the link
Four Engish Tales is a slim volume of evocative and ghostly short stories written to send a tiny shiver down your spine. Long Distance is about a marriage regretted; Dead Letter is a deepening nightmare; After the Trouble Came looks at the end days; The Appointment concerns a chance encounter with an injured man. Life can be very strange, as you will discover.
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Far Away and Further Back | Patrick Burns | Review
[image error]‘In these stories from four decades of living and working around the world, corporate nomad Patrick Burns recounts some of his most memorable experiences: from dangerous pyrotechnic liaisons in the Algerian desert to a quest to find the Archbishop of Rangoon after a chance meeting in an English village church. This exploration of the personal landscape of expatriate life is interwoven with a navigation of some of the ties that have bound his unusual Anglo-German family during the past century; a mixture of hardcore Yorkshire eccentricity (including a grandfather whose obsession with installing indoor toilets inadvertently led to a twenty-five year family rift) and a liberal academic, Hanoverian heritage disoriented by Hitler, the events of 1939–1945 and the Cold War.’
Thus reads the back-cover blurb to Far Away and Further Back, an entertaining memoir cleverly arranged non-chronologically into short sections easily read in one sitting. This is strictly a book to be dipped into, to find oneself in the basement of a Chinese hotel, a Libyan oilfield, a carpark in Detroit or a village in Yorkshire. Most of these recollections are like well-rehearsed anecdotes, brightly polished by the years, familiar and strange, and usually humorous. Patrick Burns has an agreeable, self-deprecating style and an eye for detail.
Much of Far Away and Further Back refers to another time, when international travel was less commonplace than it is today and occasionally hazardous. Many of the book’s unexamined assumptions and perspectives are similarly dated: ‘places on the edges of the civilized world’ and ‘primitive tribesmen’, for example, and the deeply troubled word ‘expatriate’. Burns’ travels often kept him in a white, English-speaking technocratic bubble, so that locations and their inhabitants tend to be ‘exotic’ backdrops to the stories he has to tell. When unexpected circumstances prick that bubble, things become more complicated (that Chinese basement again).
Far Away and Further Back is a light, easy read, reassuring and comforting in a way that books about other people’s work often are. And it has some stand-out moments: for instance, the deserts in Algeria and Libya, where the isolation and the people are vividly brought to life. Another era indeed.
CreateSpace | ISBN 978-1986213875 (pbk)
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January 29, 2019
I have been solving (I hope) some technical difficulties ...
I have been solving (I hope) some technical difficulties with this website I did not even know existed until a few days ago. Most of them were to do with subscription pages. If you do not wish to receive emailed post alerts, feel free to unsubscribe. I shan’t be offended. But have the grace to allow me to weep.
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Above an Abyss: Two Novellas | Ryan Masters | Review
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The epigraph to Above An Abyss, Ryan Masters’ marvellous collection of two beautiful and stunningly juxtaposed novellas, is from Nabokov’s Speak, Memory: ‘The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.’ ‘Trampoline Games’ and ‘The Moth Orchid’ approach this idea of existential precarity from entirely different directions, yet the two stories complement one another in breathtaking, unexpected ways.
Ryan Masters seems to relish climatic extremes. His superb short story ‘Irredeemable, Now and Forever,’ published in Catamaran Literary Reader, is pinned next to a highway near the torpid River Humboldt in the blistering heat of the Great Basin in Nevada. In Above an Abyss, ‘Trampoline Games’ tells of the inferno-summer of 1986 in Sandy, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City, where Jacob, the new 12-year-old in town, meets and befriends Finn Levy, a rebellious and eccentric red-haired kid who sports a white lab coat decorated with New Wave buttons. Jacob also discovers the four Hanson girls who live next door. They have a trampoline. He becomes quietly obsessed with Debra, also twelve: ‘The sight of Debra Hanson’s hair flouncing wildly over the fence, the sound of the springs and peals of angelic laughter, it was all too much for me sometimes.’
In contrast, ‘The Moth Orchid’ is set in Fairbanks, Alaska, where it is fifteen degrees below zero. Alasa Memnov maintains an orchid hothouse with obsessive vigilance, while also taking time to visit her mother, Bebe, at a nursing home: Bebe has succumbed to early-onset Alzheimer’s. Appropriately, it is the Russian Orthodox Feast of the Epiphany, before which Alasa dreams proleptically of self-revelation.
The writing in both these novellas is masterfully self-effacing. Nothing is forced and nothing draws attention to itself, yet it is all perfect, natural, necessary. It reminds me of the films of Kelly Reichardt, whose shots and compositions share the same sense of unexpected revelation amid the everyday. Images linger: a crazy drive on a frozen river and a bewildering walk through a maze of snow in ‘The Moth Orchid’; the deafening whirr of the crickets in ‘Trampoline Games’; the abrupt exposure of dangers and cruelties half-buried beneath the normal; and how very strange the ‘normal’ can be – almost, as Jacob asserts, like something from The Twilight Zone.
The novellas reflect one another in subtle ways. They both feature important mothers and absent fathers. Jacob’s mother drinks a great deal and watches game shows. She is not a happy woman and verges on the malevolent (at times reminding me of Allison Janney in I, Tonya). Alasa Memnov’s father died when she was an infant; Jacob’s father is delayed in California while he ‘orchestrates a massive round of layoffs’ at National Semiconductor. There is much humour and bitterness in both works, but in inverse proportion. One senses the possibility, or the fear of the possibility, that characters might simply disappear, absorbed by a landscape or a weird culture, and lose themselves.
Most wonderfully, ‘Trampoline Games’ and ‘The Moth Orchid’ end on entirely unexpected notes of quiet revelation, the reverberations of which continue long afterwards. I do not mean to suggest these endings are somehow bolted on as deliberate surprises. Instead, they are as parts to the whole, with deep roots in the material, but whose blossoming transforms all that has gone before. They are quite remarkable and profoundly moving.
Above an Abyss surely establishes Ryan Masters as a great practitioner of the novella, one of the most difficult and ambiguous of literary forms. Read Above an Abyss and be touched by a quiet moment of grace.
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Radial Books | ISBN 9780998414669 (pbk)
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January 26, 2019
Long Distance Free pdf
[image error]‘All at once, Lucy remembered Trevor and began to weep. He would never grow old as she had grown old. His youthful face remained unchanged and unwearied, preserved forever in her faithful memory. She did not love him – did not know if she had ever loved him – yet there he was. Was he still alive? She tried to think of Gerald, dead Gerald, dull, oblivious, bullying Gerald, but his face had turned bland and bloated with the years, like a blurred photograph of an undistinguished stranger.’
‘Long Distance’, a free short story
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January 24, 2019
Take the Late Train is a Readers Favorite
[image error]‘This is an intelligently and thoughtfully written story about how the choices we make affect our lives. Stephen, the main character, is a university lecturer and a literary man. It is, therefore, no coincidence that the novel is strewn with literary allusions. Some of these I noted and I am fairly certain there were some I missed. However, I would happily go back and read this book again to seek them out. After the first few pages, I was confident that Jack Messenger was going to deliver a good novel. This enabled me to relax and allow the drama to unfold. There were some things left unsaid in this book and the reader was allowed to wonder what might have been. This plot was skilfully executed and added to a very satisfying story line.’ (Readers Favorite)
For more on Take the late Train , here.
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Dead Aquarium | Caleb Michael Sarvis
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In an era of flash and twitter fiction, we are apt to forget that short is not new, and that literary heritage includes the aphorism and the pensée as much as it does the triple-decker novel and the epic poem. Kafka’s stories, for example, often extend for no more than a paragraph or two, while much Classical myth and fable is similarly concise. Motivations and contexts change with the times, however. The subtitle to Dead Aquarium – ‘i don’t have the stamina for that kind of faith’ – references the lower-case exhaustion and peculiar ennui that overcome contemporary culture when confronted with the grand, upper-case questions about Identity and Destiny, Value and Extinction that stalk us through the wind-strewn detritus of the back alley and the shopping mall.
The title page to Dead Aquarium tells us it comprises ‘stories and [a] novella,’ but this descriptive assertion can hardly be taken at face value. Dead Aquarium is divided into sections entitled ‘Mundane’, ‘Supra-Terrestrial’, ‘(Loon)acy’ (whose one entry is the subdivided novella called ‘Emerson’) and ‘Sublime’. This structural organization stresses the interrelatedness of all the pieces, whose splintered arrangement into short sections snubs venerable literary conventions while also managing to be wittily self-serving. This, together with its narrow field of focus, makes Dead Aquarium a challenging book to read. There is much to admire, much to question and to think about.
Unlike the fetid and static water evoked by its title, the writing in Dead Aquarium is amazingly fluid and lucid; and it flows, flows easily and effortlessly, so that there is not a single obstruction or blockage, not one awkward, clumsy boulder of a sentence to interrupt the easy procession of prose. It really is a remarkable achievement and a wonderful asset (with one major reservation, outlined below), the greatest that Dead Aquarium has to offer, which is otherwise concerned with absences rather than possessions.
Broadly understood, absences of one kind or another are a recurring feature of the collection. For instance, the first story, ‘Sinking Moments,’ is about the surprises of solitude in the absence of parents and lovers. The burials in ‘Goose Island’ and ‘Scoop Carry Dump Repeat’ are another kind of absence. ‘An Unfaded Black’ has other absences: a tooth, a forearm, a son, and a search for an image:
When Miles told his grandpa he’d like a cell phone for his birthday, his grandfather scoffed at the idea and said, ‘You need to learn how to be alone.’ But that was the point, Miles had thought. With a cell phone, the internet, he could always be alone. Instead, he was stuck at the dining room table with ‘Dying Sly.’
‘Gastropod’ unravels in the shadow of Hurricane Irma; ‘Terra’ is post-hurricane and the most interesting piece in the collection. A makeshift community is formed in the aftermath of destruction when neighbours and strangers coalesce around the only functioning television set to watch a game of football, eating pizza and drinking beer. Yet, amid this unexpected and casual conviviality, there is absence, for the owner of the TV has recently divorced and still has the habit of phoning his ex-wife to ask where she stored the remote.
Dead Aquarium is also about interruptions, thematically and structurally. One quickly discovers that Dead Aquarium is not a book to be read without interruptions. Indeed, it requires them, which is why it factors in so many – sections, subheadings, white spaces – as well as short short stories. These features are an indication that the writing will not comfortably expand or sustain concentration, or support anything above a few pages (I have to confess I felt compelled to skim the final sections of the novella). ‘Emerson’ – the novella – has fish tanks everywhere: in bars, in shops, as architectural elements of store fronts and bridges. Divided into short sections (as if readers cannot be trusted to cope with anything more demanding), its prose finds refuge in absurdity and a kind of resigned flippancy, often conveyed in extremely short sentences with little variation. In ‘Vertical Leapland,’ to take another example, sentences of around six stresses abound, and the few longer sentences are broken into similarly short clauses. This relentless invariant flow is only palatable in small doses.
Or so it seems to me. I wonder if Caleb Michael Sarvis has a novel in the works and what it might look like. Of course, the novel and the short story are two different dinosaurs, and neither is superior to the other. Many brilliant writers have specialized in the shorter form and made it their own; either way, they have required a lot more than six beats to the bar to sustain their brilliance.
Context is particularly important in assessing/appreciating Dead Aquarium. Perhaps it really is necessary to be American, even Floridian, and young to regard the book as an uninterrupted success. Someone from a different demographic may be puzzled by its rejection of a wider moral or political context, its absence of engagement, its refusal of genuine feeling, its comfort in denial, intellectual retreat and warped realities. When a culture is hell-bent on cruising to oblivion, brand names and Despicable Me will only take us so far, and invariably in the wrong direction. Dead Aquarium is an interesting and thought-provoking collection by an immensely talented writer – and a stepping-stone, surely, to greater things.
Mastadon Publishing | ISBN 9781732009127 (pbk)
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December 20, 2018
Five Star Review for Take the Late Train
‘What a treat – hard on the heels of Jack Messenger’s Farewell Olympus comes Take the Late Train, a quite different but no less engrossing read. Weaving between the present day and a vivid, in some ways AS present, past, the story is a deliberation on choices made, including what to know and what to be complicit in ‘unknowing’, and action over inaction. The book’s considerable cast of characters is deftly drawn, and even those with walk-on parts tend to trigger a degree of identification or empathy in the reader. The author inhabits the thoughts of central character, middle-aged academic Stephen, but is equally convincing in his portrayals of a teenage daughter and elderly mother. The sets of couples who variously reveal themselves to be anything but, are juxtaposed with more isolated figures (and indeed, isolation occurs devastatingly within couples). While melancholy – and for some characters, tragedy – is a motif, so too is love. Stephen’s own story includes no small degree of hope, and is ultimately a celebration of free will. With overt and less obvious allusions to Shakespeare and other writers, and prose which blends precision with poetry – elderly, frequently drunk Audrey is ‘dishevelled bedevilled’ and two greyhounds are perfectly evoked by their ‘clipping’ in and out of rooms – this is a work to be savoured on many levels. Highly recommended.’ (Amazon UK review)
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Water Bodies | Jeffrey Perso
[image error] Satire flourishes in desperate times and is often the last refuge of a desperate writer. If that is so, Jeffrey Perso, the author of Water Bodies, is as accomplished as he is perhaps desperate. If satire can be broadly defined as that which mocks human vice or folly by means of derision, irony or wit, then Water Bodies is satire par excellence. Its targets are specifically American, yet its reach is truly global, for stupidity and wilful ignorance care little for national boundaries.
The narrator of Water Bodies has returned to his ‘muddy midwestern town sunk into the carp-rank banks of the Upper Mississippi River Basin.’ ‘Doctor John Voltaire, Professor of Biology and Freshwater Science at the University of Illinois-Chicago,’ appears to have arrived in his home town of ‘L’ in the nick of time. The good citizens of L have every reason to heed the traditional warning to fear death by water, as so many of them are drowning in bizarre accidents and cruel attacks by unknown assailants. In addition:
People of L were always drowning: drowning in debt, drowning in sorrow and tears, drowning in obedience, conformity, and consumerism. They were going under, unable to reach the surface; shackled, sunk, on their way down.
John has returned to help sort things out between his sister Lara and his brother Cristo, so they can decide what to do about selling the old family house.
It was the first time I had been back in L since my parents’ double suicide, one successful, one only partially so, mother moldering in the wet earth seven years now, father, brain damaged and soul dead, locked inside the insane asylum.
We need pursue the plot of Water Bodies no farther; suffice to say, things are not always what they seem in this water world of increasingly turbulent relationships and muddy thinking. Water Bodies surfs its metaphor and rides the wave: humanity is drowning in the rising waters of foolishness and entrenched ideologies, much of which is controlled and channelled by vested interests and governing elites focused solely on their own greed.
In inspired parallels with the contemporary moment, civic efforts follow the same old outworn policies that led to the trouble in the first place. Thus, the plague of drownings
required lifeguard and CPR training for all residents of L, the construction of concrete walls, wooden barricades, and electric fences, twenty-five feet high, alongside both east and west river banks … Also, the possibility exists for the creation of volunteer citizen patrols.
Fears surrounding an imaginary serial killer must be assuaged with yet more killing machines:
That’s why everyone should arm themselves, he said. The state had just passed “open carry” laws, and “everyone should get themselves to the local K-Mart or gun shop as soon as possible. Don’t call the police,” he said. “Don’t call 911. By the time they arrive it could be too late.”
At Liquor, Guns, and Ammo, a store whose name speaks for itself, the proprietor is selling guns as if he really does suspect there’s no tomorrow:
“Be sure to get here early,” the store owner told us. “They’re barely out of the box before they’re gone.”
“That makes me feel safer already,” I said.
Yet the town is under siege on multiple fronts. Respiratory disease, suicide and alcoholism are the major causes of death; the air is polluted and smoking is rampant; as for alcohol, ‘It is here that L reaches its zenith. For here can be found not only more bars per capita than in any other city in the country, but also more bars per square foot.’
Satire has its own particular undercurrents of moral outrage. While the tone of Water Bodies is dryly amusing, its anger occasionally floats to the surface. For instance, at a seemingly innocent and characteristically tedious Sunday church picnic, an obese boy is mercilessly bullied and tortured by a group of children under the benignly indifferent gaze of the adults. John concludes:
Yes, I had to admit, Evangelicals make the best bullies. Especially the Lutherans. The Lutherans and the Baptists. And the Catholics. The Catholics because there are so many of them, like an invading army. Onward Christian soldiers.
This harrowing episode is ‘just another storybook moment for the memory machine, just one more page secure in the holy holiday scrapbook, sacred pages memorializing the everyday, commonplace lives of the good people of L.’ As Cristo declares, ‘You learn a lot about a country and its culture by studying what is thrown away, what has lost its value. And by what is forbidden, what is feared.’ Thus, ‘These drownings are clearly the work of a satanic cult.’
That’s why [Lara] had decided to buy a gun. Something ladylike, but not just a fashion accessory. One that could do real damage. A pistol, a revolver, snub nose, maybe a Magnum or Deringer. She wasn’t sure. She wanted me to go along to help choose.
Sometimes it is hard to know whether to laugh or to weep. Perhaps that is the point of chapter 33’s description of scandalized citizens’ righteous disgust at a display of confiscated sex toys, a disgust which soon turns to fascination and libidinous desire. Surprisingly, race and class rarely raise their heads in Water Bodies, although we learn that
Hmongs jumped into the river and began to swim out into the middle of the black, wide, still flood-swollen swift channel, while the laughing, shouting fraternity brothers heaved heavy rocks picked up from the shore toward them.
This charming interlude is later mirrored by the veiled racism of remarks such as ‘back to the jungle’ with reference to a group of trespassing children – African American children, one presumes. ‘And so, life goes on, such as it is, even in L. The sun and moon rise and set; and rise and set again. Earth wobbles on its axis.’
Amid all this threat from inside and out, ‘If the choice is between security and civil liberties, I choose security. Don’t you?’ writes the improbably named Webb Civit, MD, whose false binaries replicate the appalling standards of US political debate in general.
Chapter 32 of Water Bodies is perhaps the heart of the novel. Is there anything as sad and true as this reflection:
“I just read somewhere,” Cristo recalled, “or heard somewhere, that the Vietnamese do not call the Vietnam War the Vietnam War – they call it ‘The American War.’ And then I thought, I knew, I understood that if that is so, then the Korean War is The American War, the Nicaraguan War is The American War, the El Salvador War is The American War, the Gulf War is The American War, the Kosovo War is The American War, the Iraq War, Part I and Part II, is The American War, Part I and Part II, the Afghanistan War is the American War, the War on Terror is the American War. The War on Crime, the War on Drugs, the War on Poverty, all the wars I remember and all the wars I cannot remember or name—they are all The American War.”
The Earth rebels in Water Bodies just as it is rebelling in reality, ‘rejecting all it [has] swallowed.’ ‘The land just can’t take it anymore … it is in revolt.’ ‘The good, industrious, meat- and milk-loving people of L were almost literally drowning in shit.’ And all it has for political leadership is the dunce known as Mayor Rockton:
Some thought him “focused” and “disciplined,” that he “stayed on message.” But the truth was that Roscoe Rockton was actually quite dull, witless, unimaginative, ignorant, and dense. Once locked into an ideology he had no need to challenge assumptions; everything was already explained, everything was known, everything made sense.
Remind you of anyone?
Water Bodies’ serpentine digressions into apparent backwaters will confuse readers looking for straightforward narrative in which lots of things happen. Cristo’s ruminations are not for the faint of heart, and his Dostoyevskian wanderings with his brother through the L that is Hell will interest only those for whom the journey, and not the destination, is what counts. It is easy to foresee a major plot resolution but, thank goodness, that matters not one jot. One might also suspect that parts of the novel were originally conceived separately, especially a lengthy town council meeting where the novel sags a little before recovering.
No matter. Once in a long while, a writer seems to have been listening in on one’s own thoughts and quietly following one around for the past several years. There are few bad reasons for liking a novel, but there are plenty of tenuous ones, and I shall risk enumerating them in my own case: I, too, have tripped and fallen on a badly lit street in a US city (and fractured a finger), lying in the gutter until someone found me; I, too, have written about an Oldsmobile; I, too, have envisaged death in these terms: ‘I would put the notebook and bottle aside and settle back, close my eyes, and fall into a contented hypothermal sleep, never to wake, but only to decompose in the lovely woods.’ I feel surveilled.
Until recently, our old friend desperate times was wont to stroll hand in hand with the companionable qualifier such as our own. No more. The jig is up. Breathe deeply and you will detect the delightful aroma of burning flesh. Our shortlived Anthropocene is keeling over for lack of oxygen, tipping humanity into the Gehenna of history, a fatuous grin on its complacent face. Ah well, it was pretty bad while it lasted. ‘Weialala leia’ indeed.
Water Bodies is a bleakly enjoyable wade through the vice and folly that have got us into our catastrophic predicament. Its humour and wit are dry and acerbic; it meanders this way and that, revealing the illogicality and the primitivism, the superstition and the hate brandished by those who seek to expel, to exclude, to neutralize the demons whom they believe wish to devour them. But Water Bodies never strays from the central point that we only have ourselves to blame for what we have made of our world. Ladies and gentlemen, it is we ourselves who are the demons, and our name is Legion, for we are many.
Black Rose Writing | ISBN 9781684331994 (pbk)
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November 5, 2018
Farewell Olympus Goodreads Review
Another Excellent Goodreads Review for Farewell Olympus
‘Farewell Olympusis an enjoyable and elegantly constructed romp around fraternal rivalry, family dynamics, literary aspiration, self-definition and the stories we tell ourselves and others. Someone should snap up the film rights.’ See the complete review at Goodreads Review
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