The Myth Of Brilliant Summers

by Austin Collings

"The Myth of Brilliant Summers" is a work of suspicion and delicate menace. Spanning decades of educational and state abuse, these interlinked stories/modern day parables about outsiders and dreamers follow in the cult tradition of Junky (William Burroughs) and Post Office (Charles Bukowski). An exciting work of flash-fiction which represents a fascinating portrayal of the times we live in.

Paperback

First published October 27, 2014

Reviews

[Lydia]

This book was something I wanted to hate, but I kind of really enjoyed it.

It felt pretentious and on the odd occasion that women were referenced it was rarely palateable. The second story, Tommy V, in particular was uncomfortable to read (teenage boy is jealous of creepy old man who sleeps with teenage girls and buys them things but instead of this being gross, manipulative, and basically presented as an old man raping and taking advantage of young girls, it was presented as something the girls encouraged and wanted and enjoyed and just ugh).
Collings seems to have a fondness for his teenage self that most of us do not. You tend to realise that the vast majority of your thoughts and opinions that you had when you were a teenager were self-involved, uninformed, and ridiculous. In this collection of "short stories" (short recollections of youth would be more accurate, as they range from a short paragraph in length to about 3 pages in length) Collings seems to look back with a sort of fondness on his teenage thoughts. This is not to say that it's an upbeat piece of work, it's grim from beginning to end and every story is filled with depression.

That being said, I did somewhat enjoyed this book. I thought his prose was great and it flowed incredibly well. There were a couple of stories that I couldn't get into because the harsh blocks of text were too much, but when he actually utilised paragraphs, I couldn't help but enjoy it. So yeah, didn't want to like it but the reading experience was very good.

I kind of feel like this comic sums up how I felt about its tone: http://reparrishcomics.tumblr.com/pos...

This review can be summed up as: Lydia liked a book in spite of herself and the prose was very well-written, but it's not so special that anything in particular stood out to be remembered.

[Mark D · Rating 5 out of 5]

　　Philosophers may argue the precise relationship between contingency and necessity, but most agree that a culture is what you happened to grow up in. Radcliffe, North Manchester, aka Dog Shit Valley is the unlikely soil for this book of astonishing brevity and beauty, in which the developmental staples of what used to be called the British working classes are laid out like a recipe book for domestic murders. Social deprivation, drug use, alcohol dependence, mental illness, crippling cultural poverty, violence, sexual abuse are all shamelessly visible. Yet far from being another misery memoir 'The Myth of Brilliant Summers' excels at mapping a landscape of invisible forces which (just about) keep the young writer on his feet. Collings documents painful beauty and brief outbursts of love, raw boredom, the stability of his parents lousy marriage, the pleasures of friendships 'not for escape, but for conspiracy', and institutions which 'take in the cases which nobody else would touch'. Collings' weapon of choice is the street-fighters' jab, snapping out rhythmically clipped sentences:
　　
　　'Bright orange background. Photo booth stuff. I'm guessing it was her bus pass picture. Overuse would have crinkled it, if she'd had the time to overuse. Instead she was found dead in the bus station toilets. First thing in the morning. The night before she'd stopped off at the George & Dragon pub in Bury after visiting her daughter in hospital. The hours in between were crucial. Took the police twelve years to find their killer. A former soldier.' (p7, George & Dragon).
　　
　　 Abrupt as the vowel sounds of the local dialect, these dots of meaning trace out stories and awful epiphanies told in one or two pages, sometimes a single sentence:
　　
　　‘Bad dreams of offices; of wheezing computers, low ceilings, stark lighting, carpet; and how I belong to that place like a chair, or an envelope; and not as the boy who once looked out of windows with a smile.’ (p.73,‘Web’)
　　
　　In the literary ginnel between aphorisms and prose poetry, Collings’ observations and revelations assemble a mosaic of flinty runes from which an entire world is conjured. The minimal narration is a verbal equivalent of sly ostensive gestures: a tilt of the chin, a raised eyebrow. This is a high-risk strategy which involves doing more and more with less and less, until he is as close as possible to doing nothing. Any miscalculation would tip enigmatic minimalism over into the nonsense of a Mancunian Zen koan. Great risks, great rewards: as an exercise in world-building this is a near-flawless debut, accomplishing in its first ten pages what many novels fail to do in hundreds. This is Proustianism for the knackered workers of twelve-hour bakery shifts. It is writing for the short bouts of sanity ‘after they’ve tried to slowly kill you again at school or in work or even at home’ (‘Note to Reader’).
　　
　　Whereas Proust had leisure to search out ‘lost time’, Collings is a smash-and grab necromancer of dead time. Read any five pages of The Myth Of Brilliant Summers and you will scent things long repressed - or more likely simply binned off. The bittersweet, reeking memories of miscarried first, second and third loves. Of wasted Thursdays bent to metalwork tasks appropriate only to long-dead industries. Of ten-page application forms for that horrible and horribly needed first, second, or thirtieth job. You will recall the names of classmates who you suspect are today somewhere way beyond weeping, in the purgatory of manual labour or the call-centres that didn’t take you on, their life-story one plain tale such as Collings’ father passes to his son: ‘He told me not to end up like him’ (p,14, ‘Colourful Language’). Between flurries of merciless observation Collings develops swaying, fugue-like meditations, his mental gyro oscillating between fear, profound isolation, alienation, and the equally compelling horror that he might actually belong in such a place as Radcliffe.
　　
　　If this book were nothing but a documentary of teen spirit growing to accept its lot - or rather, not growing, just accepting age as a mode of atrophy – then Collings’ bleakness would be merely depressive. But this is not temperamental pessimism. It is something more active, and runs deep enough to be described as a philosophical commitment. The Myth of Brilliant Summers is not a personal blues or a social commentary: it contains something of both, but the book’s value does not lie in expressing the contingent woes of the (just about) tolerably mean streets of Radcliffe. What stabs out as Collings’ most valuable and totally necessary point in The Myth of Brilliant Summers is that memory is already among the most political of our mental functions. Without any moralising or tub-thumping, he conveys a profound responsibility to something beyond any individual writer or reader – a responsibility to recall the Army Recruitment Teams eyeing up fresh meat in the no-hope suburbs (‘The New Grunts’), the open paedophilia of his community (‘Tommy V - Crimes Against Nature’), and sordid murders in public toilets (‘Because We Are Also What We Remember’).

　　That ‘something beyond one’s self’ could be branded with such names as class- consciousness, or respect for historical truth, or merciless dirty realism, or a concept of ‘justice’ etcetera, but such tags feel jarringly idealistic or nostalgic in relation to Collings writing. Why? Because his cracked window into youth reminds us of a process that has not disappeared into the past. He shows what England, our England, was like in the days before confusion, horror, and boredom numbed-down into normal. He reminds us that it was repetition, not alleviation, which normalised our (non-)responses to confusion, horror, and boredom. Those bygone days and feelings are still available in bulk for the poor bastards navigating their own ’brilliant summers’. Radcliffe doubtless retains its brigades of clueless youths seeking advice from crippled musicians or their proxies, tolerating an endlessly looped tale of near-success for the sake of some non-judgemental advice on drugs, or girls, or an escape plan (‘Night Fishing’).
　　
　　 Collings’ eye for an appalling metonymic detail or the nastiness of a vernacular phrase is sharper than his wheelchair-bound drummer’s sciatica. Of one of these lost and bullied children he writes:
　　
　　 ‘He was the Caravaggio of the canteen who drew shiny pots and kettles and naked women from Penthouse that looked just like shiny pots and kettles and naked women from Penthouse. The dead spit.’ (p.49, ‘The Stuff of Paint’)
　　
　　Indeed they do, and this play on the principle of identity affords a clue to the dark energy which propels the book. Political optimists look back and tell a tale of how polio and slavery are abolished, how the best is yet to come. Pessimists bemoan our once-brilliant nation declining to the present low-point where we can no longer wage war against China or treat incoming foreigners like the criminals they mostly are. Collings pronounces a curse on both houses, diagnosing that what optimists and pessimists equally avoid looking at is the full horror of what has not really changed at all – the fact that our ways of remembering (and our ways of not remembering) have alike taken sinister turns. It is as if remembrance as a gesture of respect for the departed is rejected by the dead themselves. The dead spit - at us – because we are the dead spit of them. Life becomes contemptible through resemblance to non-life. We ‘ended up like them’ - and we don’t even have the excuse of being dead. The remarkable black-magic of this book is that Collings writes with such dazzling beauty about this process: every page is a gem, and the thread of gems adds up to a noose-like necklace of anti-nostalgia.
　　
　　This is Collings’ challenge: remember when women were beaten, sometimes to death, by husbands and ex-soldiers? When spazzes were called spazzes, loonies put in loony bins, when girl-children were raped and people knew but didn’t do a damned thing about it? Remember the bad old days? Don’t bother, you don’t have to, because they’re here. Not here again. They never left. They just slid over the decades, with one or two minor modifications, to the next kids in line. The libraries have closed and the pornography is on-screen rather than magazines. There is more pressure for youths to stay in dubiously worthwhile education, fewer chances of meaningful employment; changes in housing and university provision have made crippling debt compulsory for almost everyone over eighteen. But this is the same that England that allowed Members of Parliament to get their jollies from fucking children with the full knowledge of Her Majesty’s police force. And now, as then, the workings and counter-workings of memory are linked to political choices: though ever so earnestly made on the basis of a desire for change, these choices are the bait of an awful trap:
　　
　　‘I watched as she sat enraptured by his TV presence. Her eyes gleamed, fervently, as he shook public hand after public hand. [...] He made her happy, made her forget herself briefly, forget the mum-life. This was glory time and she wasn’t alone here. He made a lot of people feel this way, feel the fickle euphoria of forgetfulness. Immediate nostalgia: that’s what he’d mastered […] And the far-reaching barbarism that defined his spell; this was not yet envisioned, realised, or even imagined. Not back then, in sunny glory time, before the smile was seen differently.’ (p.59, ‘Pinned Hopes’).
　　
　　In the upcoming elections, as ever, the politicos will talk about making Britain great again. We face a choice between several varieties of lip gloss, all claiming to be a cure for mouth cancer. Whoever ‘wins’ will not prevent the continuing metaphorical, economic, psychological, paedophilic, or educational fucking of the youth of this land by the wealthier and more predatory classes. There will be promises of odour-free or self-removing dog shit in every valley. Promises to restore our truly brilliant summers. Read this book and be prepared to feel uncomfortable with how much you have allowed yourself to forget. It is a book of rare beauty and violence. It will make you feel vulnerable and it will provoke reactions you may well have forgotten how to deal with. It will almost certainly not improve you, and may even do your sense of self a little harm. The Myth Of Brilliant Summers is a humanising and powerful debut from a young writer blessed with both eloquence and immediacy.

[Ben Tallon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I encountered this book thanks to a friend's passionate recommendation. He spoke of 'this book I think you'd like. Kind of a mood piece, a series of downtrodden short stories.' He was right. It opened my eyes to how infectious and yet pedestrian a personal short story could be. Evocative and morose, droll and darkly comedic. Austin has a real knack of welcoming you into his world, but allowing you to look only from the corner of your eye, smell only through the floor and hear muffled by a partition wall. If you have a dark sense of humour and a love of the understated, this is one for you.

[Kimberly Azumah · Rating 1 out of 5]

dnf really didn’t like it

[Fran Henderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just personally not the kind of book I enjoy

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was massively praised, and was thought provoking, very intense but was it really any good? I can't be sure it wasn't a case of hype.

I've just reread this very short book and I am no more satisfied about what I think then I was before. Mr. Collings can write but I can't help still feeling that beyond the fireworks of the prose there isn't a great void.