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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Last Kind Words, an anthology of poems after Geeshie Wiley’s song, edited by Peter Riley
2. ‘Ghost’ and eight more poems, by Veroniki Dalakoura, translated by John Taylor
3. The Metaphoric Graveyard, a short essay by Alan Wall
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause and Dreamt Affections| Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych
More below. Scroll down.
4. New to The Fortnightly Review? Our online series is more than ten years old! YOU MAY NEVER CATCH UP, BUT YOU CAN START HERE: Peter Riley: Poetry Notes: Winter reading |Alan Morrison: June Haunting | Kallic Distance, explained by Michial Farmer | Thesis: Stravinsky. Part four of Tronn Overend’s comments on Adorno and music | Two uncollected personal poems by Roy Fisher, with comments by Peter Robinson | Anthony Rudolf reviews The Hölderliniae by Nathaniel Tarn (with an excerpt) | The reascent of Spengler’s Decline by James Gallant | Three new poems by Simon Smith | Tom Lowenstein’s poem To the Muses | Michael Hampton reviews Turner’s Loom | Le meutre: the death of Camus, reviewed by Michelene Wandor | Peter Larkin: Extract from Trees the Seed |Anthony Howell on Julian Stannard’s Freeing Up | Wanton and two more poems, by Michael Egan | Alan Wall on Melancholy’s black sun | Paul Cohen parses Words and Lies | Bruce Kinzer on Leslie Stephen and the Metaphysicals | Richard Johnson: The Present Dystopian Paranoia | Nights In and two more new poems by Anthony Howell Dreamt Affections, a sequence by Peter Robinson | Freedom and justice at the Warburg by Peter McCarey | A Brexit Fudge by Alan Macfarlane | The poem’s not in the word by C. F. Keary | Peter Riley’s Poetry Notes: An Anthology for the Apocalypse | Diderot: The Curious Materialist, by Caroline Warman | Cambridge and two more poems by Ralph Hawkins | Gerard Manley Hopkins: No Worst There Is None, by Alan Wall | Hoyt Rogers: Seeing with Words: Yves Bonnefoy and the Seicento | Dragon Rock, and two more short fictions, by Umiyuri Katsuyama, translated by Toshiya Kamei | Adorno and the Philosophy of Modern Music: Part three of the essay by Tronn Overend | Michael Buckingham Gray: Back to the drawing board, an extremely short story | Customer. Relationship. Management. A downloadable polemic by Sascha Akhtar | Strictly Scrum: Michelene Wandor on the life and work of James Haskell, flanker | Michial Farmer On Elegance | Telling it for ourselves: Simon Collings on the latest cinema news from Africa | Stephen Wade on the Good Soldier and his creator: The Good Writer Hašek | Six prose poems by Scott Thurston | The Seicento and the Cult of Images by Yves Bonnefoy, and ‘Seeing with Words: Yves Bonnefoy and the Seicento,’ by Hoyt Rogers | Jonathan Gorvett, In Djibouti with The Angel of Hulme | An Aural Triptych by Daragh Breen | Immanuel Kant and the origin of the dialectic, the second part of Tronn Overend’s essay on Adorno and music | Three bilinguacultural poems by Changming Yuan | The Optician, short fiction by Cecilia Eudave | (a bean) — fiction by Marzia D’Amico | Stories from The Jazz Age by Aidan Semmens | ‘The London Cage’ and three more poems, by Judith Willson | Manifestos for a lost cause: A sequence of poems by Peter Robinson | Seven new poems by Barry Schwabsky | The poetry of social commitment: Poetry Notes by Peter Riley | The poet as essayist, by Alan Wall | On Gathering and Togethering in Medellin by Richard Berengarten | Two songs by Tristram Fane Saunders | What Heroism Feels Like: Fiction by Benjamin Wolfe | Two poems: ‘Inbound’ and one untitled about Ziggy by Nigel Wheale | Iconoclasm and portraiture in recent fiction by Paul Cohen | The Weimar Republic and critical theory: Adorno on modern music. First in a series by Tronn Overend | From the archive: Art, constantly aspiring: The School of Giorgione by Walter Pater | Seven very, very short fictions by Tom Jenks | The Seicento and the Cult of Images by Yves Bonnefoy | Three poems after reading Heine by Tom Lowenstein | Six new poems by Johanna Higgins | Macanese Concrete by Peter McCarey | ‘Leave-taking’, the end of a left-bank affair. By Ian Seed | Peter Riley probes Laura Riding’s many modes and offers his 2020 list of summer reviews |Bibliographic Archæology in Cairo by Raphael Rubinstein | Steve Xerri: Ezra Pound’s life in verse — with two more new poems, one featuring Keats | New Poems by Carrie Etter and Anna Forbes | ‘So, Dreams’ and three more poems, by Luke Emmett | Simon Collings wanders Buñuel’s labyrinth of artifice | Matt Hanson on the Romaniotes in America | For Once, a short fiction by Susana Martín Gijón | Four prose poems by Jane Monson | Jesse Glass and the poetry of ‘ouch’, explained: Pain… | Three poems, one very prose-like, by Claire Crowther | Two new poems by Sandra Kolankiewicz | Michelene Wandor reviews a metro-anthology from London’s twin cities | Simon Collings interviews Jeremy Noel-Tod, anthologist of prose poetry | Alan Wall: How we see now. A Note on Inscape, Descriptionism and Logical Form | Simon Perril: Poems from ‘the Slip’ | Michael Blackburn reviews Byatt’s Odd Angel | Christopher Landrum looks through Chris Arnade’s candid camera at America | Nigel Wheale reviews Ian Crockatt’s translations of the Skaldic verse of Orkney | Osip Mandelstam’s Tristia, in a new translation by Peter McCarey | Anna de Noailles: Thirteen poems in versions by Anthony Howell | Meandering through the Belle-Époque with Anthony Howell | Peter Riley‘s Poetry Notes for Summer 2020 | Three collections of prose poetry: 1.Nine haibun by Sheila E. Murphy | 2.Hurt Detail and two more prose poems by Lydia Unsworth | 3.Ten prose poems, five about men. By Mark Russell | The Latest Event in the History of the Novel by Paul Cohen | Life after life: Viduities, an essay by Alan Wall | As Grass Will Amend (Intend) Its Surfaces, by landscape poet Peter Larkin | More delicate, if minor, interconnections. Poetry by Tom Lowenstein | What Peter Knobler discovered out Walking While White in New York City | Alan Wall reviews Ian Sansom’s autopsy of Auden’s September 1, 1939 | A few very short fictions by Georgia Wetherall | A Play — for 26 Voices by Alice Notley | Four new poems from Credo, Stephen Wiest‘s new collection | Nigel Wheale on the significance and frailty of Raymond Crump | Ottomania! Matt Hanson reports on three new Turkish titles | Cinema: Simon Collings looks into Andrew Kötting’s Whalebone Box | Gowersby. A new puzzle-fiction by Shukburgh Ashby | The Jinn of Failaka: Reportage byMartin Rosenstock | Five Hung Particles by Iain Britton | Three poems from ‘Sovetica’ by Caroline Clark | It’s about time—Boustrophedon time: Anthony Howell is Against Pound | When words fail: Alan Wall diagnoses Shakespeare’s Dysnarrativia | Olive Custance, Lord Alfred Douglas’s much, much better half. By Ferdi McDermott | Three gardens and a dead man by Khaled Hakim | Poems from The Messenger House by Janet Sutherland | Two new poems by British-Canadian poet Pete Smith | Mob Think: Michael Blackburn reviews Kevin D. Williamson’s Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mobs | Natalia Ginzburg’s On Women. The first translation in English, by Nicoletta Asciuto | Alan Wall: Considering I, alone, An interrogation of the isolated first person | Anthony Howell reviews Christopher Reid’s ‘Love, Loss and Chianti’ | Jeremy Hilton: An excerpt from Fulmar’s Wing | Peter Riley: Hakim and Byrne and a spring storm of ‘Poetry Notes’ | Simon Collings with news of African films, including a review of Mati Diop’s Atlantics |Alan Price reviews Anthony Howell’s mind-body reflections | Franca Mancinelli: Pages from the Croatian Notebook, in a translation by John Taylor |Anne Stevenson: A tribute to Eugene Dubnov | David Hay: Two poems, one in prose | Four poems from ‘Lectio Volant’ by Steve Ely | Seven very short stories by Ian Seed | Advice from all over: Peter Riley on How to Write Poetry | Geoffrey Hill and the Perturbation of Baruch by Anthony O’Hear | Bird of four tongues by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee | Deirdre Mikolajcik: Abstract Wealth and Community in The Way We Live Now (Trollope Prize) | Nyssa Ruth Fahy on A Less-Beaten Path: Trollope’s West Indian fiction (Trollope Prize) | Blame it on the rain: flash fiction on two wheels, by Michael Buckingham Gray | True love—at 103: Breakfast with Mrs Greystone by S.D. Brown | The last Mantegna: fiction by Michelene Wandor | My first thirty years: A serial by Alan Macfarlane | Quotidian verse: She went to the hospital for an infection. By T. Smith-Daly | Tradition, by Enzo Kohara Franca. ‘My mother’s parents didn’t make it easy for her. In 1938 they immigrated from Sendai, where all men are Japanese, to São Paulo, where all men are Brazilian.’ | Peter Riley: Autumn reviews of new poetry | George Maciunas and Fluxus, reviewed by Simon Collings | The Political Agent in Kuwait, by Piers Michael Smith | Mother child: fiction by Conor Robin Madigan | The marital subtext of The State of the Union, reviewed by Michelene Wandor | Swincum-le-Beau, a puzzle-fiction in the spirit of Pevsner. By Shukburgh Ashby | Gibraltar Point and three more poems by Iain Twiddy | Six quite brief fictions by Simon Collings | James Gallant: Puttering with E.M. Cioran | Blind man’s fog and other poems by Patrick Williamson | None of us: a poem by Luke Emmett | Rankine’s uncomfortable citizenship by Michelene Wandor | Languages: A Ghazal by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee | Seven more poems by Tom Lowenstein | Five poems from ‘Mattered by Tangents’ by Tim Allen | Anthony Howell: Freewheeling through some post-summer reading | ‘Noise’ and three more new poems by Maria de Araújo | A shelf of new poetry books for summer reviewed by Peter Riley in ‘Poetry Notes’ | Film: Simon Collings on Peter Strickland’s In Fabric | Michelene Wandor reviews Helen Dunmore’s Counting Backwards | Mauritius in three voices, by Emma Park | The hidden virtues of T-units and n-grams, by Davina Allison | Peter McCarey reviews W.D. Jackson’s latest Opus | Seven new poems by poet-ethnographer Tom Lowenstein | Anthony Howell: Empyrean Suite, an afterlife collaboration with Fawzi Karim | Christine Gallant reviews Herb Childress’s book on the life of the Adjunct Prof | The talk of The Dolphin, King’s Cross, as reported by Michael Mahony | Franca Mancinelli: Eight poems from Mala Kruna, in translations by John Taylor | A short question: Who will read short stories? David McVey answers | Eavesdropping on Olmecs: New poems by Jesse Glass | Two new poems by Laura Potts | Simon Collings on existence and its discontents in Capernaum | Peter Riley: Reviews yet more new prose-poetry | Anthony Rudolf remembers Turkish poet, novelist and essayist Moris Farhi | James Gallant sheds new light on the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in Brussels | Theatre: Third Person Theatre Co., and ‘The Noises’ reviewed by Anthony Howell | A fourth gulp of prose poems from ‘The Dice Cup’ by Max Jacob in a new translation by Ian Seed | Lots more short fiction: A new item by Michael Buckingham Gray and a full half-dozen by Simon Collings | Apollo 17 and the Cartoon Moon: Lunar poetry by James Bullion | Juvenal may be missing his moment: Satire for the millennium by Anthony Howell | Pickle-fingered truffle-snouter: fiction by Robert Fern | April Is the Cruellest Month: London fiction by Georgie Carroll | The Beginning and the End of Art…in Tasmania. By Tronn Overend | Kathy Stevens’s plate of fresh fiction: Everything in This Room is Edible | Boy, a new poem tall and lean by Tim Dooley | Beckett, Joyce, words, pictures — all reviewed by Peter O’Brien | Even more new translations by Ian Seed from Max Jacob’s Dice Cup | Poetry written in Britain’s ‘long moment’: A dialogue and portfolio of work by Peter Robinson and Tim Dooley | ‘Remembering Ovid’, a new poem by Alan Wall | Four new poems by Luke Emmett | Hugo Gibson on Discount entrepreneurship and the start-up accelerator | ‘Half a Black Moon’ and three more new poems by Seth Canner | Martin Stannard’s life-lessons: What I did and how I did it | Anthony Howell on three indelible images left after a season of exhibitions | You good? Anthony O’Hear reviews Christian Miller’s The Character Gap. | Peter Riley on Olson, Prynne, Paterson and ‘extremist’ poetry of the last century. | Three prose poems by Linda Black,with a concluding note on the form | Simon Collings watches Shoplifters, critically | Tim McGrath: In Keen and Quivering Ratio — Isaac Newton and Emily Dickinson together at last | Daragh Breen: A Boat-Shape of Birds: A sequence of poems | Peter Riley reviews First-Person ‘Identity’ Poems: New collections by Zaffar Kunial and Ishion Hutchinson | Marko Jobst’s A Ficto-Historical Theory of the London Underground reviewed by Michael Hampton | José-Flores Tappy: A Poetic Sequence from ‘Trás-os-Montes’ | Nick O’Hear: Brexit and the backstop and The tragedy of Brexit | Ian Seed: back in the building with Elvis | Nigel Wheale’s remembrance of ‘11.11.11.18’| Franca Mancinelli: Maria, towards Cartoceto, a memoir | Tamler Sommers’s Gospel of Honour, a review by Christopher Landrum | Typesetters delight: Simon Collings reviews Jane Monson’s British Prose Poetry | In Memoriam: Nigel Foxell by Anthony Rudolf | David Hackbridge Johnson rambles through Tooting | Auld acquaintances: Peter Riley on Barry MacSweeney and John James | ‘Listening to Country Music’ and more new poems by Kelvin Corcoran | Latest translations by Ian Seed from Max Jacob’s The Dice Cup | Claire Crowther: four poems from her forthcoming ‘Solar Cruise’| Anthony Howell on the lofty guardians of the new palace | War and the memory of war, a reflection by Jerry Palmer | The ‘true surrealist attentiveness’ of Ian Seed’s prose poems, reviewed by Jeremy Over | Antony Rowland: Three place-poems, a response to Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Brontë | New fiction by Gabi Reigh | Simon Collings reviews ‘Faces Places’ by Agnès Varda and JR | Ian Seed’s life-long love of short prose-poems | Michael Buckingham Gray’s extremely short story: ‘A woman’s best friend.’ | Simon Collings’s new fiction: Four short prose pieces | Anthony Costello: ‘Coleridge’s Eyes’ were his shaping spirits | Anthony Rudolf remembers poet and broadcaster Keith Bosley | Michael Hampton on Jeremy David Stock’s ‘Posthuman and categorically nebulous art writing’ | Peter O’Brien meets Paulette, Martin Sorrell’s ‘extravagent mystery’ of a mother | Anthony Howell reviews Lady Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory | :: For much more, please consult our partial archive, below on this page.
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Augustus Young’s ‘Heavy Years’.
A Fortnightly Review of
Heavy Years: Inside the Head of a Health Worker
by Augustus Young
Quartet Books 2018 | 299pp | £20.00 $25.50
By MARIANNE MAYS.
“Augustus Young”, as a very young poet in Cork, needed a pseudonym so as not to “be disgracing the family name” and discovered it in Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe,
The smooth combination of boundless ambition and deflating irony gave him the persona he wanted. I like to think that “Charles Augustus Fortescue,” the hero of Hilaire Belloc’s Cautionary Tales, may also have played a part in his choice: Belloc is mentioned early on in Heavy Years. Young has never — to my knowledge — written under any other name. His most recent publications are Brazilian Tequila and (in verse and prose) the poignant m.emoire.
The narrator is nameless, so readers can no longer assume that he and the author are the same…the pseudonym as a literary device contributes to the reader’s almost subliminal sense of bewilderment.
In the same way, Heavy Years eludes the nets of classification. Satire, sociology, history, politics, memoir, Irish writing, philosophical meditation: where would a bookseller place it on the shelves? Suspended between genres, it plays by the rules of none. The blurb calls it “autofiction” but the word does not fit. The rules of that game are that you use the same name as writer (at the keyboard), author (on the cover), and first-person narrator, and then stand over what you have written and take the flak. Knausgaard is widely disliked and deplored as well as admired. My Struggle stands or falls by its truth-claims, though people who appear as characters in his story may (and do) dispute his version of it. In Heavy Years “the barrier that divides fact from fiction is often crossed and double-crossed” (the blurb again), so how can it also be the “inside story of the NHS”? A conundrum, but the subtitle provides a clue. Inside this health-worker’s head is an enormous treasure trove of quotation and reference, and out of it comes a sentence, used as the epigraph, from Kierkegaard’s The Law of Delicacy, to get him off the hook: “The author has the right to use what he himself has experienced. But he must keep the truth to himself and only let it be refracted in various ways.”
A book about the NHS could hardly be more timely or relevant than in this year of that institution’s seventieth birthday.
A book about the NHS could hardly be more timely or relevant than in this year of that institution’s seventieth birthday. The story covers the last decades of the twentieth century, tracing the inexorable growth of bureaucracy, with its proliferating superstructures and substructures, its conflicting interest groups and its tangled politics. This is the behemoth into which the narrator is infiltrated by his Mephistophelean mentor Mal Combes, a consultant with an agenda of his own (though it is not clear what that is) who employs him as a researcher on a project “nobody else wants to do,” and, tacitly, as his own Trojan horse: as a neutral researcher “Poet” (as Mal dubs him) will have a point of entry into “the inner circle.” Mal Combes provides him with the lowdown on the established order, from the Powers That Be, the Mandarins, the Eminent Persons Group, and the Great and Good, through the Health Authorities, Lobby Horses, People Who Matter on the Ground and the Upper Echelons, down to the Underlings and the Humans (human resources). He ends his overview with a piece of advice —“know that nobody loves anyone else unless they have to,” ,and then “thumbing devil’s ears ….’Welcome to the portal of hell’.” Thus Poet begins his progress, more pilgrim’s than rake’s, for by this time he has decided that he “had to find a trajectory” of his own. Mal Combes may be his mentor on the swampy ground of the NHS, but “the voices in [his] head” are more important as he searches for “the large idea” he needs. Chief among the voices are Hegel, Descartes, Voltaire, Brunet, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer (who was “like opening the Bible to tell you what to do”) with contributions from Bentham and Nietzsche and guest appearances by Janáček and Duke Ellington, while films are “my writing on the wall.” But at this particular juncture as he starts his progress, it is the voice of Rudolf Virchow that predominates. Virchow, a German pathologist celebrated in his time but now largely forgotten. His words, “Medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing but medicine on a larger scale,” become his marching slogan (and the second epigraph at the front of this book).
This statement of simultaneous self-definition and self-effacement is pivotal. Ironically, a few pages later in conversation with one of his new colleagues, Michel Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic is mentioned: “‘He’s an extremist of self-effacement,’ Dean sighed, ‘And at the same time cloyingly arrogant.’ That rang a bell.”
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The story from here on tells of his successes and failures in putting his plan into practice on the ground Mal Combes has mapped out for him. “Hell’s portal opened onto quagmire of unhappiness,” the various groups regarding each other with mutual suspicion. The personnel are introduced under semi-allegorical comic names like Stanley O. Kay and Dame Brenda Tabby. The Powers That Be are headed by Dame Sibyl, and later Little John followed by the New Broom. As “the projects person” with an office in a converted gent’s toilet our pilgrim has his base for infiltrating the system. Starting small, and keeping Virchow out of sight, he devises his own research projects into such areas as redundant treatments, obsolete medication, and ways of using computerisation (just coming in) for identifying doctors with unusual death-rates, which he then presents at meetings of the hierarchical Groups. The upper Groups regard him, initially, as a useful scapegoat, but then worry that he’s getting above himself. “The Eminent Persons Group, their iron bottoms newly polished, were firmly in the driving seat.” He has more success with a grass-roots strategy, getting to know the Underlings and the Humans, and achieves a number of small Virchovian adjustments that produce big improvements in the quality of daily hospital life. But success draws the attention of the Eminents. Dame Brenda tracks him down: ”So this is your piss-palace! Very engaging. Are you occupied? . . . The group considers you a useful resource. . . . If you attended our meetings from time to time it would be of mutual benefit.” The freedom of invisibility is threatened further when he finds himself promoted, by default, to management status. ”I wasn’t cut out to be a manager. . . . A manipulator perhaps.”
Then, the narrator is knocked off his bike by a white van, shattering his elbow. He has a spell in hospital (his own) and a rehabilitatory charity cycle ride across the holy land (‘Get back on your bike’, says his therapist) When he returns to work four months later he finds all changed by the departure of Mrs. Sibyl and the arrival of the New Broom. There is a new language: “value-added,” “consumer-driven” and “delivering outcomes downstream.” He settles back, determined not to rock the boat “before landing on my desert island, retirement.” But the end arrives suddenly. An enemy from the aftermath of Lovecraft is on his tail, and “I knew I would have to go sooner rather than later.” He writes an article on Virchow for an anarchist journal, and Mal Combes advises him to “Go while the going is good.” The pilgrimage ends “on a soggy note” in a wet car-park, a scene of mingled farce and pathos, and a small, token, victory. The outsider is back outside.
There is a chapter in the middle of Heavy Years on Irishness, “My secret weapon,” the chief credential of Pilgrim’s continuing outsider status as he moves into the mainstream. The ambiguities of being Irish while being permanently resident and fully employed in England would be recognised by many in the same position: the English politeness in avoiding the fact of his Irishness, “at least directly,” while at the same time allowing him to “get away with” remarks that would be frowned on if made by a fellow English person. “‘A breath of fresh air,’ warbled Lady Wilton. But on balance I don’t think she liked draughts.” On a more serious level, “Becoming English in any way was unthinkable” because of his family history, his father having been a prominent revolutionary in the War of Independence. More serious still, his “Autotochthones” — “the old people in my blood” — speak up inside his head on from time to time, as when a “good bad movie,” with a revenge plot in the Liverpool Irish community, brings on an attack of atavistic violent patriotism and the sense of being in enemy territory. “I left the cinema with the dark intoxication boiling in my blood. . . . Only when I hit the frail tenuous light of the high street did I come to my senses.” He’s rescued by his critical faculty — he can see the weakness of the film — and his addiction to word-play: the ‘‘’big’ dropped out of my ambiguities, and I was left with ‘amities’.” There is no ambiguity in in the moving account of the IRA bombing in Regent’s Park in July 1982. He had gone to listen to the lunchtime concert by the Green Jackets band. The bomb went off under the bandstand, killing eight members of the band. As he leaves the Park he writes a slogan on the bridge: “Virchow lives.” Amity prevails.
Irishness is not the only or even the essential element of his self-definition as an outsider. From the start, he feels a stranger in his own family…
Irishness is not the only or even the essential element of his self-definition as an outsider. From the start, he feels a stranger in his own family: ”I wondered what game we were playing, and what the house rules were,” and “It crossed my mind that I could be a changeling.” The Prologue describes a household where family dynamics work at high pressure, while he, the fourth of five children is, or feels himself to be, the catalyst of disturbance. He is sent to one school after another, finally managing to scrape into university. “When my siblings began to have second thoughts about the fool of the family, my mother said, ‘Don’t encourage him. It will go to his hair’.” At Medical School he does well on written papers but not on clinical work because “I became pale and loitering when confronted with bodily fluids.” He is awarded a Bachelor of Medicine on condition he does not continue towards an MD, which would allow him to practice. With this anomalous qualification he is off to London to look for a job as a lab assistant in the big city where he hopes he will be “left alone to get on with getting away with things.” And, he adds, “The idea of living with the ancient Irish enemy excited me too.” The outsider finds his role.
Heavy Years does not fit comfortably into the comparatively recent slot labelled “Irish writing.” His cultural frame of reference — which structures the arena “inside his head” where the real activity of Heavy Years takes place — is revealed through the epigraphs that head the Parts and Chapters. They are taken from, in sequence, Kierkegaard, Virchow, Thomas Wyatt, E. M. Cioran, Rousseau, Ed Dorn, Shakespeare, Brecht, Samuel Johnson. Kafka, Voltaire, La Rochefoucauld and Montaigne. The literary figures quoted or referred in the text include Blake, Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Milton, Swift, Melville, Lewis Carroll, Hawthorne, Wallace Stevens, Proust, Stendhal, Rilke, Baudelaire and Verlaine, Conrad. Dickens is there, though not by name: the visit to Jo Manders and her ancient mother in their “doll’s house” is surely a mini-homage to the description of Pip’s visit to Wemmick and “the Aged P.” in Great Expectations. Yeats’s “Come away, O human child” is quoted in the Prologue as a childhood memory. Young began writing poetry under the influence of Austin Clarke, experimenting with techniques imported from Gaelic poetry, but his more recent writing does not reflect any specifically Irish influence or trends. An Irish voice, but the choir is the Great European Tradition.
There’s food for thought on every page of Heavy Years. Mal Combes rebukes the narrator at one point for “over-estimating the cultural reference of your poor staff” in his memos. Readers may identify with the staff. But keep your attention on tiptoe, Wikipedia to hand, and you may find this the most stimulating, entertaining and curious book you’ve read in some time.
♦
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Publication: Friday, 3 August 2018, at 10:31.
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