Author: Richard

Hello! My name is Richard O’Brien, and I’m a critical-creative practitioner interested in early modern theatre and its creative afterlives in the present day. My PhD was on Shakespeare and the development of verse drama. I won the 2015 Ben Jonson Journal Discoveries Award for an article on fictional representations of Jonson. I’m also a widely published poet, and the winner of a 2017 Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors. You can contact me about the course on r.t.obrien@bham.ac.uk, or make an appointment to see me in my office, shared with Dr Elizabeth Sandis, just through the computer cluster.

The Teleportation Accident, by Ned Beauman

 Egon Loeser, the protagonist of Ned Beauman’s second novel, is a set designer obsessed with spectacular feats of stagecraft, the kind that make onstage characters disappear before their audience’s eyes. As such, it’s wholly apposite that the novel which revolves around him works largely through a classic bait-and-switch.

 We spend the majority of its three-hundred-plus pages in the company of one of the most feckless individuals in recent fiction, an agonised egomaniac who is a loser by nature as well as by name. In early 1930s Berlin, Egon barely notices the Wehrmacht gearing into action around him – he’s suffering too much from his own blue balls to heed the greater suffering inflicted by the blackshirts. Instead, he spends the decade chasing the beautiful socialite Adele Hitler all the way to Los Angeles from the hip abandoned corset factories of the German capital. ‘Loeser’s attitude was that if a place was abandoned it was probably abandoned for a reason’, writes Beauman in a sentence suggesting that the retro-conversion racket of modern-day Shoreditch isn’t even itself original. And Adele’s unfortunate name is only one of the many historical allusions that Loeser doesn’t spot.

Which is part of the point: he’s too embedded in his own present circumstances to think about what they’ll mean in the future, which is why he feels no qualms about throwing away a half-read letter from a Jewish friend who is verbally abused on a streetcar, and doesn’t baulk at a missive from a friend who has joined the SS out of a penchant for being surrounded by men in gleaming uniforms. Loeser’s reactions aren’t ours, but the novel asks: if you were there at the time, could you guarantee you’d have been paying any more attention?

Of course, Loeser himself wasn’t there at the time either. Throughout The Teleportation Accident, Beauman smuggles in questions of fiction and reality that are, for the most part, too compellingly funny to come off as smugly post-modern. The clearest of these is Loeser’s American landlord, Gorge, who suffers from ‘ontological agnosia’ – a disease which makes him unable to distinguish between objects and representations of those objects.

Spilling ginger ale on a map of Los Angeles sketched on a napkin, the afflicted party screams ‘Flesh of Christ! … Newspapers! Ambulance! Thousands drowned!’; later, he attempts to shoot the stuffed and mounted head of a bear he has previously dispatched in Montana some years earlier. There are subtle suggestions that humanity is already on the path to a world where everything is a copy of a copy of a copy. Not that Loeser particularly notices, of course; or would care if he did.

Part of this novel’s appeal is that it never tries too hard to render its main character appealing. We see personal and political history unfolding through Loeser, a filter which is at best blurry and at worst actively begrimed. He allows Beauman to make observations which are frequently startling in their lewdness, while often stunning in the fluent beauty of the prose in which they are expressed. And perhaps it’s exactly by diverting the reader’s attention from what’s ‘really happening’ – the rise of fascism, the human cost of war – that this darkly funny romp through early twentieth-century history allows the horrors massing on the horizon to truly make their presence felt.

Confessions of an Accidental Arsonist

from 2011’s  The Salt Book of Younger Poets, edited by Roddy Lumsden and Eloise Stonborough, & with thanks to Ash magazine.

How can I say what made me miss the embers
as I came to you, bun-heavy, fingers derelict with yeast?
Our sheets that night were warm as plague, a pie crust,
and I felt your sleeping ribcage rise like loaves.
Outside, they didn’t know our names, they turned
on spits of fitful sleep, but we were golden.
Slowly, love, we burned.

That night I dreamed I walked along the wharves.
The stars were crumbs, or fish too far away to catch;
the air played Chinese whispers, double-Dutch,
kissed me with salt it rubbed into my elbow crooks
that stung like creaking timber, and a vast
sense of my littleness broke over me. I remember
the stories. Light in the east.

Our daughter reads incendiary books.
The wrinkles kneaded in her face are politics,
the new astrology. Her crossed eyes are a crucifix
and her virginity reminds me I will die.
I stroke her inky head. Her hair invents the match.
The rotten weight drowsing across the rooves
lifts its head like a latch.

Now something is rising in this half-baked city;
the morning light does a roaring trade, sold on
until every street is a red hand holding
another hand, the Thames a boiling butter churn,
the houses dribbling new red humours. Look.
The future kindles cupolas and kilns and bricks.
We jump. Too many cooks

will spoil anything. That much we’ve learnt.
Blow on your fingers, shake off flour and slumber.
Now the news joyrides the wind. Unnumbered
wooden dotages collapse, choking, and the river heaves
a red-hot vomit. They are counting casualties.
My lungs breathe in all the ash of London, and it sticks.
I breathe out, but it sticks to me.

What Rev is doing right

It’s very rare for Rev to make me laugh out loud – which might seem an unusual admission for what I’ve already described as one of my favourite  comedies currently on British TV. This in itself suggests it’s worth looking more closely at how it works, and why it works so well, despite its fairly low rate of chuckles per minute; it might also suggest that when we like a TV comedy that isn’t always funny, we might want to think more about what comedy is.

Specifically, it's about these people

To begin with the banal; Rev is about people. It devotes a large proportion of time in each episode of its second series, which finished last night, to giving us a good sense of who its characters are, what they think of those around them, what they want, and what they think they want. Knowing what someone is supposed to be like makes it more interesting, and curiously, more plausible, when they do unexpected things: when Colin experiments with alternative forms of spirituality, for instance, or when Mick (admittedly not a developed character, but a well-established comic turn) kicks drugs and shares his secrets, or when Archdeacon Robert openly discusses his sexuality along with his spirituality, both of which have up to this point been kept firmly in the background. All of these moments have emotional weight because, rather than rushing for the comic jugular, writers Tom Hollander and James Wood have taken the time to craft, through subtle detail, a sense of psychological expectation which is solid enough for viewers to accommodate new information, the kind that doesn’t vanish by the time of the next thirty-minute episode. We finish Series Two feeling we know more about these people than we did at the start of it; that the problems and questions it raises will continue to matter at the start of Series Three.

Specifically, this God

But Rev is also about God – in a serious, not a frivolous way. I don’t know, and nor do I particularly want to, if Wood and Hollander are paid-up believers; but as the credits make clear, a lot of ecumenical advice has gone into the show’s creation. It tells, because rather than reducing religion to a series of paedophile priest quips (cf episode 5 of Life’s Too Short), or the brilliant, but perhaps slightly kitsch surrealism of Father Ted, the show gives voice to the debates and doubts about mercy, morality and the treatment of others which have always driven genuine religious reflection. It’s true that the show generally supports Adam’s ministry, though it also shows him as a selfish bastard with very human failings – but by engaging with religion’s role in the world in a serious way, it elevates the inquiries of the Church to a position where they can be endorsed or dismissed from genuine understanding and criticism rather than ignorance.

This is something the best atheist comedians – Stewart Lee being the most obvious example – have also always understood, to the extent that Lee’s Catholic wife Bridget Christie challenges him for it in her own show. She expresses incomprehension at his need to have a deeper knowledge of the Bible than she does, likening it to someone with a hatred of Jeremy Clarkson watching every single episode of Top Gear. But some of Rev’s funniest, and most dramatic, moments come out of this engagement; I’m thinking of the football match in which Adam screams out a pep-talk about the difference between Catholic and Protestant interpretations of God, quoting which might make my point more clearly: ‘But most of all let’s do it for our kind, liberal God, who loves women and gays, and not their vain, tasteless, demanding God who loves gold and supported the Nazis!’

Anglicans: totally fine with men holding balls

Although Rev has been well-received by critics, it doesn’t neatly fit the comedy genre, and I think this is because we’ve come to expect every moment of a comedy show to be in itself comic. It might be more helpful to consider the genre more as an indicator of tone than a contract to deliver a certain type of content; some of the best drama, after all, is full of moments of uproarious laughter (This Is England ’88, of which more next time), but wouldn’t get packaged as dramatic comedy in the same way something like Rev might end up filed under comedy-drama. The obvious point here is that genres aren’t an adequate, or a particularly useful, way to subdivide works of art; but given the criteria that develop around an art-form which we expect primarily to make us laugh, it’s worth remembering that what makes a comedy good or great might not always just be what makes it comic.

 

‘Embrace The Margin’: Half Man Half Biscuit and Cultural Overload

‘How much more can I exhume?/How much more can you consume?’  asks Nigel Blackwell, ‘singer’ and lyricist of Half Man Half Biscuit, on their new and typically under-promoted album ’90 Bisodol’. The song quoted is ‘Left Lyrics in the Practice Room’, a caustic canter through the potential motivations of ‘Chris from FutureDoom’, a musical nobody with a taste for self-promotion.

At least, I think so; like all the best satire, it cuts more than one way, and like all the best Half Man Half Biscuit songs, it fires its arrows in about twenty directions at once. In two minutes and seven seconds, we’ve got glancing references to the Virgin Mary, Black Sabbath, the Dutch lager Oranjeboom, and a direct musical quotation of legendary bluesman Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘Let Your Light Shine On Me’.

To track the last reference, I had to do a little exhuming of my own, and this is the kind of reception Blackwell’s lyrics reward; though also, perversely, an attitude they mock and question. The song title itself suggests a certain ironic critical distance from the song lyric as a form; throughout Biscuit’s work, questions are raised about the validity of rock and roll, its proponents, and its audience, but this is a critique from within, ambivalent commentary on the state of play from a deeply-entrenched and highly literate observer.

I started with the word ‘singer’ in quotation marks because even the vocal delivery Blackwell favours seems to send-up the expectations of a frontman – exaggeratedly flat and sardonic, it functions as an alienating device from the usual romantic catharsis of rock and roll. (The fact that he is, objectively, quite bad at singing, is clearly also relevant; but not as relevant as the statement made by his decision to continue doing so, regardless.)

Rock and roll is ‘full of bad wools’, as the scorn-drenched closer, a running commentary on the televised panic of a landfill-indie idiot forced to share sofa space with Heston Blumenthal, repeatedly asserts; Blackwell’s final bark of the titular genre as the music cuts out is an act of highly-knowing vandalism. By smashing the myth of integrity, it’s possible that HMHB also scorch the earth sufficiently to reclaim it for themselves.

‘Lyrics’, therefore, in their traditional sense, also come in for some playful deconstruction. These aren’t heartfelt, linear transcriptions of the wounds of the heart, or even deliberately vague images suggestive of inner torment (cf Cobain); instead, within a broad vein of comic social critique, they’re a stringing together of disparate elements, a levelling of the dizzying array of cultural touchstones provided by contemporary mass-media into a gleefully anarchic post-modern mess.

A collage poster for a recent exhibition on Post-Modernism

The grammatical term ‘parataxis’ – defined by The Oxford Dictionary of English Grammar as ‘a very general term covering various kinds of juxtaposition of units of equal status, including the coordination of two (or more) equal clauses, phrases, or words, with or without coordinating conjunctions’ – and literally meaning ‘arrangement side by side’, has been used in literary theory to discuss styles, such as Pound’s Imagism and Dadaist poetry, which place disconnected images and statement side by side, without apparent connection, to disorientating effect. This is one of the main techniques Blackwell uses as a writer – why much of his work is so difficult to take in at a single sitting, and why there is a need to ‘exhume’ its multiple allusions, as the existence of various websites (here and here) for the purpose will attest.

See, for example, the end of rant-ballad ‘Descent Of The Stiperstones’, where the narrator, fleeing from an awkward encounter with former Crossroads actress Lynette McMorrough (not a figure in particular need of uncrowning) collides with a surreal series of items including ‘a pack of Triffid seeds, an icerink for a model village’, ‘post-apocalyptic Allen keys’, ‘a jar of language pills’ and ‘a jigsaw of Nazi war criminals’. And let’s not even get started on ‘Tommy Walsh’s Eco House’ – (‘back-to-back Cadfael, Ross Kemp on Watership Down‘) – I’ve already had a bellyful.

This is, apparently, Lynette McMorrough. And apparently this blog exists.

What’s the point of all of this, then? Is Nigel Blackwell just mentioning anything and everything that daytime TV brings into his Birkenhead living room, or is there some wider principle of selection and direction? I’d argue yes, though in full awareness that he would describe the literary-critical approach of this essay, like many of the teams in the Korfball tournament scrutinised in the anthemic ‘Joy in Leeuwarden’, as ‘just a crock of shit.’ It’s the nature of this kind of thing to reject – well, my kind of thing. But nonetheless, there’s got to be a reason why it works.

I think it’s all linked to that question of consumption. In modern capitalist society, it’s impossible to consume everything, though according to the media and advertising, it’s imperative to try – to hear the next Pitchfork-recommended album, buy the latest Guardian-approved box-set, follow Stephen Fry’s Twitter and the Strictly Come Dancing liveblog. And what this creates for many people is a feeling of cultural overload – of being constantly, helplessly surrounded by a never-ending stream of input, of signal to be sorted from noise, wheat from chaff. What’s interesting about Blackwell’s songs is their refusal to engage in this sorting process – instead of picking one style or idea or subject and running with it, they fire names, images, messages at the listener like a demented tennis-ball machine.

They simultaneously parody and celebrate the overwhelming ephemera of our lives, the petty annoyances and omnipresent subliminal grabs at our already fractured attention. They don’t read it, or attempt to explain it, in a coherent sociological thesis (and having no relevant training, neither will I), but they recombine the detritus of modern living and modern media into fresh, surprising collages, and in doing so continue a fine 20th-century and onwards tradition of subversive, playful cultural critique. And they do with a much better sense of humour than a post like this can ever hope to have.