How awkward would it have been if the debut short story collection by the young editor of Stinging Fly magazine, discerning champion of the form in Ireland, had been a dud?
Very. Happily, though, it isn’t. In fact, it’s like one of those fireworks that flares not just once, but repeatedly, each time higher up and more spectacularly.
It is, of course, too soon to say with certainty that Thomas Morris’s We Don’t Know What We’re Doing will stand the test of time, although credible critics here and elsewhere have made comparisons to Richard Brautigan and Donald Barthelme, even James Joyce and Dylan Thomas. Having just re-read it, I can say, however, that like a good curry it is even better second time around.
There are equally valid comparisons to be drawn to his friend Colin Barrett’s award-winning debut collection, Young Skins, with its unity of place and gallery of disaffected youth, but also with screenwriters Ruth Jones (Gavin & Stacey and Stella) and Alan Bleasdale (Boys from the Blackstuff), whose sharp wit, black humour and bleak backdrops Morris shares.
It’s a bold move to set your first book in your home town, particularly if you’ve long left it behind, but, without ever sliding into sentimentality, an affection for the place and compassion for its people shines through that should save his skin. “Caerphilly looks alright, doesn’t it,” says the protagonist in the excellent opener, Bolt. “Yeah. It’s a paradox though,” says another. “What is?” “The fact that it only looks nice when you’re away from it.”
The coal mines of south Wales may be long closed but Morris trawls through the slag heaps left behind with a sure eye for nuggets of black comedy gold and digs far enough beneath the surface of things to unearth a brilliant seam of compressed and darkly glittering stories, rich and plentiful enough to suggest there is enough here to fuel a career that will burn brightly for years to come.
We’re not really here, Manchester City fans used to sing, making light of their ignominious descent into the underworld of the old third division. Morris’s characters are similarly disbelieving at where they’ve ended up: on Caerphilly’s shuttered streets, as paralysed as Joyce’s Dubliners, as trapped as those Peruvivan miners, as haunted as Caerphilly’s looming, listing castle. Out of body experiences, in one case literally, are a recurring theme. His characters are uncomfortable in their own skin – again, in one case, literally. Even the homes in Castle View are Lego houses, their walls made only of plaster, as flimsy as a film set.
This isn’t a ludic playing up of the stories’ fictionality. This is saying that life itself can all too often be ersatz and shoddy; our experiences second-hand; reality unsatisfactory and unconvincing.
The teacher in Castle View sees his reflection “as if he’s standing in the garden looking in” as the kitchen window at night turns into a black mirror. Just as his eyes are raw from the virtual reality of playing Fifa on Xbox, so are the student’s in Fugue from internetting. The boy in 17 “felt outside and above myself, like I was watching us in some made-for-schools film about the danger of drugs”. Larry in all the boys reckons “we’re in The Matrix”. Gareth in the same story reckons “they’ve just brought the shell of his body over to Ireland”. In How Sad, How Lovely, the protagonist “felt unreal. Literally unreal, as if I wasn’t in my body anymore.” Life is not just hard sometimes; sometimes it’s hard to believe.
Morris’s characters are scrabbling for the means to survive emotionally and spiritually in a post-heroic and soulless service economy, where cirrhosis is likelier than silicosis to be their undoing. Unlike their fathers, they may no longer risk their lives underground to make a living but there is peril aplenty to be found on the surface.
The story titles are short, but rich with layers. Take Bolt and its multiple meanings. The tale’s most telling episode is about a wedding horse which bolts, only to come to a halt at a red traffic light, a virtual but effective bolting of the stable door. Likewise the young protagonist, whose freedom is an illusion. He has just lost his job as his video shop has closed down, and there is no Hollywood ending here. His life is like a tape in a VCR, a Groundhog Day of repeating his mistakes, fixating on a mother figure, hitting the end then spooling back to the start, a continuous loop, a vicious celluloid circle. We see him bolt his food, eating a burger without really savouring it, echoing his unexamined life. To bolt is also to produce seed prematurely – check.
The protagonist's latest mother figure, the town's only psychiatrist, is in fact just a counsellor – this is not New York City, after all – though the humour is a match for Woody Allen, sometimes subtle, sometimes broad, like Jimmy Hughes, the elderly ladies' man in Strange Traffic, defending his virility. "My cock is like that dog they put in space. It's still up there and it's never coming down."
There’s even a shout-out for the reasonably priced Zaytoon in Temple Bar in the wonderful all the boys, about a stag weekend in Dublin. Free kebabs for life? Maybe not. One of the lads sits outside, “his vomit softly coating the curb and cobblestones like one of Dali’s melted clocks”.
Life may be bleak but the writing is not. There are moments of transcendent joy, too, breakthroughs of understanding and appreciation, as in the passage which gives How Sad, How Lovely its name. “The ways and means of a good life rested inside all of us.”But there is always a price to pay.
The characters self-medicate with alcohol and, more healthily, with humour, but this is life taken seriously.
The writing isn’t ostentatious but there are some wonderful touches – “Caerphilly was bathed in sponge-gold light”; “streetlights glowing like electric lunchboxes”; “my body lumbered as if I’d just been camping”; “Katrina had scraped-back short hair, and looked like she’d seen some things. Things that were unlikely to appear in the Radio Times.”
All the boys is cleverly told entirely in the future tense, and Fugue in the second person, but each feels right, not showy. The last story, Nos Da, is at once a clever conceit and a profoundly moving piece of writing, a heartbreaking meditation on love and loss, addressed from a very original angle but so real you can see the pores on the characters’ faces and thoughts flicker across them. What fuels and sustains this flight of the imagination is its rootedness in reality, the writer’s keen empathy and tender understanding of how people think and act.
This is a debut of prodigious accomplishment, not mere promise.
Martin Doyle is asssitant literary editor of The Irish Times.
