It is extremely difficult to categorise this new work, Cannibals, from Dan Collins. To label it a novel is not exactly correct, nor is it a collection of short stories in any conventional sense. It is, rather, bitesize slices of life from Ireland, Britain and America. An array of characters - men, but mostly women, from a variety of backgrounds - overheard telling their stories.
The reader is afforded no background information on these characters and is plunged directly into each narrative. Neither is there any overall theme or motif binding together the stories told and disparate collection of characters. There is, though, one fact uniting many of them: they mostly seem to have connections to the heady world of media with careers in modelling, TV and so on.
This is an environment that Dan Collins obviously knows, as he is himself a scriptwriter and has spent time in London and Los Angeles. This is not to suggest that Cannibals concerns itself with laying bare the intimate details of that kind of life. Instead, what the reader learns is that people everywhere have the same desires, fears and foibles. If this is not a novel or a collection of short stories, it is best understood as something akin to a film script. Scripts are about voices and consequently this book is concerned with presenting voices: many different voices - unconnected, disembodied, fragmented voices.
The stories they tell move from the ordinary and mundane to the less than ordinary and mundane. Characters find themselves in hopeless relationships with lovers, parents, and friends. Some narratives are shot through with bleak humour and some wit. None is too demanding of the reader because no one narrative, no one voice, is sustained beyond a few pages. The problem is, of course, that due to this rapid movement from one instalment to the next, nothing is allowed to linger in the reader's memory.
The result is a bit of a mess and somewhat confusing. Some voices merge and meld into one another at times as there are not enough distinguishing characteristics or unique verbal tics to set them apart. Perhaps, all of this is intentional and Collins wants his readers to feel queasy and disorientated.
It is a technique borrowed from the cinema and has been successfully used in recent films like Magnolia, Happiness and Short Cuts. However, in those movies the puzzlement experienced at the outset was resolved as the movie progressed. Here, no such moment of revelation is volunteered. It is questionable, then, that it is a style suited to prose fiction.
Art, it could be said, at an essential level simply gives shape to experience: that's what makes art different from the world it reflects. When art is shapeless, it is a bit too real in its ordinariness.
Dan Collins certainly displays a talent for the monologue and maybe these would be better served by being filmed, where the camera could really bring the words, and the worlds they express, to life.
Derek Hand is Faculty of Arts Fellow in the Department of Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama, UCD