Because The Night By Stacy Hardy & This Is The Ritual By Rob Doyle

Because the Night by Stacy Hardy &;; This is the Ritual by Rob Doyle

Published by Pocko (pb £;10) &;; Bloomsbury (hb £;16.99) respectively

#59;

Two girls squat in the undergrowth at the side of road. As they urinate they fall into awkward conversation. It transpires that one of the girls believes the other to have designs on her boyfriend, who sits in his parked car, waiting for the girls to finish.

“;I want to tell her there is nothing to steal, her boyfriend is an asshole. I swallow and focus on the piss. Her pee is a rigid stream, louder than my wet slurp. Everything about her is louder. She speaks first, says, ‘;I know you don’;t like me but now we have to be friends.’; Pee Sisters is what she calls it.”;

Pee Sisters, the opening story in South African writer Stacy Hardy’;s debut collection, Because the Night, sets the tone for the stories to follow: candid intimacies –; frequently graphic, at times uncomfortably so –; dealing with the personal politics of race, gender and sexuality. These are related in a prose-style that is both simple and direct, with endings that are often inconclusive, and the stories positioned so that one story seems to bleed naturally into the next. Thus the angst of Pee Sisters is followed by Breasting: a teenager’;s recollection of a wet t-shirt contest:

“;The first girl was on stage, jeers and laughing. She screamed when the water hit. I screamed too. I screamed for real. The shock of the cold, colder than I had imagined. It felt like a fist. The audience were cheering and clapping but they sounded far away. I was listening to them through a waterfall.”;

This is followed by ‘;A Breast is not a Leg’;, in which a young woman struggles to come to terms with the loss of one of her breasts and the impact this has on her relationship with her boyfriend:

“;She wrote down all the things the scar reminded her of: a shatter windshield;; road works as seen from an airplane;; the depression when they knocked down a skyscraper, a tear in the ground as if something deep within had escaped, burrowed out…;”;

‘;Whiteout’;, the story that follows, is a sexually explicit story set in the early stages of a relationship. This sequencing gives one the impression of being plugged into a very particular thought process –; one with its own strange subconscious logic at work, making connections, seeking symmetry and order and meaning. Sometimes the results are surprisingly surreal. In one story a girl compares her developing breasts to “;an embryonic mouse still pink and wet and curled in the womb”;;; in another, it is the penis of a paraplegic that is imagined as “;a kind of embryo, wrinkled and cervically pink, floating, its fists to its face.”; Similarly, the sexualised Kafka-esque allegory of ‘;Molester’; –; ostensibly about nothing more than a burrowing mole’;s progress through the earth (“;He knows the fate of all moles is tied to the fate of holes”;) –; is followed by ‘;Arse About Face’;, in which a prison warder disappears up the anus of his prisoner during a full body search:

“;He knew this is crazy, impossible, but still he kept going. His head was inside, like being birthed backwards, thick wet eyes and nose filled with body fluid. He got leverage, applied force. He could feel the veins on his forehead throbbing like tight knots. He tried to breath. He wrenched with his hands. Something tore then popped, broken through”;.

One of the principle joys in Hardy’;s collection lies in noticing the recurring themes and imagery as they are reemployed and refashioned to suit the different narrative voices and perspectives. The cumulative effect of this is to reinforce the irrepressibility of life and nature: its animal-like qualities, its will to live;; the differences between the sexes –; as well as the similarities. Quite simply, Because the Night is a startlingly assured collection.

A more perplexing read is the debut short story collection from Irish writer Rob Doyle, This is the Ritual. The opening story, ‘;John-Paul Finnegan, Paltry Realist’;, begins engagingly enough, with Finnegan, an unpublished writer, travelling back to Ireland aboard a boat named the Ulysses. During the journey he rails against Ireland, James Joyce and “;the typical and all-too-prevalent shit of literature”;, while espousing the principles of his invented genre, paltry realism. According to Finnegan, this is a school of writing that eschews all notions of style and content and the “;vanity of writing well”;. What begins as a moderately amusing character portrait and satirical swipe against Ireland’;s literary heritage doesn’;t quite manage to sustain its interest over its eighteen-page page length, and the lasting impression is akin to being trapped by a boorish bar-room philosopher as one’;s bemusement gradually curdles into resentment. Unfortunately, this is a pattern that is repeated throughout the collection –; much of which consists of a series of portraits of fictional writers (‘;The Glasgow Novels of Malcolm Donnelly’;;; ‘;Frederick Mulligan, Life in Flames’;, etc.) along with faux-literary criticism of their imagined works (“;The novel’;s climax is a long, desultory, expletive-ridden dialogue…;”;). While this post-modern playfulness is strongly reminiscent of Nabokov’;s Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Paul Auster’;s New York Trilogy (indeed, Auster is name-checked by Doyle;; as is Martin Amis, Brett Easton Ellis, Kafka, Ballard, Beckett, Burroughs –; to name but a very few: Doyle is not shy about citing his influences) it is unfortunate that Doyle’;s obsession with writing and the writing life tends to come across as insular and self-indulgent. What is most frustrating, though, is that, sentence by sentence, Doyle’;s writing is actually very fine indeed –; and a vast improvement on the somewhat flat prose of his 2014 debut novel, Here Are The Young Men. Perhaps it is telling that the final story in This is the Ritual (‘;Jean-Paul Passolet, a Reminiscence’; –; another fictional portrait of a neglected writer living in obscurity) makes the following observation:

“;I moved on from Passolet in the kind of brutal vanquishing we must inflict on our idols if we are to become what we are.”;

It is tempting to conclude that this “;brutal vanquishing”; of Doyle’;s literary idols lies at the heart of This is the Ritual –; so redolent is much of it of Auster, Amis, et al. If so, I’;m afraid that it is at the expense of supplying the reader with genuinely engaging material. But hopefully, with said vanquishing duly inflicted, Rob Doyle will be able to extricate himself from this claustrophobic cul-de-sac and apply his considerable talent to subjects that may be of more interest to world beyond Rob Doyle. After all, any writer who can describe a bout of diarrhoea as if “;someone was wringing out a filthy towel in his bowels”; is certainly worth watching. #59;