Review of This is the Ritual by Rob Doyle

An edited version of this review appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 31 January 2016.


That Nietzsche has a lot to answer for. He's the prophet who brought the alarming news that we are alone - adrift in the vacant interstellar spaces. For some, this message was a liberation and a cause to celebrate the sensual pleasures and other passing delights of our brief earthly reign. For others, death and the prospect of everlasting extinction cast a pall over all endeavours. Either way morality became unfashionable. We are all beyond good and evil now. As in his first novel (Here are the Young Men), the dark shadow of the German philosopher looms over the action in Rob Doyle's new collection of short stories. He is referred to frequently by the characters in the book and is the subject of one story: On Nietzsche.

The sole duty of the writer, according to Jean-Pierre Passolet in the final story is "to bear witness to the horror, and to the magnificence". Doyle does his duty by looking into the abyss on our behalf and reporting back. We are far from the conventional Irish concerns: the coming of age of a sensitive soul in rural Ireland, or the predictably dysfunctional family gathering for Christmas. Doyle's themes suggest souls lost not in the bogs and prejudices of Ireland but adrift in a hostile cosmos. His concerns are universal and his mentors international. Writers whose influences permeate these stories include Borges, Beckett, Burroughs, Bolano, and especially Georges Bataille (see above). The latter is explicitly referenced in On Nietzsche (which is the title of a Bataille book on the German philosopher), and in Anus - Black Sun which is surely a homage to Bataille's Story of the Eye. The cosmic musing in Doyle's story echoes Bataille's theory of the sun as an anal eye, a sphincter guarding the entry to darkness.

But don't be put off by the literary allusions. These compelling vignettes stand up for themselves even if you're ignorant of the more arcane influences. They transport us beyond the routines and petty distractions of our daily round. For comfort, we are told, bear in mind the unreality of life. The stories are visceral, scatological and frequently disturbing. There are no happy and fulfilled characters, no glory or redemption. The tales reek of failure, despair, misogyny, fear and loathing, and not a little sexual disgust. On Nietzsche tells of the narrator's inability to write a book on his intellectual hero. Lost in the swamps of preparatory reading (Fichte and von Hartman) he gives up. Along the way his Russian girlfriend leaves him. Elsewhere writers disappear off the face of the earth, days fuelled by drink and drugs pass fitfully, friends die pointlessly, partners are unfaithful, and a woman is described as being "brazen and vulgar, as intoxicating as an open sewer".

Those looking for traces of autobiography are not discouraged by the frequent appearance of the author's name amidst the action. Many of his characters are aspiring writers, doomed to failure by an absence of talent and some manifestly bad habits. Doyle has travelled a lot and it shows in the diverse locations into which he has pitched his stricken protagonists. The action shifts between Dublin, London, Paris, Barcelona and Mexico but the angst remains the same. Untethered from the old verities these are lost souls. There's plenty of sex but it's mostly joyless and often accompanied by physical disgust. Sexual jealousy is also a recurring theme, frequently involving a racial element. The straying women dream of black boxers, or take up with Arabs or Turks. A character called Rob Doyle declares: "I also wish I had a dog having proven already that I can't live with women." Masturbation is a regular activity, as if highlighting our essential isolation on this vale of tears. Drug abuse and heavy drinking are the norm. One character has invented the Guinnsky (a Guinness and whiskey concoction) to assuage his pain.

No Man's Land describes an encounter between a depressive young man and an old vagrant in a deserted Dublin industrial estate - a wonderfully Beckettian backdrop. The vagrant is further down the path on which the former has just embarked. "Nietzsche didn't see this coming" is amongst the wisdom he imparts as he recounts the downward spiral that is his life story. The chastening effect of the wretched creature's tale sends our young man back to mother and college. In the opening story, John-Paul Finnegan a writer, described as a paltry realist, delivers a foul-mouthed diatribe on the Bloomsday industry: "making absolute fools of themselves by aping the characters in a book they have never read". This piece is one long, entertaining rant that takes place on a ship called Ulysses sailing from Holyhead to Dublin.

It's refreshing to see a young Irish writer keeping up the cloacal tradition introduced to Irish literature by Swift and continued by Joyce. While Joyce confined his more outré interests to his letters, Doyle spares us no excremental detail. Anus: Black Sun involves the most prolonged piece of anal gazing in contemporary literature - surpassing even John Updike's more affectionate riff on the same subject. There may be a nod to Burroughs here also but Doyle's orifice, while inspiring a cosmic reverie in the beholder, is considerably less talkative.

Outposts comprises six sections and over 30 pages and is made up of disconnected paragraphs "snatched" from sources as diverse as Dostoyevsky, Desmond Hogan, Blaise Pascal and conversations with patients at St. Senan's (a psychiatric hospital in Wexford). There's no good news here, it's all ennui and despair. Relationships are impossible and life has no meaning. These are the effusions of "Men who brood in small rooms with bad air." There's a reference to "an unfinished novel by some frazzled drifter, 'Rob Doyle'". These are cryptic variations on the longer stories in this unsettling collection - cries from a psychic wasteland, fragments shored against ruin.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Nihilists at Work in South Dublin: Review of Here Are the Young Men by Rob Doyle

An edited version of this review appeared in the Sunday Times Culture magazine on the 6th July 2014

The spirit of Nietzsche looms over the action in Rob Doyle's darkly exhilarating first novel. But don't be alarmed, the book's intellectual architecture is well concealed beneath the boozing and braggadocio of its protagonists. The nearest we get to an explicit acknowledgement of the great German thinker's influence is Scag's philosophical riff half way through which contains a tasty chunk of Nietzsche's apocalyptic prologue to Thus Spoke Zarathustra - unattributed but with added 'fuckin's.

The novel portrays the antics of four epically disgruntled teenagers in that hiatus between sitting the Leaving Certificate and heading off in the directions designated6 by their results. You may acquire a hangover just by reading about their drug-fuelled ride through late Celtic Tiger Dublin. Drugs and drink are constantly sought and consumed and most of the action stems from their effects. Getting wasted is the one solid ambition they all share. But the boys behaviour is dictated by the cosmic squalor all around them. They are living in the twilight of the idols. God is dead, school is out, Church and State have failed them - the robber barons rule the land. Their irreverence and frantic drinking is a way of dealing with the void. Beneath the surface hedonism there is a dark undercurrent of seething emotions where terror, despair, and violence lurk. We know what we're in for as soon as we reach the fly-leaf. There's a quote from E. M. Cioran - a man famous for bemoaning the "inconvenience of existence". These youthful nihilists casual misogony is only trumped my their sustained misanthropy There are a few superficial similarities to the novels of his namesake Roddy, a writer admired by Rob. They share an ear for dialogue, particularly the oath-laden demotic of Dublin. However while Roddy has colonised the north side, Rob's characters roam between Greystones and Tallaght - with frequent excursions to Temple Bar and to Killiney Hill and its environs. These are south side boys but definitely not D4. One of the quartet's mother is a cleaner for God's sake. This is different territory in other ways also, a realm beyond good and evil.

Early on we encounter a spectacularly vile anti-Bono tirade that will give plenty of readers pause. But these are just the spewings of Kearney the book's resident psychopath. He will get his comeuppance. He's just reflecting darkly the level of invective often directed by Dubliners at this amiable and enormously successful rock musician. Pure Paddy begrudgery. And if that scene disturbs you wait until you get to the snuff movie description.

In addition to the juvenile nihilism of the four characters, there is an attendant sexual anxiety that afflicts all of them except, ironically, Cocker. It's as if this last avenue to escape and transcendence is also closed to them. Matthew is weak and vacillating and he knows it - he has moral fibre issues. He's also timid with girls and when he finally gets his much sought after Jen to bed discovers that he can't perform - not surprising perhaps considering the volume of drugs he has consumed. This is a horror for any man but for the shy teenager it's a trauma that ruins everything. Jen is unfazed by the sexual failure that blights his love for her. The girls in this novel are very relaxed about sex and its trappings compared to the boys. His later encounter with her and Kearney in flagrante merely compounds his misery and rage. This is a tragic unresolved love story at the heart of the action. Cocker seems to be benignly indifferent to the girls. In fact the Cocker character is the least well-drawn of the four, as if Doyle needed a foil for the erratic antics of the other three. He alone doesn't enjoy his own chapter headings which are divided between Matthew's first person agonising and the third person descriptions of the deranged Kearney and the over sensitised Rez. Kearney has a violent streak that emerges early on. He is obsessed with ultra violent computer games and creates alarming personal web cams. His attitude to girls is brutal and pragmatic, date rape is to be admired and eventually practised. Rez is the smartest of the four. He agonises about the human condition and raises the conversation above the bestial level struck by Kearney. His girl-friend dumps him all the better to frolic abroad with a clear conscience and when he discovers her emails to a friend gloating about her pleasuring by some holiday-camp Lothario he is quite undone - most particularly by the unfavourable comparisons she makes with his own sexual ministrations.

Half way through Doyle introduces the book's most likeable character, the old punk and stoner socialist Scag - who "dreamt of the day when the working classes refuse to work". He acts as Matthew's mentor and guide around Dublin in a way that faintly echoes Bloom and Daedulus's more restrained peregrinations. He points Matthew along the path of true stoner righteousness, which means avoiding a career at all costs.

The novel turns even darker in the latter stages. A trip to the US exposes Kearney to a snuff movie and he returns to Dublin with his vicious urges cranked up a few notches. The occasional outbursts of casual violence become more regular and more extreme - his inner psychopath comes out to play. He tricks Matthew into complicity in one of his crimes and from there things escalate to a murderous and fiery denouement - in Greystones of all places. This is a fine debut from Doyle. It shines a light into a relatively unexplored region: the psyches of our youth, adrift in a world where the old verities no longer exist. And its fast-moving episodic structure makes it a rollicking good read. God may be dead, but a new literary star is born.

 

Lilliput Press

304 pp

€13.99

John P. O'Sullivan

July 2014

 

Posted with Blogsy