By all means, these pieces, like his other fiction, fill out more detail from the world view available in his poetry, the surrealism and gothic horror coming straight out of an early-ish poem like Thrillers and Cheese, but if at first one is reminded of the way that a Murakami novel can rapidly develop from laid-back domesticity into a nightmarish adventure that is only the other side of a wall or lurking under a fragile surface of a recognizably ordinary life, one can't ever forget O'Brien quoting Douglas Dunn's poem, The River Through The City, as a major influence. O'Brien is forever in its debt.
But he is a literary writer, never knowingly avoiding any allusion that suggests itself. Having produced a version of Dante's Inferno, that is in evidence here, alongside The Odyssey, poets such as Tennyson, Marvell and Larkin and any amount of knowing nods and quotation from past literature, not least T.S. Eliot who most notably made his books from bits of other people's. But like Eliot, whose work is very much his own, O'Brien has by now created an idiosyncracy of which his is the only likeness. If you think you've spotted an intertextual reference, you probably have and at the bottom of page 1,
Her smug prettiness was all that was the case with her.
if you weren't sure if Wittgenstein was being subliminally hinted at quite so early doors then one can look back and assume he was.
If we are chronically on the brink of subterranean nether worlds, whether being rowed by faceless boatman to unknown places, undergoing a change of consciousness via the moly drug of Circe or encountering ghosts or the suggestion of them, we soon get used to it but O'Brien's prose writing here is often a gentler thing than the characteristically uncompromising realpolitik of much of the poetry. Despite the literariness and the genre mannerism demanded by tales of mystery and imagination, this is fine writing with an entirely convincing naturalness. Only perhaps in Change for Low Rixham does the action become a bit more comic book than necessary.
If it would be an understatement to say the stories share a sense of dislocation, it is no exaggeration to say that O'Brien has a bottomless stock of telling expressions of ennui,
the watery crepuscular light of this town with its air of perpetual valediction.
That is from the title story, an epistolary account of a girl who goes into mitteleuropa to research the papers of a bad poet, gets no replies to her increasingly anxious letters home and is never seen again.
Although one becomes aware that something unsettling is bound to happen once the pattern has been established it is perhaps only in Lovely that the first date is going so apparently well that the macabre ending is totally to be expected but if one is led into thinking that you've sussed it, the formula has been outed and motifs are recurring with ominous regularity, the rest of the book is going to be more of the same, no, the best pieces are actually still to come.
Ex Libris has turned into an encounter with Dr. Johnson and Boswell that uncomfortably brings in avatars but becomes a meditation on literature and the novelists' revenge on critics whereas Revanant makes no effort to disguise the figure of Maurice Ashover, the biographical subject of his surrogate as a poet, Macklin, as being based not very loosely on Larkin. Macklin might have all but given up on poetry but is invited to contribute to a radio programme and hasn't been able to escape the way his subject took over his own life. He disappears into someone else's poems and the story is shudderingly more worrying for its understatedness.
That masterpiece follows close upon A Cold Spot, which is a calmly beautiful ghost story but political themes are not forgotten for long. There is clearly going to be more to come from Certain Measures than the cut-price crowd doing their Christmas shopping in Oxford Street so disarmingly seen, in some vintage O'Brien, for what they are, the diagnosis of a 'cure for capitalism...downsized God' and erasure of 'me from myself' having come only a few pages earlier. When it does come, and civil disturbance is orchestrated by the Police, the news item presented as further high street horror we all need to be protected from, one might ask of O'Brien whether or not he is siding with conspiracy theorists and whether or not he appreciates living in a country that, imperfect though it may be, employs security services to allow him to write and publish as he sees fit. It's a pertinent piece but suggests to me more questions about the defence of liberalism than the sinister forces of perceived tyranny.
And, in A Green Shade, the 'monetarization' of university resources is lampooned and the purpose of universities, nowadays ostensibly 'positioning themselves in world terms', considered in the light of whether Lord Pybus's Ground, an area made over for contemplation, reading and sometimes performance, should be 'developed'. The issue is settled, non-acimably but fittingly, in the masque peformed there, in most literary fashion.
And then, presumably significantly as the last story, is The Aspen Grove, by no means the first to use the idea of having finished doing what one used to do (Macklin, above, had done that) but Morgan has given up his university post, book reviewing and poetry readings and gone back to his novel, so far seven years in the making,
Morgan had given up women as well as everything else. It didn't occur to him that this renunciation might be reciprocal.
But the poem is about a statue, and perhaps he is infatuated with it and just in case we hadn't been sated with enough literary allusion, it is an inversion of Orpheus and Eurydice and, as we probably always knew we were due to be, we are left,
turned to stone and the stone would burn forever.
Being a tremendous admirer of Sean O'Brien at his best, and finding any thoughts of a correspondance with the Ashover/Macklin axis in Revanant harrowing and to be vigorously contested, I adored this book and read it not in one sitting but really only with breaks to look at e-mail and be delayed by a chess habit for which no cure has yet been found.
It might not rival the short fiction of James Joyce, George Moore, Katherine Mansfield or William Trevor, if they might be thought of as paragon examples, as some of the best in the language, not least because some knowledge of poetry, a subscription to the TLS and a bookish mindset might be required to appreciate it for what it is. But it might stand alongside Sean O'Brien's best poems as his most memorable work. It's rare for me to be still up gone 10.30 on a Sunday night, fuelled by Merlot, only because I wanted to get on and do it rather than wait until tomorrow night.
Quartier Perdu is a book to relish, sometimes sentence by sentence, for its dark humour, layers of irony, untrustworthy beauty and unashamed panache, never apologetic about being what it most obviously is, a book for book people, the brooding machismo still there somewhere and the nightmares only one more sleep away but we are a played-out generation, us, and the exquisite account of that trauma is what we have left to enjoy.