We feature each week Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books
“ASTONISHED DICE – Collected Short Stories”
by Geoff Cochrane (Victoria University Press, $NZ30)
The
sun was as hard as a loaded dice or a difficult passage from Proust once he’d
left Lambton Quay behind him and got to Courtenay Place. Funny how not many
people were around, even at this time of day. He steadied himself, raised the
too-light bottle one more time and sipped. Not much left in it now. Sweet
sherry for breakfast was getting to be a habit, and what are habits but compulsions
dressed as graces?
Maybe it was the
sugar. He’d read the story “Blue Lady” where the guy said he drank sweet sherry
because he needed the sugar hit.
He sipped again
and it was empty and he threw it away. The soggy brown paper bag that encased it
didn’t stop it from clanking when it reached the gutter. No cops around. No
guardians of public morality. Just one sour look from a passing typist swinging
her curiously 70s-looking skirt. Was he going to have another of his flashbacks
to the ‘70s? Did they still even have typists now?
It was alright.
There was nobody here to tell him off. It wasn’t like serving mass for Father
Ignatius up at the Redemptorist monastery when he was a teenage altar boy. It
wasn’t like when he had to go to confession or when he rushed up there once,
pissed, asking to be married. He’d left all that religion stuff behind him, but
he still thought about it a lot. He was religiously irreligious. And who could
sanctify bums and street people and winos if not a mystic? As a rationalist, he
could nurture his soul without feeling embarrassed about it. Or not too
embarrassed.
He
slumped down on a bench, and fumbled in his pocket for a fag. The packet was
now nearly as empty as the discarded bottle. Maybe he could get some from Mavis
next time he visited her flat and tripped over the piles of Mills and Boon she
propped against the kitchen door to keep it closed.
“Watch out for
the crocodiles”, Mavis had said last time he was there.
He knew what she
meant. She didn’t. That last lot of smack she scored wasn’t the best quality.
The dealer had a funny sideways grin when she made her payment and he knew what
she’d had to pay for her payment. Sailors. Overgrown schoolboys. Pushy
businessmen when they were half out of it. And that track of needle pricks up
her arm. He couldn’t help loving the woman whenever he bumped into her.
It had been
raining last time he was there. They slept on her floor mattress. An SIS man
had burst through her flyscreen and said he was going to take them for interrogation.
God, he knew the feeling. The threat of thumbscrews. Would the powers ever
force out of him everything he knew?
He felt
interrogated now.
He had to write
this review of Geoff Cochrane’s collected stories Astonished Dice. The loaded dice of the sun was now burning his
brain.
He said “I will
be true to my code”.
He said “My code
is, you respect writers who can write, even if you don’t see life the way they
do. You look for the craft. You try to see what it offers readers. You try to
keep your judgments and gut reactions for the last paragraph.”
Gut reactions.
Sweet sherry and
that second fag and too early for the chug-a-lug of the pubs. His gut felt like
a halcyon whirlwind, a still tornado. What was that? Litotes? Euphuism? There
had to be a chance to put some poncy literary words into his report before he
got to the detox part. They liked that. And the detox part. It left him dried
out. It left him washed out. It left him feeling the essential nothingness of
things. Like that movie Round Midnight
where the jazzman says everything’s inside the universe but what’s the universe
inside? And you know the universe is nothing or there are universes inside
universes or it’s all inside God. Or something.
If only he could
focus.
He braced
himself. Okay, what did this book offer readers? The re-publication of two
little collections called Brindle Embers
and White Nights that had got the
small-circulation treatment first time and were now getting the VIP VUP
treatment. And bracketing them new stories. The one at the end was surprising
from this author. It was called “Quest Clinic” and it was nearly fifty pages
long and was broken into chapters. This was unexpected from a writer who dealt
with miniatures.
Ah, there it
was.
Miniatures.
He began reading
this book expecting stories, because it said “collected stories” on the cover.
But most of them (2 or 3 or 4 pages long) were not stories. They were
vignettes. Or scenes. Or maybe prose poems. Yes, that would do for a review.
Call them prose poems. Or maybe they were like the beginnings of stories that never got completed. The one called
“Coffee” for example. It has a police chief beginning
to interrogate a tourist (more spy fantasies) and then it just ends and you’re
left thinking “Is this some extreme form of join-the-dots irony where we’re
supposed to infer how the rest of the story goes? Or is it just an unfinished
story? Or doesn’t Geoff Cochrane really do stories?”
He struggled to
keep his head clear. He knew this writer was no unlettered bum. He could do
stories about F. Scott Fitzgerald and drink (“Burning”) and he could do stories
that seemed to take the piss out of Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria (“Alex”) and
he could do an in-joke about literary lunches (“Takes”) and then there were the
ones that seemed to have a nodding acquaintance with the film industry. Or were
they just dreams of being part of the film industry? Like that one written like
a cod film-script, called “Human Voices”. Was the ghost of William S. Burroughs
in these stories as much as the ghost of Barney Flanagan?
He had to be
fair. Fairness was in his DNA. That explained why he could never be an
extremist. So he did admit that he laughed out loud at the story “Hospital”
with its quirky contrasts of social classes. And he went all po-faced and solemn
when Geoff Cochrane shifted into autobiographical mode and did first-person
ones on his pain and toxification like “Boiler House” and “Full Clearance”. And
oh the ache of absence when he goes all ironical on his Catholic background and
calls the result “Wonders”. The one called “Sacraments” was somewhere in the
same Basin Reserve of mind.
But was it wrong
to read these prose poems all one after the other? Maybe they should have been
left to percolate in his brain longer. And individually. Sometimes the sameness
of them got to him. The ones beginning like photographic realism (grainy
black-and-white, slow shutter speed for preference to get that
blurry-but-gritty look) and then becoming surreal fantasies like something
spurted forth by a shredded mind. He found himself writing “blah blah blah”
after reading yet another story of this sort.
He got up. The
book was troubling him. Courtenay Place was filling up. The morning was getting
on. He had an undirected hunger. Or thirst. Not like the straightforward hunger
of the woman for a screw in the story “Programmed Maintenance”. Not like the
other characters who want quick sex and are usually unfulfilled in their
desire. Something was nagging at him.
He turned
towards the waterfront. What did you call that feeling in his gut, now?
Biliousness?
Concentrate.
Concentrate. He was supposed to be thinking about the book.
Geoff Cochrane.
His imagery was vivid. You did remember it. You had to give that to the guy.
But he often put together incompatible things in his 2 or 3 or 4 pages of prose
poem and you had the feeling that this juxtaposition was supposed to be very
meaningful but it was damned hard to see what the meaningfulness consisted of.
Or was it nor
meaningful at all?
He had this
recurring image of a garrulous drunk he once knew who would drone on and on. Once,
when thoroughly plastered, the drunk began to talk about the importance of ants
as he kept turning his hand over and over watching this ant scuttling along it
and back again as the drunk kept blocking its routes of escape. But when sober
the drunk had no interest whatsoever in ants and never talked about them again.
Was that it?
Were Geoff Cochrane’s juxtaposed images things that seemed meaningful and
connected at the time of writing, but not otherwise?
At the
waterfront the waves heaved. He moved slowly towards the part near the maritime
museum. There really was one thing he found he found hard to accept. It was the
way some of the stories finished in the middle of
No comments:
Post a Comment