The Sharp Side

‘The same day was going by’
Maurice Blanchot, Awaiting Oblivion


Every insurrection requires leadership and drive. In resisting these values Lee Rourke has, over the past two or three years, emerged as the V.I. Lenin of the literary underground. As the editor of Scarecrow he has both set out a manifesto and passionately and enthusiastically promoted a very diverse range of writers from the margins of our culture. We are no longer in the realm of Martin and Julian and Ian but in a bleaker, less consoling place. Stewart Home, Ann Quin, Noah Cicero, Tom McCarthy. And many, many others. An alternative geography of literature to the ones in the corporate supplements, the corporate review pages.

The internet has erupted as a force as revolutionary and contagious as print was in the sixteenth century. What better medium than the blog to use, now, to proclaim that so much of the contemporary fiction celebrated in the corporate media and prominently on display in the chain bookstores is dead – false in its century-old forms, dead in its complacent easy soul, its putrefying odour masked only by corporate power in all its perfumed manifestations. And the governing custodians of culture and information are rattled. Corporations employ them and reward them but their power is draining away. A thousand voices rise up to challenge their values and mock their hollow thudding insistences. You call this literature? You think this is news? You call this lazy vicious simulacrum reality? And the citadel trembles. Its salaried army howls. Blogging, they cry, lacks authority; blogging, they wail, is unregulated. Meanwhile Scarecrow let loose the underdogs of literature, to snap at the shaky legs of the 3 for 2 table. Scarecrow offered (still offers) a different way of doing things.

But theory is nothing without praxis, and now Lee has aimed his own personal bombardment at the citadel. Everyday. Twenty-eight stories, which scrutinise the modern condition through the prism of city life. A modernist project (think Joyce; think T.S. Eliot), with a twist of Dostoevsky, a touch of Trocchi. But a twenty-first century city, with the focus on a particular zone – Hackney, sometimes bleeding into Islington and Soho. A shadowed realm of Baudelairean Angst; of impoverished lives and hard drinking and casual sex and pubs and litter and pigeons. Detritus and banality in a thousand manifestations. Hackney: a place where anything can happen and almost certainly will.

Everyday: a book of Hackney. Unfolding its possibilities, its hackneyed lives. Strangulation in order to obtain a book. A fall from a building site which is probably murder (‘Footfalls’). Contingency. Casual meetings which lead to casual sex or (for Karl Dobson, say) no sex at all, just a desolating desire to repeat the original rudimentary encounter. Not a romantic geography, then. Nor populated by romantic figures. We are remote from the exotic lives and experiences of comfortable, comforting ‘Literary Fiction’. Instead we are with the common people, amid ‘the everyday humdrum trivialities of London’. Because contingency, the humdrum, the trivial, is everyday.

This volume brings us face to face with everyman (and everywoman): characters who have not inherited enormous wealth. They do not lead glamorous lives. Their names – Little, Price, Blow, Heinz - invoke their bleached-out lives, outsiders enduring inside the glitter and conformism of capitalist society. They are wage slaves, in mundane employment. And the narratives have that acutely modernist sense of their own making, their own absurdity. There are no spurious meanings secreted here.

I don’t wear black, I don’t want to kill myself or listen to bands like Joy Division. I work and drink, I look like everyone else you see. I consume and watch TV, read the newspapers, books, eat and sleep. One day I shall be gone and no one will remember me, and no one will care, because that’s the way it should be and that’s the way it’s always been and will be. You see? I’m ordinary, my wings are clipped, and anyway, I have work in the morning. I have things to do. Stories such as these are meaningless.
(‘Mon Amie’)

Elsewhere, a voice says ‘You know how these stories end.’ But with Lee Rourke we can never be quite that sure. This is not genre writing or establishment literary fiction, where everything is wrapped-up at the end, with a consoling, uplifting, reconciling, upbeat ending. Don’t expect to be uplifted. We are on a hellish Beckettian treadmill here. Endurance is everything. And don’t expect ‘literature’. There is no fancy writing here. The Rourke style is a plain style. Bleached out language. The language of, well, everyday. The vernacular. What was good enough for Dante. Nothing mannered or cute. No wastes of polished pebbles from a Dorset beach. Everyday gives us characters who, even when they stumble on the grave of William Blake, have never heard of him. Everyday unfolds a world of monotony, poverty and boredom. Gordon Maldon fishes because he is bored. The teenagers shoot a swan because they are bored.

These stories throw off sparks from the class war. But they are not political in the explicit sense. The rage and dissatisfaction of the characters feeds into different channels than those of political organisation and activity. Which is how it mostly is in real life. Capitalist society crushes, distorts, diverts. In Everyday we are with the little people who have never read a word of Marx. We are with the losers and the people at the bottom. The ones who photocopy other people’s invoices. Dostoevskyan clerks. People hard up for cash. These are fables of alienation, focused on characters who are not team players. They seethe with dissatisfactions and resentments:

Media this, media that, photography this, photography that. She didn’t give a flying fuck about their phoney lives…the marked-up bottles of fizz and plonk were alwayspaid for by credit card – always. Never old-fashioned cash, of course.

But they rebel on their own terms. In ‘Nightshift’ a barmaid gives a free glass of wine to a man who seems to offer freedom. But it turns out that all he offers is another kind of slavery and imprisonment.

Sometimes there is a break for freedom, as in ‘The Roof’, where the sight of a couple having sex on a roof inspires a resignation letter. But as someone once observed, freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose, and in the world of Everyday it’s hard to believe in fulfilment. And sometimes these everymen crack. In ‘John Barleycorn’ the escape is inward, into alcohol. Other stories walk the edges of derangement – a lapdancer with putrefying flesh who leaks body wastes, a work colleague whose stench and aggression is registered only by the narrator. The possibility of revenge exists:

His stomach had been ripped clean open and red gut and purple entrails had been poured quite deliberately onto his desk, his files, laptop and the numerous pictures of his wife (Judy) and two adoring daughters (Molly and Bella) quite deliberately. Most chilling of all though was the bloody smile that had been cut into his face with a pair of scissors (now on the floor by his feet, open, red with his blood). Snip. Snip. Snip.

But this, in fact, is fantasy. It is lurid as cinema but all in the head. Paranoia and madness enticingly beckon (‘The Fat Slubberdegullion’, ‘The Doppelgänger’). Sometimes the fantastic becomes real: in ‘The Rodent’ a media worker is attended by a familiar…

So this is what Everyday is, then. Not Dubliners but Londoners; a Dostoevskyan tale of Poor Folk; a proletarian classic inflected with a modern(ist) sense of absurdity in all its comic and tragic reverberations. A book of outsiders, from outside hegemonic culture; tales from the margins; a drama of superfluous men and women. Sometimes they have literally been made redundant, which is what they have always been anyway. Society can get along without them. Lewis Dowling, Matt Hamilton, Gordon Maldon: no one will miss them.

Among these isolated figures there is a desperate desire for human contact, whether with a woman passing by in the street or even a pigeon. ‘Anon Takes a Lunch Break’ – a dialogue (or rather, a monologue) with a pigeon is comic, but at the same time desolating. The pigeon is freer than the narrator.

If only you knew. If only you could understand how mundane my life is. I get up. I commute. I sit at my lousy desk all morning acting on orders like a drone; speaking with people I have nothing in common with. I feed the pigeons in my lunch hour and I smile. I go back to my desk. I sit at it all afternoon acting on more orders like a drone; speaking to more people I have nothing in common with. I commute back home.

There is an unsparing Beckettian bleakness here, only occasionally lightened by muted comedy (in ‘The Overdraft’ an impoverished writer is refused money by a bank clerk who is also a writer). This is a society of solipsists; everyone is embedded in self. Everyone ‘had other things on their minds.’ Everyday presents a cold and desolating vision of the modern condition. This is a cyclical world where the season is always wintery and oppressive and its only motion is one of repetition. And, true to the condition of modernity, it enfolds its creator too:

Lee Rourke had work the next day, he would wake and then leave his flat, he would walk to work, he would do this everyday until it was the weekend again. And again, the following Sunday, you would probably find Lee Rourke sitting in The French House at 3.00pm drinking fine red or white, waiting for the two artists to start their argument. And sure enough they would. And Lee Rourke would accept this fact, knowing deep down that things probably don’t get much better than this.

These are stories which, in the words of my favourite Julian Maclaren-Ross story, make you think of ‘T. S. Eliot and the arctic wastes’. Everyday is a book of London knowledge written in the knowledge that such a book can only ever be present as a wintery absence.