But we never receive the qualities that he sees in the trees as
But we never receive the qualities that he sees in the trees as direct sense data; we never feel the branches as crestfallen, see the sadness ingrained in bark. We only see a dotty geezer poking about in a wood.In the same way, though Jackson is working the device of the almost infinitely huge building the house doesn’t take on the nightmare sprawl of Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, or even the comic profusion of Malplaquet, the ruinous stately home invented by T H White. In fact, it’s the servants in this novel who keep the house sane.The octopus of tunnels the Duke has had built ought to have left the mansion irretrievably gothic. But as Jackson writes him, His Grace is a white-bearded child, rather bewilderedly at play.
Because of his immense wealth, he can order his whims into existence; yet the freedom to drive a coach and horses up tiled passages is accompanied by an infant’s dependence on the people who look after him.Mrs Pledger the housekeeper, Mr Clement the butler, Mr Grimshaw the groom are all substitute parents.Wherever the Duke forages, he is sure to come upon a sensible man or woman, digging or polishing, who’ll hear his theory that the moon is a hole in the sky with only a patient Ah or Oh at the oddness of the gentry. The Duke’s oddness forms a zone extending no further than he can reach.This is a limitation on a novel, especially since the Duke possesses a child’s incuriosity about the inner existence of anybody else. His encounters are governed by no logic of plot or development But the Duke’s predicament is also a fictional opportunity. What Jackson evokes with invention is the play of energy within His Grace’s lonely self-absorption: the strange comedy and bravery of a self-diagnosis attempted with inadequate means.Something is wrong, but what? An ache tunnels its way from one opaque portion of his anatomy to another. Lacking even the whisper of a hint of the idea of an unconscious, the Duke’s reckoning with himself becomes a romance of containers.
Caverns, dumb-waiters, suits all seem to invite him inside, only to arouse immediate anxiety, a need for the release of long-sealed contents.A pot of jam seems a fine thing to be, he thinks; later he longs to be a letter in an envelope. A moment of serenity offers him a vision of his internal organs as “fish, nestling at different levels of my pool” But this school of thought has perils as well as charms. The Duke is an amiable literalist, and Mick Jackson’s fantasia becomes a sly race between the release of repressed memory and the wandering of his mind toward an unsymbolic method for letting his insides out – in which case, farewell Duke.. Disco Biscuits edited by Sarah Champion, Sceptre, pounds 6.99
Sarah Champion’s round-up of acid-house ravings has already shifted 15,000 copies and prompted its publisher to commission a second volume, Disco 2000. Is Champion leading the way or has she merely hitched a rise on a bandwagon? “New fiction from the chemical generation” claims the cover-line, despite the fact that two of the 19 contributions are reprints (Irvine Welsh’s and Steve Aylett’s).
A quick run down the contents page reveals an all-male contributor list. In her introduction, editor Champion namechecks one Allen Ginsburg (sic) in a roll call of drug-culture antecedents.
This misspelling is only the first of three dozen literals, typos and shudder-producing howlers scattered throughout the pages of Disco Biscuits. Is the idea that you read the book while you’re off your face on one of its many featured drugs and so don’t care about such piffling details, or is it that Champion (and an in-house P45-chaser?) were E’d up when they should have been getting down to the task?No, the idea is that here is a collection of stories celebrating ten years of acid house: techno, jungle and drum ‘n’ bass, spliff, blow and E. If none of these terms means anything to you, (a) where have you been for the last ten years? and (b) Disco Biscuits is definitely not for you.
If there was ever a hippy anthology, or a punk collection, few remember them. The same fate surely awaits Champion’s book, unless it’s remembered as a low point in the history of Sceptre.The less said about the stories themselves the better Out of 19, three are readable and one is pretty good. In this company it’s outstanding – that’s Steve Aylett’s “Repeater”, reprinted from Technopagan (Pulp Faction) edited by Elaine Palmer. At its best, Aylett’s prose is like poetry – “Acres of grass were blown to italics” – with attitude – “Add velocity to ignorance and you get a police car”. Alex Garland’s “Blink and You Miss It” has a little of the psychological depth that is absent elsewhere, and Matthew De Abaitua has a clever turn of phrase: “I pull another impassive face out of my bag and slap it over my fear. When Job is driving, I always like to have some impassive faces to hand”.But Champion does the rest of her contributors a disservice by publishing work that is not ready, stories which should have been slipped into stamped addressed envelopes and returned with a few words of discouragement.