SYNOPSES OF LONG AND SHORT PROSE
BY JOHN O'LOUGHLIN
LONG PROSE
01. CHANGING WORLDS: My first
novel, written during the summer of 1976, is a largely autobiographical account
of three days in the life of a clerk-turning-writer by name of Michael Savage,
whose disillusionment with the drudgery of office work has led him to quit his
job in London's West End in order to dedicate himself to a literary career ...
come what may. In this regard, Savage is
a sort of Henry Miller, who doesn't believe in doing things by half-measures
and, consequently, to him there is no sense in remaining a clerk when one has
an imperative desire to become a writer and thus effectively 'change
worlds'. For him, it is a make-or-break
situation, all the more poignant for its unfolding
against a background of indifference or hostility from colleagues and relatives
alike! Of all my novels, CHANGING WORLDS
is (together with FIXED LIMITS) by far the most subjective, with long passages
of interior monologue which often overlap, to ironic effect, with
conversational or observational settings, though I have taken extra care to
differentiate reflection from conversation by utilizing single quotes in the
one context and double quotes in the other - a stratagem which, though
unorthodox, has probably done more than anything to condition my preference,
contrary to literary norms, for double quotes in relation to conversational
passages virtually right the way through my fictional oeuvre. However that may be,
it was probably the degree of this novel's subjectivity combined with its revolutionary
technique which alienated most London publishers (apart from 'vanity press'
ones) when first I attempted to have it published back in the late 1970s, and
to this day I am proud of the fact that I was able to subvert literary
objectivity to such a radical extent that ... the result is more philosophic
than fictional, thus heralding my true destiny in the more unequivocally
philosophical works to come!
02. FIXED LIMITS: If CHANGING
WORLDS betrays the influence (through souped-up
interior monologue) of James Joyce on my early fiction, then the chief
inspiration behind this fictional journal was undoubtedly Jean-Paul Sartre or,
rather, Sartre's first novel Nausea,
which made such a profound impression on me ... that I simply felt I had to
attempt something similar - albeit within a necessarily different milieu and
social setting. This was in the autumn
of 1976, and the result was an account of some three weeks in the life of the
very same character whom we first encounter as a disillusioned clerk in the
earlier novel, but whose existence here, as a budding writer, is nothing short
of a spiritual rebirth! Now that Michael
Savage has become or, at any rate, is in the process of becoming his
intellectual self ... we are led into an even more subjective world than that
of his previous incarnation, with further opportunities for both
autobiographical and philosophical speculation on my part. In fact, FIXED LIMITS should be regarded as
the sequel to CHANGING WORLDS, without prior reference to which much of its
subject-matter and settings would seem difficult if not impossible to
understand. For me, this was the
literary Black Hole which led into a new universe of fictional writings
thereafter, beyond the reach of my early mentors.
03. CROSS-PURPOSES: This novel
moves beyond the largely autobiographical concerns of my earlier experiments in
the genre towards a more fictional integrity which led me by the nose, so to
speak, into contexts and settings largely outside the domain of personal
experience. To be sure, the subjectivity
of my first novel is in some degree still present (witness the opening chapter
... with its highly philosophical considerations), but it is now subordinate to
the unfolding narrative ... as we follow the fortunes of James Kelly, a
self-styled philosopher, through successive love-affairs which clash with his
loyalties to friends and benefactors alike, culminating in deception and
tragedy for all concerned. One would
think that CROSS-PURPOSES was a philosophical-novel-turned-romance, and so, up
to a point, it is. But it is also a
tribute, in no small measure, to both Lawrence Durrell
and Henry Miller; though one might be forgiven for detecting an implicit
condemnation of the latter in the 'Paris chapter', as I like to think of Chapter
7, where Kelly's attitude to sexual promiscuity is concerned! However, that is still my favourite chapter
in what is probably my best novel.
04. AN INTERVIEW REVIEWED: This
novel was written just after the above and is both more complex and subtler than
its stylistic precursor. Basically, the
plot revolves around the efforts of Anthony Keating, a young correspondent for
an arts periodical based in London's West End, to conduct a prearranged interview with world-famous
composer Howard Tonks when, to his dismay, the person
who would normally have conducted the interview had gone down with influenza at
the last moment. Due to lack of
experience in this field Keating fails
to complete his assignment on the specified day and is obliged to accept an
alternative date for later that same week, when Tonks
is due to return from a professional engagement in Birmingham. However, the composer is detained there an
extra day and, due to a combination of unforeseen factors, Keating ends-up
seducing his daughter ... with disastrous consequences for both of them! For they are discovered in flagrante delicto
by Mr Tonks' elderly housekeeper, and word eventually
gets back to the composer himself, causing serious allegations and
misunderstandings which put not only the interview but Keating's very career as
a correspondent for 'Arts Monthly' in jeopardy.
Ultimately only Howard Tonks' daughter,
Rebecca, can save Keating from additional humiliation, but not before several
turns in the plot have led him into deeper trouble with his boss and
colleagues, and duly resulted in his dismissal.
However, thanks to Rebecca's influence with her father, the interview
eventually goes ahead, and the resulting dilemma for 'Arts Monthly' is whether
to publish or shelve it in view of the surrounding circumstances and the
dismissal of its principal instigator from his post. It is the composer himself, however, who has
the final say, and it comes as both a shock and a delight to Anthony Keating. - Those looking for philosophy in AN INTERVIEW
REVIEWED will find much food for thought, as will those for whom humour is a sine
qua non of literary entertainment.
05. THWARTED AMBITIONS: This, the
first of three loosely-related novels written in 1980 and dealing with art and
artists, is the tragic and, in some sense, pathetic account of a young artist
by name of Robert Harding who is so obsessed with advancing his career ... that
he becomes blind to the sexual machinations of Henry Grace, a wealthy and
influential art critic, to seduce him whilst ostensibly posing as his admiring
patron. For Grace seems to be just the
answer to Harding's professional ambitions, and the artist allows himself to be
led from commission to commission by the older man without the slightest
suspicion of what the latter is really all about. But it is Carol, Harding's modelling
girlfriend, whose suspicions are first aroused and, together with both the
writer Andrew Doyle, who is Harding's next-door neighbour, and a professional
acquaintance of hers, she plots to thwart Grace's sexual ambitions - with
tragic consequences for the critic, as things turn out in this far from
implausible narrative!
06. SECRET EXCHANGES: An artist is invited by his girlfriend to visit her parents
in the provinces and, failing to get on with her father, duly finds himself
inviting her mother to his London studio where, to his shame, he allows himself
to be seduced by her whilst apparently teaching her to meditate. Thereafter things go from bad to worse for Matthew
Pearce, not to mention his girlfriend's mother, whose tetchy and ailing husband
has discovered what he believes to be concrete evidence of her infidelity. Yet Deirdre Evans is determined to capitalize
on Matthew's previous hospitality, just as the latter is having serious doubts
not only about her but, thanks in part to their affair, about his relationship
with her daughter, Gwendolyn, as well!
Then, one evening, a friend of Gwen's turns up at his place and, before
long, she precipitates him into a new and more passionate affair - in fact, the
kind of affair for which he had been hoping all along! So now it seems he can dispense with both
Gwen and her mother and take up with Linda instead - provided, however, that
she can secure a divorce from her husband on grounds of incompatibility. For Linda Daniels is also a married woman,
and, like Mrs Evans, the man to whom she is married proves himself to be no
friend of Matthew Pearce! Could that be
the main motive for Pearce's willingness, bordering on recklessness, to enter
into affairs with both women? The reader
is left to decide this and so much else for himself in
what is, by any account, an ironic commentary on human relationships and their
social and ideological interactions!
07. LOGAN'S INFLUENCE: Invited to a
party by his friend, Martin Thurber, the avant-garde writer Keith Logan quickly
begins to turn their host against him by his radical views on God, evolution,
religion, literature, etc., with a result that he quite spoils the party
atmosphere for Edward Hurst, and unwittingly puts the future of Thurber's
employment as an art critic for Hurst's magazine in jeopardy ... when, under
duress of a hangover the following morning, the publisher decides to dispense
with his art reviews partly in revenge for the intellectual humiliations inflicted
upon him by Logan the previous night.
Yet Hurst has a crush on Thurber's girlfriend, who was also at the
party, and, bumping into him in the street one afternoon, Greta Ryan elects to
place her body at Hurst's disposal if only he will agree not to take any
disciplinary action against Thurber.
Reluctantly,
08. SUBLIMATED RELATIONS: A young
religious writer named Timothy Byrne accepts an invitation from Lord Handon, an aristocratic admirer of his work, to spend New
Year's Eve in the company of a select gathering at Rothermore
House, Handon's country retreat, and winds up first
dancing and then falling in love with one of his fellow guests, who happens to
be an opera singer. Much debate and
festivity take place before Timothy discovers, in conjunction with the other
guests, that the real motive for their presence there is to learn of and offer
his services to the 'Voice Museum', an extraordinary project situated in
London's Piccadilly which houses voice recordings of famous people in
soundproofed booths where, for a small sum, the public can sample words of
wisdom and/or folly at the touch of a button.
Thus it is that Timothy Byrne agrees to allow his voice to be recorded
for future use by the museum's principal director, Girish
O'Donnell - as, of course, do each of the other guests, all of whom are either
established or budding talents in the arts.
Meanwhile Lord Handon has been attempting to
conduct a low-key relationship with Sarah Field, the opera singer, though with
little success, in view of her preference for Timothy and knowledge of the
viscount's secret - a secret which has more than a little to do with the
strange nature of his relations, necessarily sublimated, with women. Equally unsuccessful are Handon's
attempts to subvert Byrne's spiritual standing as a self-styled guru through
his daughter, Geraldine, though, unbeknown to anyone else, the writer has
already undermined it through Sarah and has no need of further seductions! Another of my philosophic-turned-romantic
novels, SUBLIMATED RELATIONS is nevertheless much bolder and freer than the
others.
09. DECEPTIVE MOTIVES: With an
opening chapter that highlights the duplicity of a husband towards his wife,
this novel builds on the marital dissatisfactions and grudges of its principal
heroine, Julie Foster, and couples them to the literary and social
dissatisfactions, grudges, etc., of one Peter Morrison, an unpublished and
seemingly unpublishable writer, as the two characters
bump into each other in a restaurant, after many years, and Julie agrees to
accompany Morrison back to his squalid flat where, contrary to her
expectations, he simply proceeds to expatiate on his political and
philosophical views, and to disburden himself of a number of anti-social
grudges. He does, however, invite her to
visit him again and, to his surprise, she accepts the invitation and turns up a
couple of days later. This time they get
down to some serious sexual congress but, in the process, Julie impulsively
reveals that she is married and Morrison, aghast at her deception, loses his
temper and proceeds to strangle her.
Overcome with remorse, he attempts to mollify Julie, now a corpse, by
taking photographs of her in a variety of erotic poses, and is then faced with
the unsavoury task of disposing of her body.
However, an old friend of Julie's becomes suspicious by her failure to
turn up at a pre-arranged rendezvous and, aware from a prior phone conversation
that Julie was intending to visit Morrison, begins to make inquiries about him
from what little information she has.
Eventually, she tracks him down to his latest address and, mindful of
the fact that he once had amorous leanings towards her, falls into a frantic
sexual coupling with him. Things are
looking good for Peter at this point but, whilst he is out of the room, Deirdre
discovers photographic evidence of Julie's murder and proceeds to accost him
with it on his return. Unable to calm
her down or explain away the evidence, he is obliged to kill her too, thus
saddling himself with the problem of disposing of yet another corpse! Subsequently he moves to
10. FALSE PRETENCES: Written in the
late-Spring of 1982, this novel has something of a Spring-like ebullience about
it which takes us to the Norfolk countryside and to the stratagems of a radical
writer-turned-artist by name of Jason Crilly (who for
the most part remains veiled behind first-person narrations) to shake off a
depression he contracted while living alone in an insalubrious part of North
London. His wife Susan, whom he married
shortly after moving to
11. POST-ATOMIC INTEGRITIES: This little
novella, based around an autobiographical fantasy, shares with FALSE PRETENCES
the stylistic device of first-person narrative, and relates the nocturnal visit
of an old acquaintance to the flat of an admirer who had optimistically written
to her in the hope of receiving a positive response. What follows is a romantic pact in which
12. THE POLITICS OF SEXUALITY: A
six-chapter novella of first-person and loosely autobiographical tendency, THE
POLITICS OF SEXUALITY explores the concept of sexual politics, or the notion
that every mode of politics has a sexual corollary. Although such an idea was by no means new to
my work at this time (1984), it hadn't been explored to anything like the same
extent before, and it is a theme to which I have since returned quite frequently,
always seeking to improve upon my initial theories, which, through bitter
experience over the years, I've learnt to regard as more of a springboard to
better things than as a definitive statement.
SHORT PROSE
13. A MAGNANIMOUS OFFER: This
little collection of prose pieces is composed of four one-act plays, or playlets, two of which are straight dialogues, together
with a couple of short stories which I wrote at about the same time (1976), and
which I believe to have a loosely poetic quality and deserve, for stylistic
reasons, to be included with the playlets, the title
piece of which is a shamelessly facetious spoof on Oscar Wilde.
14. A VISIT TO HELL: My first real
collection of short prose, written during the autumn of 1979, combines literary
and philosophical themes. Surprisingly,
the overall result is not displeasing and, although the subject-matter and
settings of one or two of the contents are slightly dated, the best of them
retain a freshness and relevance to the contemporary and, I hope, future world
which should stand them in good stead for several years to-come. Of the eight examples included, I especially
recommend the title piece, 'A Visit to Hell', as a reflection, albeit slightly
distorted by literary licence, of contemporary life in all its diabolical
frenzy and hell-bent cacophony!
15. FROM THE DEVIL TO GOD: This
collection of short prose, written on and off during the winter of 1980-81,
starts in a relatively literary fashion with the account of a clandestine visit
of a masseuse to a priest who can no longer cope with his celibacy, and ends in
a profoundly futuristic manner with an account of evolutionary progress towards
a definitive Beyond, as envisaged by a radical philosopher. In between there comes a fairly balanced
alternation between literary and philosophical subjects ... as we follow the
voyeuristic pleasures of a man covertly watching his wife getting dressed from
the comfort of his early-morning bed; explore the evolutionary revelations of a
de Chardinesque gnostic in
the face of atheistic unbelief; witness the horror of a Mondrianesque
ascetic, whose rural daytrip out of London with some friends proves to be more
unsettling than he had bargained for; and go beyond conventional concepts of
the Millennium, as of Millennialism, with a revolutionary thinker who believes
that only when human brains are artificially supported and sustained will there
be any prospect of heavenly salvation of a definitive order.
16. DREAM COMPROMISE: This
collection of short prose, dating from the autumn of 1981, includes what is arguably
the most literary piece I have ever written - namely 'A Canine Crime', which
deals with the problems of dog ownership in an age and society which has turned
against such a thing, making it illegal.
Also of special note here is the fetishistically
erotic 'Nolan's Investigations', which opens the collection,
and the partly autobiographical title piece 'Dream Compromise', which has a
trick in its tail, so to speak.... As, incidentally, does the volume as a
whole, in that it ends with a series of aphorisms, in keeping with the broadly
philosophical bias of my maturer literary works.
17. MILLENNIAL PROJECTIONS: This
fictional compilation, dating from 1982, combines some sixteen short-prose
pieces with subjects ranging from musical evolution to Christmas trees, Black
Holes to Esperanto, and space travel to modern art. Of this number, my favourite is the title
piece, a fantasy projection into a millennial future in which we enter the mind
of a superman who is preparing to undergo an 'acid trip', view life in what is
called the 'post-human millennium' from a spiritual leader's standpoint as he
grapples with his counselling responsibilities vis-à-vis the superhuman flock,
and sample a controller's perspective on post-human life from the
administrative sidelines. One could
argue that this is my Brave New World, but
it was with a view to refuting Huxleyite cynicism
that I set out to fashion so positive a futuristic projection.
18. A SELFISH MAN: Another volume
of short prose, in which a number of my principal philosophical themes are
recycled in literary guise for the benefit of a wider understanding, A SELFISH
MAN begins with the title piece, a first-person narrative by an advocate of
spiritual selfishness, and winds its way through fifteen other examples of my
art in this field, culminating in a section of interior monologues which
features twelve different thinkers who successively elaborate on their likes
and dislikes from a similar ideological standpoint, thereby establishing a
unity of mind which transcends their phenomenal separatenesses. In between these two extremes there are
varying amounts of unity and disunity between the characters, but all are
caught in the throes of a vigorous philosophical debate. For here, as in other kindred works, action
is subordinate to thought, whether we are dealing with a drive to the cinema, a
couple watching television, reflections on a soapbox orator, a clandestine
affair, or the vicissitudes of a revolutionary politician. Sometimes the characters have names, sometimes
not. Sometimes they are a fairly
transparent projection of me, at other times a degree of fictional objectivity
has gone into their fashioning. Whatever
the case, A SELFISH MAN, dating from 1983, bears ample witness to this
philosopher-artist's search for literary perfection through thought.
19. A TRUE EXTREMISM: This
collection of fifteen short-prose pieces puts my ideological philosophy through
a literary prism, as we explore a variety of interrelated themes from a loosely
fictional standpoint. In fact politics,
whether associated with a correlative mode of sexuality or not, also figures
quite prominently here, though usually in connection with Social
Transcendentalism, which is both political and more than political. Those especially interested in philosophy
will find the last three titles in this collection particularly intriguing,
since they were conceived in a loosely aphoristic vein, the final one being a
kind of oblique tribute to Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
Copyright ©
1976–2012 John O'Loughlin
