Photographic portrait of an older man in a dark tweed jacket and cheesecutter hat. Beautifully lit so that only his face is really visible. An air of great warmth and cleverness.
Vincent O’Sullivan (Photo: Grant Maiden Photography)

BooksMarch 22, 2022

The subversive compassion of Vincent O’Sullivan

Photographic portrait of an older man in a dark tweed jacket and cheesecutter hat. Beautifully lit so that only his face is really visible. An air of great warmth and cleverness.
Vincent O’Sullivan (Photo: Grant Maiden Photography)

Emma Neale, something of a literary polymath herself, reviews Vincent O’Sullivan’s new short story collection Mary’s Boy, Jean-Jacques.

Confession: I started this collection wanting to race through the first six stories, to get to the novella and discover just exactly what the author had done with the tortured creature from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. But of course, this is Vincent O’Sullivan, Mansfield scholar and literary polymath, so I should have known that those stories would mock my wish to skimp and skip. 

In each story, there is a novel’s worth of observation and nuance, flecked with the glinting mica of poetry and a cast of clear, distinct characters. In the novella, not only is there a similar novel’s-lode of insight, but also a bittersweet distillation and dramatisation of philosophical views and a limber, imaginative leap into a castaway narrative in its final section. 

O’Sullivan’s short fictions play with various time schemes: some travel an upwards, ever tightening arc of chronological narrative suspense; others, like ‘Good Form’, the first in the collection, telescope in and out of past and present, gradually spiralling in to crushing revelation. 

‘Good Form’, with its shadowy, laconic, yet prideful and supercilious father, slowly circles in to a central event in a brother and sister’s farm upbringing. A tale both of tragic religious mania and marital infidelity, it also exposes the difference between gossip – where events become a yarn to spin, a comic turn for the local community – and the reality of lived trauma, “the woundings of time”. For Andrew, the protagonist, the cyclical return of memory is so disabling that he almost has to schedule in periods of breakdown throughout his career. The way O’Sullivan finally steps into the historical crisis moment for Andrew is arrestingly skillful: the prose zeroes in, becoming highly visual, also full of assonance and internal rhyme:  

He hears what must be a bird or an animal even tangled in something, but no, birds don’t grieve like that. A high dense cry and then a drawn-out sound, a choked sound like something wanting to become words but unable to find them. He is struck with a feeling deeper than fright. As it comes again it is a cry that seems to drain colour from everything around him. He sees only a slowly billowed curtain lifting at the kitchen window. Everything else is so still.

The actions, sensations and psychological response all pool and pulse for the reader with the same intensity they have for the haunted man. There is a Grimm’s fairytale air, of an aging Hansel and Gretel united through the violence and madness they’ve witnessed: the final chords of the story become an understated testament to enduring sibling love.

Small speckles and colour-streaks of style characterise these stories: a use of incomplete sentences and gerunds (verbs that act as nouns: e.g. wounding, being, watching), and the present continuous. In ‘Good Form’ for example, this gives a sense of Andrew only being able to take remembrance in small doses. (“Being able to say so.” “The woundings of time.” “The habits of a lifetime.” “That is the way it is, as if like her weight, or her height. Describing her, but not defining.” “Going over changes nothing.”) In the novella, this “prose-mark” shaves off some of the formality of the omniscient voice, so it somehow seems like a mind talking to itself, lending a curious emotional richness to what might otherwise be a distanced, historical tone. 

Yet even with such shared genetic traits, the voice of each story arrives lively and individualised. So the voice in ‘The Walkers’, where the narrative presses shoulders close with Eric, a young man with an intellectual disability, would never be mistaken for the more removed literary pastiche in the first two parts of the novella ‘Mary’s Boy, Jean-Jacques’. Likewise, the voice that flickers between the scholar, Mandy, and her teenage daughter Louise in ‘The Young Girl’s Story’ has subtle tonal differences from the characters in ‘Splinters’. O’Sullivan’s skill, in fact, is that even with an individual character, the tone darts and scuds, floats and sometimes sinks below the sunlight zone, following the fluctuating perceptions of that singular mind. The tension and action of a story is found in this internal psychological movement as much as it is in the jolts and gasps of plot: and yet nearly all the stories here also have “tellable” narratives: the dramatic, sometimes horrific, events you could recount if someone asks, What happened?

Cover of the book; shows an icy landscape in greens, blue and grey, slightly Cubist/stylised, with a hulking male figure walking away across the rocks.
Cover art is by Sarah Wilkins (Image: Supplied)

Literary tradition echoes from many of the stories, as if we’re walking past a cathedral and strains of high and plangent hymns drift out. I can see the roseate windows, catch some words, some references, but I certainly can’t grasp every allusion nor in-joke. (The store, D’Arcy’s, in ‘Good Form’, for example, which includes guns and sexual derring-do: does it refer to early 1900s poet Walter D’Arcy Cresswell, who was shot when he threatened to expose another man’s sexuality? It seems a stretch, yet the name stands out in a local literary context — and so much in O’Sullivan’s work responds to tradition, that I feel as if something dangles here on invisible wires.) 

There is a geeky delight in spotting or speculating over some things: the way the title ‘The Young Girl’s Story’ slyly fuses two Katherine Mansfield titles (‘A Married Man’s Story’ and ‘The Young Girl’); its exploration of academic conferences, inventing an author called Manson as the field of expertise (so close to Mansfield it’s as if the author deliberately short circuits any nerdy sleuthing); the fact the story unfolds, as Mansfield could, the way young women aren’t only vulnerable but may use their sexuality with varying degrees both of self-awareness and consequence. This story captures ruthless, narcissistic academic ambition and materialism, and is an acidulous, skewering observation of disconnection between a mother and daughter: an observation which also informs ‘Splinters’.

‘Splinters’ subverts expectations of a sort of “poor old dear”: the cosy corner to which the daughter and son-in-law want to relegate Emily, the pensioner protagonist. Instead, the story leaves an impression of a spider-like mind, waiting in the eaves, although Emily’s possibly most lacerating observations are of her own past. 

The story moves from Emily’s sardonic dismissal of her sister, through various moods, to her own determination to confront and be confronted by her past: “Memory was Stonehenge from a choice of angles. It was there and you were here […] The exhilaration, if you had the nerve to face it, of knowing exactly where you were […] But once we get it straight – it’s where we sit in judgement on ourselves.”

One pivotal memory for Emily is of a sexual peccadillo – and yet betrayal isn’t the concept she hits on: unless, perhaps, it’s for the way the unbidden, wild moment reveals self-deception. Such indiscretions are both “fragments of history, of what is really oneself” and yet also ‘as if it were a fragment of time from other lives, but not their own”: as if their real lives are not fully lived, only glimpsed, in almost frightening, asocial, or at least taboo slivers: the animal and sexual taking over in silence, the lack of discussion afterwards perhaps the strangest, most disconcerting thing. Emily’s variegated tones – sardonic, unconcerned about consequences, warm and sparkly, ruminative, fiercely aware she only accesses authentic aspects of herself intermittently – create a character who has few illusions about herself, and who is thrillingly three-dimensional.

Subtle striations of internal character always appear in what O’Sullivan has recently called his “social commentary realism”. Yet in the titles published here, he also plays with the more dramatic twist in the tail, the gothic tale of horror and mystery. Both the eponymous story and ‘Ko tēnei, ko tēnā’ offer all the robust joys of a strong narrative spine. ‘Ko tēnei, ko tēnā’ pivots on Mason, a young scurrilous, priapic scion of a so-called gentleman (in reality, a slave-owner, sinner against humanity). The son becomes a sort of self-selecting remittance man, who deliberately violates the cultural boundaries both of his own European circle, and of Māori tikanga, aiming to outrage and titillate in a weird, disturbing power play and a fetishistic act of dubious trade then gift-giving. His total failure to read the undercurrents running between the women he is supposedly closest to, and his taste for sexual and cultural exploitation, results in a ghastly comeuppance: the “plot shock” had me staring at the page in the right kind of disbelief. Not disbelief in the author’s choice, but as if stunned by a blow to the head, the assault instrument being character action. 

Portrait of a woman – emphasis is on her glowing skin and strong gaze; she wears a black off the shoulder gown, hair pulled back and no jewellery.
Mary Shelley, aged about 43 (Portrait: Richard Rothwell; Photo: PHAS/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

O’Sullivan’s brooding sport with the 19th-century gothic resurfaces in the title novella. The name given here to the monster – Jean-Jacques – nods to Rousseau, the philosopher who believed that uncorrupted morals were only possible in the natural state, away from the decadence of society. We see how Jean-Jacques, Frankenstein’s resuscitated, patchwork cadaver, becomes the center for a subliminal tussle over competing “civilised” views when he is rescued from the ice by Captain Francis Sharpe and his younger relative, Lieutenant Richard Jackson – who are sailing from pole to pole, on an adventure “merely to show it might be done”. 

I mentioned the potential game of spot-the-allusion earlier; and yet it doesn’t matter if the reader can’t translate, or even see the references. In some instances, memory of the original source might even hinder. I reread Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein before plunging into this collection and briefly got hung up on how, in O’Sullivan’s version, the monster seems to discover the concept of God after his rescue from the ice. Yet in Frankenstein, the golem reads Milton’s Paradise Lost, and begs Dr Frankenstein, movingly, “I was alone. I remembered Adam’s supplication to his Creator. But where was mine? He had abandoned me, and in the bitterness of my heart I cursed him.” Once I accepted that Sullivan’s scene is essentially laying out the differences in philosophy between the Christian captain and enlightenment, science-enthused lieutenant, I settled down, feeling a bit like the foaming twit who stands up immediately after the seat belt signs light up on a plane. (Just trust the pilot: he’s an expert.) 

Another element I initially banged the shin of my brain against, smarting and asking, How the hell did that get there? revealed itself as a brilliant, sly joke when I mulled it over (while out running, under native trees: perhaps Rousseau would say, of course that’s when the franc dropped). The captain comes across the novel Frankenstein on a stopover in the ship’s travels. The book is soon treated as biographical fact: horrifying empirical evidence of Jean-Jacques’ past violence and true nature. Initially I couldn’t figure out why a work of fiction was seen this way by Captain Sharpe, it seemed a weirdly illogical metafictional loop. Why not have the crew come across a newspaper report of the creature, perhaps written by Walton, the captain who hears Victor Frankenstein’s story in Shelley’s novel? Then I realised, Sharpe’s entire world view is built around the Bible: his reality is founded on powerful, intractable myth. Of course he’d read a novel and treat it as gospel. 

Throughout the novella, there are enlivening details about shipboard life. The creature’s gradual education in facts and feelings, the self-questioning he arrives at, are poignantly unfolded, and the theories that his dubious rescuers come to, about what this “almost man’ might be” sleekly convey the general spirit of an era.

In the original novel, the monster longs for Frankenstein to make him a companion. There’s a beautiful, joyous, poignant fulfilment of this desire in the final part of O’Sullivan’s novella, where suddenly the formal Victorian prose falls away and the narrative has a fresh energy and clarity, as if to emphasise how Jean-Jacques has escaped the stiffness, reserve and evasions of 19th-century mores and manners. There’s a suppleness, a sensuousness, a deepening and sharpening of feeling as Jean-Jacques meets Va in the wilderness of Te Waipounamu. 

I love the way the novella gives the monster what he so desperately wanted in Shelley’s book;  the gentle development of the relationship is remarkable, moving, and so carefully visualised it feels filmic. Yet because of the ongoing activities of colonisation, and the nature of decades passing, a chill seep of foreboding still arrives in the South Seas idyll of love between two lost and outcast souls. The closure is plangent, yearning, sorrowful, yet beautiful; the last line both echoing yet reversing the final line of Mansfield’s ‘The Man Without a Temperament’ (which O’Sullivan has written and talked about so eloquently elsewhere). 

In both stories, the single word of dialogue spoken by the male partner in the final lines carries layered resonances. In Mansfield’s, it has a dark and icy, even vindictive blow. In O’Sullivan’s, the last word spoken is loving, if poignantly undercut by our knowledge of time. The almost-man has an almost-happy ending; and O’Sullivan’s gifts have given us a monster with such an empathetic temperament that I wager many readers would far rather shack up under a stone bivvy with Jean-Jacques than sit in desperate silence with Mansfield’s repressed, monosyllabic Richard Salesby. In fact, by the end of the novella, most readers will find that Jean-Jacques – driven only by others’ cruelty to violence – has become a fuller-feeling, more generous, compassionate and noble man than many “of woman born”. O’Sullivan remains one of Aotearoa’s most intriguing, erudite, bold, eloquent and subversively compassionate writers.

Keep going!
A book cover showing a stylised illustration of a fish, all done in blues on cream. Background design using the blues.
(Image: Supplied; Design: Archi Banal)

BooksMarch 20, 2022

Vincent O’Sullivan reviews the strange and slippery new novel by Lloyd Jones

A book cover showing a stylised illustration of a fish, all done in blues on cream. Background design using the blues.
(Image: Supplied; Design: Archi Banal)

Near the start of the Booker-shortlisted writer’s latest novel, a boy visits a beach caravan where his 19-year-old sister has given birth to a reeking, repulsive baby: the Fish. This is its story. But what does it mean? 

“Fable” isn’t a word that immediately catches a contemporary reader, although it was one widely used of Lloyd Jones last novel, The Cage. It’s a word that tells us what we are reading is about something as well as the story it tells – a moral point of view, echoings that may surprise, that what seems like a fact may be something more expansive. Should someone ask what it is “about”, we might offer a precis of events, but that would be a meagre answer, and not do justice to it. With a writer as skilled as Jones, we need to add that his language often extends to so much more than he describes; that, like good poetry, it demands we attend to what it suggests, what hovers there, seemingly just out of reach. It can be like hearing a new piece of music we’re not at first sure about. Of course we’re not. Because we’ve not heard anything quite like it before. It’s asking us to go beyond cosy expectations. As a reader, there’s an excitement with that, even if the puzzle remains.

Early in The Fish, we know the story is set in New Zealand suburbia, and a clue tells us precisely when. The movie Dr Zhivago is currently showing in the cinemas, so this is the summer of 1966. The characters live in Wellington, close to the sea. It is a decade we tend to look back on with a mild condescension. 

This was Kiwi life at its most “ordinary”. This was mum and dad in an ordinary house, there was a craving for security, there were few tentative dabs at sophistication. This is what a generation after the War wanted, after all – just don’t bother us with anything that upsets. Apple carts are very difficult things to come by, so don’t risk tipping them. Time in the novels zig-zags round a bit, but the kind of lives it touches on stay very much in that period. What can’t be avoided, is when inevitably sex raises an ugly head. (As the Mazengarb Report 10 years before had assured us it would.)

As far as the events of the story go, sex is covert, nasty, lawless, the one thing sure to mess up lives. It would be easy to take one reading of the story, which I’m putting aside, that could turn it to a yet darker tale of incest. I could not believe the publisher’s blurb of The Fish that found it a tender family story. One sister becomes “a ship girl”, the other, with more smarts, finds success overseas in “professional girl friending”. And of course it is from a mangled sex life that we get to the title of the book, and the child – Shakespeare offered a handy line as it came to mind  – “sent into the world before my time, scarce half made up”. How it survives, how it is regarded, how it swims into and out of events, carries the fable. And note, its pronouns are always “it” and “its”. 

By now anything like run-of-the-trade realism is left well behind. We never know for certain what the Fish thinks, what it looks like, any more than we know what, in the fable it swims in, quite what it means. All we are certain of is that it is central to whatever happens to the family, as the story variously drenches us in compassion, puzzlement, confusion, loss. There are distant texts drifting about in the current we’re caught up in. Moby Dick glides by. So does Robinson Crusoe. You’re unlikely not to think of Kafka’s famous changeling. More than once, the Fish’s siblings are referred to as crabs, its grandmother as a cockroach. As much as Ahab, we’re on a quest we don’t fully comprehend, fingering a code that obsesses but eludes us. The quest takes us through some compelling incidents, spare but memorable imagery, and the best writing about the Wahine storm I have read.

I expect many of us remember the excitement, and the shock, when as children we first saw the image or a model of an embryo. Just how it looked anything but human, at the same time as it unmistakably was. A tadpole may have been the closest we had come to that enormous head, those tapering limbs. There may have been that appalled fascination, to learn that on the way to being ourselves we had passed though being other things as well. Most of all, how like fish we had to be on the voyage out. I remember a curious moment of adult discomfort, as a doctor once felt my neck, and remarked on where my gills would have been.

So the Fish is what we were then, what we have absorbed into ourselves? No problem with that. But what if this is also what we still are? Alien, other to ourselves. Jones always has seemed to me a writer inescapably compassionate. “Nothing that is human is alien to me,” as the Latin tag goes. Is the Fish us, when we don’t want it to be? At our weakest, our most unattractive? Perhaps. Jones is masterly on human weakness, on what goes wrong with us. On how hard it can be to get things right. This is a story that is heard, as it were, through half opened windows, put together in events the characters themselves are confused by, the human tangle at its most elusive, where hints and nudges and guesses are worked overtime. It is about, most certainly but not only, how people are to be saved, against the odds. If some don’t make it, others do. If the Fish is dead, others may survive because of it. The foundering of the Wahine makes that very clear. 

The end brings us back to what is so much a mark of Lloyd Jones’s constant questing about for how something is to be told, but not in a way that’s been used before. So often it has struck me, how his sense of the writer’s calling is the lodestar in so much of his work. Part of this is to take his readers seriously, to assume they will accept their part in this business of “fiction”.  As much as with Mr Pip, writing itself is floated as redemptive. 

On the last page of The Fish, the narrator, leaving the caravan where so much of the story has been set and where we now find out it was written, looks out to the country which is his, his family’s, ours: a place of “baffled sheep and a restless wind.” You don’t have to push symbolism too far to take that caravan as a womb, where things are put together, where mistakes happen. In the last sentence, as he comes from his writerly cocoon, “I heard a beast confined to a pen in the hills some distance away and I wondered if, in fact, it was my groaning relief that I heard. Then I began my own uncertain walk back out into the world.”

In a fiction shot through with the fellowship of other writers, one can’t help but hear, in that final sentence, Ishmael’s lift from Job in the most myth-laden of novels – “And I only am escaped to tell thee.” I imagine Janet Frame not too far from the story’s relentless demand that we look at ourselves, at what we don’t and can’t fully understand. The Fish is in the same country as her own unrelenting riffs on what we are. Only with Jones, there is so much more humanity, so little of her delight in punishing us for what can’t be helped. 

The Fish by Lloyd Jones (Penguin, $36) is available from Unity Books Auckland and Wellington