Blending Genres

Muscle, Alan Trotter, Faber & Faber, 2019, £10.00 (paperback) For the Good Times, David Keenan, Faber and Faber, 2019, £12.99 (paperback)

Looks can be deceiving, and Alan Trotter’s recently published Muscle is testament to that well-worn adage. As other reviewers have described, the narrative drive of Trotter’s novel incorporates tropes typical of hardboiled, neo-noir genre-fiction recalling Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick. Two small-time gangsters are at work in the underbelly of an anonymous city: ‘Box’, and his unsavoury, knife-happy partner who is referred to simply as ‘___’. Trotter’s stylistic decision offers a ‘blank’ take on the more conventional ‘Frank’, and his two main characters, the novel’s eponymous ‘muscle’, use all manner of scare tactics, intimidation and bodily harm to make petty change, and ultimately to have something to do.

So far, so familiar. However, as Muscle develops, we find original variations that steer the plot from conventional pulp standards. Depictions of lowbrow and rather fruitless criminal activity – which lead us to wonder how the story might develop – begin to syncopate as protagonist Box becomes a conduit for time-bending ruminations that take seed when he meets Holcomb, a pulp sci-fi writer who plays late night poker with landlord Palmer and company while Box watches. Holcomb is the novel’s most fluent character, ‘the talker’, and therefore operates in stark contrast to Box, who ‘feels like so much furniture’– mutely fulfilling orders and drinking water as opposed to the preferred libations of his associates.

Box’s role broadens when he is briefly hired by Holcomb for protection. Out of character for a small-time and seemingly illiterate thug, Box begins obsessively to read his client’s short stories and notebooks. The stories are

bizarre and other-worldly: describing clever scientists, time travel, alternate universes inhabited by aliens and – on board with the more philosophical qualities of Trotter’s text – the ultimate dictum that ‘time isn’t a single line’. Two common physical motifs connect the otherwise dissimilar plots of Holcomb’s short stories: a machine intended for time travel, and a hefty copper ball associated with the machine. A similar ball sits on Holcomb’s desk, and, upon closer inspection, Box notes that the heavy sphere ‘was ringed by broken lines’, likely marked by erratic indentations caused by the time machine to which it is an essential component. Later, when searching for Holcomb’s literal copper ball that Box has grown to believe ‘can hold the future and the past’, he cannot find it. In effect, he integrates content from Holcomb’s stories with elements in his possible ‘real’ world that, like the etches in the ball that exists in both ‘fiction’ and ‘reality’ within the text, grow to be increasingly erratic as the book continues.

Literary dexterity that combines genres shows Trotter’s talent as a writer; he sets up a series of fictional frames to blend genres into a prose that creates its own form of temporal manipulation. When Holcomb is found murdered, the realm of neo-noir genre fiction is maintained: now dead, Holcomb has left behind debts, leading Box and partner to the apartment of the author’s supposed girlfriend, Evelyn Heydt, to collect them. Evelyn is a red-lipped beauty described in standard noir-ese: delicately curvaceous, defenceless and a salve for wounds that cannot be readily healed; she evocatively simmers in Box’s imagination. Box becomes entranced by her, and – quite predictably – thereafter cannot keep away from her. He begins to routinely show up at her door, and the eventual animosity of his presence is signalled by descriptions late in the book. Evelyn repeatedly asks Box to leave her alone: ‘Why do you do this? […] Is it just to frighten me?’ Her plaintive, feminine rejections bring about the sting that conventionally runs along the keys of such fiction, contributing to the novel’s slow-burning sense of foreboding: this is likely not going to end well.

In Muscle, Trotter incorporates elements of neo-noir with science fiction while complexifying a central character that might otherwise appear superficial. Box is the container for the book’s significance – as a narrative

vessel he allows Trotter to evade loyalty to a particular thematic mould. In that vein, what also guides the force of Trotter’s book is the multifarious capacity of story-telling itself. Box’s first-person narration, for example, is spliced by the novel’s 2–4 page ‘intervals’ made up of stark, existential dialogue between cold-blooded killers Hector and Charles following each section. The logic formulating such welcome additions, between Box’s harrowingly literal interpretations of Holcomb’s stories and the interludes, steadily cuts towards the novel’s tremendous end that makes this book a vindicating read. The text’s variations defy its plausible classification as a pastiche of well-trodden stories of gangster violence with sci-fi components, and it resists reaching apex in a predictable climactic shootout – the ending is refreshingly inventive without sacrificing impact. A unique papier-mâché style overcomes what could be a simple collage of genre-fiction; Trotter has created something new held at the heart of his book’s original conclusion.

David Keenan’s For the Good Times likewise bends time and defies straightforward type, but in a very different way. Main character Samuel McMahon – alternatively referred to as Xamuel – operates with Tommy, a Perry Como loving man (one of Como’s hit songs is the book’s title). Tommy and Samuel volunteer for the provisional IRA, though – as Keenan has remarked in an interview – For the Good Times ‘is not a book about The Troubles, or a book about the IRA, that’s just the backdrop’. Depictions of The Troubles are overlaid with paused jokes and segmented, italicised comic book style narration, and Samuel dubs himself as ‘The Anomaly’ while later bequeathing his gang as The Forever Family. Much like how Muscle is not to be understood as pure neo-noir genre fiction, so too is Keenan’s book resolutely not a typecast literary account of The Troubles.

On first glance this comes as a surprise, given Keenan’s pronounced description of Northern Ireland during The Troubles. The story begins, as it ends, with a colon, indicating that the end of the novel is meant to recirculate to its beginning. This is perhaps to signify the cyclical violence that continued to rage in the North following the 1970s. What connects the start and finish of the book is the 1981 hunger strike in the H blocks, or the

Maze Prison, where Bobby Sands and 10 other hunger strikers eventually died from self-inflicted starvation. Any martyrdom affiliated with the strikers actions, who intended to draw public attention to the state of affairs in Northern Ireland and facilitate recognition of republican dissidents as political prisoners and not terrorists, are firmly swept away throughout the rest of the novel. Keenan’s narrator Samuel describes IRA members as ‘mostly criminals’, ‘mad Paddy bastards’ and ‘uneducated Irishmen’, leading to an abrasive, original and problematical fictional contribution that, regardless of its intentions, does describe a perspective of republicanism in Northern Ireland during the late 1970s.

A remarkable surgency of literature has come out of Northern Ireland in recent years, immediate examples being Michael Hughes’s Iliad inspired Country and most notably Anna Burns’s 2018 Booker Prize winning novel Milkman. The protagonist of Burns’s novel, like Keenan’s in For the Good Times, comes from the largely Catholic, republican neighbourhood of Ardoyne in Belfast. Any further similarity ends there: while Burns’s novel recounts the pervasive psychological trauma of growing up during The Troubles, Keenan’s character Tommy says 1970s Northern Ireland was ‘the best decade what ever lived’. This statement makes it clear that political strife is used as a fictional trope in this book, and it should be taken as such. Keenan’s novel reads as high-octane bravado from a lost boy driven by circumstance. Depictions of brandished violence, loosely validated in the name of the IRA, are carried out by Samuel and company with brutality: the choice of murder weapon alternates from Stanley knives to wrenches to iron bars and chisels. Such depictions leave us to question how to take the book’s message, if it indeed has one. Pages of flippantly described mutinous republican murder – albeit well-written – do not pause to include the actions of unionist paramilitaries, the RUC or, as David Hayden has put it in his review for The Guardian, ‘British interests’. Within Keenan’s book, this can be easily taken as tongue-in-cheek, blatant ignorance or as fictional immunity to either. Thematic provocations are accentuated by its volatile narrative style, which is hurriedly dissociative and at times amusingly postured, applying a heavy-handed Northern peppering of ‘so I did’ to finish sentences every ten or so pages.

Jokes and comic book asides, that function as innovative digressions throughout the book, add entertaining emulsion to the main body of the text: ‘how many Irish does it take to screw in a lightbulb?’, etc., break up fuelled paragraphs of narrator Samuel’s blood-soaked and ultimately aimless adventures. Keenan’s bricolage suggests that core elements in the book are likewise to be taken as a joke – after all, the main characters are simply, as indicated by the book’s title, trying to have a good time, and the pronounced backdrop of everything else – such as the IRA, Sands, or causal yet prolific violence, are scenery to the more all-important pursuit of extracurricular enjoyment. The true meat of the story, despite the actions of the central figures within the book, appears to be single-minded intent on obtaining gratification however possible. Samuel explains:

Our bearing? You want to know what our bearing was? Our bearing was towards the future. We intended to seduce the fuck out of it.

Tommy, from whom Samuel takes many cues, is an example of how such seduction operates. During a trip to Glasgow in 1977 in order to lie low following an ineffective attack on the Europa, a city centre hotel in Belfast, Samuel and Tommy end up in the company of a gang of Orangemen at Tommy’s insistence. There, they sing along to a variation of the unionist song ‘Do you want a cheeseburger, Bobby Sands?’ before taking part in an orgy that only ends when Tommy’s genitals brush against another man while they are both having sex with the same woman. Tommy erupts in a homophobic rage, nearly killing the other man. This moment, like many other energetic areas of text, is quickly left behind as the novel continues its ambivalent narration that, so full of impulsive carnage, does not labour on consequence or circumstance – such as Sands’s imposed bread and water diet in Crumlin Road Prison in 1977 that notably predates the 1981 hunger strike – for too long. However, such episodes contribute to the sense that this text is not preoccupied, much like its characters, by dedication to history, cause, loyalty or redemption.

For the Good Times describes the IRA as ‘the biggest punk group going’ and

perhaps it is from this sentiment that, when read sympathetically, the book gives its greatest gift. Keenan’s novel just might be a literary feat that uses The Troubles to colour in the bruises of an anarchic fight launched against any system’s stranglehold. From its violent centre it creatively obliterates and repurposes themes of solidarity that allege valiant purpose. Motivity is deeply subverted in Keenan’s book, and having a good time becomes a defunct prerogative at odds with the enthusiasm for mandatory bloodshed. Samuel, the immoral, uneducated and murderous foot solider for the IRA whom Keenan has made his central protagonist indiscriminately kills without remorse and appears to be metaphorical totem for fighting against the system. If this is the case, the whole book uses the broad strokes of fiction in a manner that, in skewed measure, is perversely redemptive by historically troubling its Troubled context, turning the legends of sectarian dissonance to pure masquerade. It’s all in the fire, Keenan seems to say, so let’s raise our glass.

For the Good Times contains sweeping literary feats that provide unexpected nuance to the blade-wielding, broken-toothed grin of the text. In particular, a dream-like, run-on sequence when Samuel meets a republican sign painter showcases remarkable literary skill. The antinomies of his book, that run white-hot, cold and on occasion tenderly warm are not dissimilar to the dexterity shown in Trotter’s Muscle. In Muscle, Holcomb’s stories provide a time-travelling tunnel that draws central character Box to Evelyn in order to mollify the monotony of break-bone violence: this inevitably leads to sacrifice. Keenan’s Samuel faces the same immolation in his efforts to enjoy, but with a presumably one-fingered salute raised from a prison cell. The possibility of redemption alludes to the sacrificial disposability inherent in violence, and the carnal force in the originally of these texts balances on its perimeters and fictionally challenges them.