One of the late Dennis Potter’s final projects was the television adaptation of Tim Park’s blackly, bleakly hilarious Cara Massamina. The sequel will, alas, not follow it onscreen, unless Potter’s eye starts to wink again from beyond the grave, like the murdered fiancee’s. Her would-be husband and eventual killer Morris Duckworth is still enjoying the parvenu delights of having married money, not once but twice.
His sister-in-law’s bed is an even more energetic berth than Mimi’s; Paola is less Dantean than Rabelaisian in her appetites. Mimi’s Ghost (Secker amp; Warburg Pounds 14.99) is Park’s eighth novel and bang up to scratch; funny, sardonic, strangely generous even in its violence. Morris is the sort of character only Kingsley Amis and Frederick Raphael ever seemed able to do convincingly: a wicked man with a broad streak of what can only be called decency.
By contrast, the characters in Edward Toman’s Dancing in Limbo (Flamingo Original Pounds 5.99) are cartoonishly unconvincing, seemingly collaged from every Irish novel you ever read. The conflict between Cardinal Snozzle O’Shea and the hard-hat evangelist Oliver Cromwell McCoy is played out against the buzzing background of the Armagh Shambles, scene of Toman’s first book, Shambles Corner. If it was in every way a better book, the reason has to be that Dancing in Limbo is plot-driven and highly circumstantial, and Toman’s forte is the kind of scenic stand-up (Billy Connolly monologue in an Ulster brogue) that doesn’t depend on twists and turns of narrative.
What makes the book frustrating is that Toman, like Duncan McLean in Scotland, is directly plugged in to forces that are, almost by definition, beyond comedy. Unlike McLean, though, he seems unable to break out of the wisecracking, casually surreal mode for long enough to allow the real horror of bigotry and violence (save for one cold vignette of an IRA hit) sink in. If Toman were to burn his Flann O’Briens and his Dermot Bolgers, more of his own voice might come through.
No such problem with Gerald Lynch’s luminous Troutstream (Fourth Estate, Pounds 14.99). The voice is ancestrally Irish, but the setting is an Ottawa Suburb - where Lynch has lived since childhood - and the profound social conservatism of Gene and Alice Davies, who might serve as the originals for a North American version of Keeping Up Appearances. Lynch surrounds them with zanies like Knowledgeable Nigel, prosey plodders like Mark and Dennis, two writers who are not so much imaginatively blocked as creatively deadened, and one hardened drinker, Anne Cameron. Their interactions and competing perceptions are so beautifully interwoven that one finds oneself treacherously softened up for the interruption of violence. A serial slasher works the Troutstream streets, hunting down and killing young girls without apparent motive or rationale.
Lynch never makes the snap moral judgments his surname might imply. He allows his characters to breathe and to develop at their own pace. They all sound, unlike Toman’s cast as if they are speaking their own lines, and speaking them from a depth of implicit experience, rather than talking up on a bare stage. It’s only gradually that one realises how thin the physical backdrops actually are. Even with a sketchmap on the endpapers, Troutstream is like a place of the mind, a linguistic confection rather than a documentary record, and all the more real and engaging for that. The second “r” is mysteriously italicised on the title page, and Lynch’s other emphases are equally enigmatic and subtle. This is a quite remarkable book, further evidence of the vitality of contemporary Canadian writing.
