We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, Tom Morris’s collection of stories, won me over from the start. The combination of a clean and sinewy prose, and the prevailing setting of a small town in South Wales were enough to propel me into reading all 10stories in two sittings.
I grew up about 25 miles farther west than Caerphilly, where all but one of the stories take place, but my own town is of an approximate size and population, and the individual types with which Morris peoples these stories are graphically familiar to me: lonely, unfulfilled, lacking self-assurance, under stress, dislocated and arthritically uncertain about themselves and their futures – a condition deftly encapsulated in the collection’s title.
Most of the people whose stories are gathered here are in their twenties or thirties, often living alone – sometimes after a break-up – watching a lot of television, knocking back the booze at a great rate, generally as abandoned as the shopping trolleys that languish in the moat of the town’s immense Norman castle.
The several forms of stagnation these residents are experiencing are echoed in the paralysis of the town: the post office has closed, shops are boarded up or about to go out of business (we actually encounter the video shop’s last customer, a female shrink, in the collection’s opening story, Bolt). A staple of other stories – Castle View, 17, Clap Hands and Big Pit – is an absent father, men who are not easy to live with or who are estranged from their children.
Yet, despite the predominant aimlessness of these shipwrecked lives, and the aroma of sadness that arises from many of the stories, I found myself buoyed up by the vigour of the language (both the various narrative voices and the characters’ vivid turns of phrase). The prose has a flinty energy and there’s not a joint in the writing. All the Boys, the one story not set in Caerphilly, but in Dublin (mostly in Temple Bar) over a stag weekend, makes very clever use of the future tense in relating the narrative.
Morris refers every so often to Caerphilly’s neighbouring hinterland, and the sonority of the names of these villages – Nantgarw, Abertridwr, Ystrad Mynach, Blaenavon, Llanbradach, Abersychan – to south Walian ears has the same musical resonance as the litany of places cited in the evening weather forecast.
These stories will stay with me, especially Fugue, How Sad, How Lonely and Big Pit. The overriding melancholy of impassive lives brings to mind the last lines of One Warm Saturday from Dylan Thomas’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog, “where the small and hardly known and never-to-be-forgotten people of the dirty town had lived and loved and died and, always, lost.”
Jonathan Williams has worked as a literary agent in Ireland for the past 30 years. He did not represent Tom Morris’s collection, but he wishes he had.
We Don’t Know What We’re Doing by Thomas Morris is published by Faber, at £12.99. Hodges Figgis offers a 10 per cent discount to Irish Times Book Club readers.
Morris is editor of The Stinging Fly magazine and edited Dubliners 100, a Tramp Press collection of stories updating James Joyce’s original to mark its centenary.
