When I first read Michael Collins, I was 20 years of age. It was 1992. I was living in Providence, Rhode Island, and I was on a running scholarship at Brown University. When I wasn’t pounding out the miles, or attending motivational team-meetings – a complete waste of time by the way – I was in class, or back in the dorm reading, and writing, or behind the circulation desk as a student librarian at the Rockefeller Library, what we then called “the Rock”. I was friends with those in acquisitions, and whenever a book arrived which Steve the manager thought might interest me, it would land on my desk before it made its way into the stacks. Call it a perk of the job. That was the case with Michael Collins’ debut. There it was one day waiting for me – the cover containing a vista of Americana stained by a splash of blood.
I was intrigued. Here was an Irish author who had been on a running scholarship, and was now living, and writing in the US. As far as I was concerned Michael Collins was blazing a trail, and I wanted to follow. That debut, The Meat Eaters, is irreverent, outrageous and pulsing with a gritty lyricism: I thought I had found a mentor of sorts in Michael Collins – especially when my own athletic career ended abruptly.
Lost Souls is not just a good piece of genre fiction, it's something more, something which manages to transcend its genre and become something quite extraordinary
The sentences of his debut were laden with the kind of demystifying tropes of the iconoclast, and I read every word of every book which came out subsequently; The Life and Times of a Teaboy, and The Feminists Go Swimming. And then after the scintillating Emerald Underground, The Keepers of Truth and The Resurrectionists – read them all if you haven’t – there appeared what for me was Collins’ best book to date: Lost Souls, published in 2003. The novel is poignant, and elegiac – a lament for small-town America, and its corrupted values – a world inhabited by the directionless, mean-spirited and self-serving: a community, in other words, of lost souls.
In a nutshell, Lawrence, the narrator, is a policeman in a small Midwestern town. It is Halloween. Kids are out trick or treating when a body is found covered by a pile of autumn leaves and left by the side of the road. The body is a girl. She’s three years of age. She’s wearing the costume of an angel. So begins Lawrence’s quest to discover the truth of what has the traditional set-up of any good thriller.
It’s no surprise that our protagonist is alcoholic, divorced and struggling. However, the breed of suspense the novel engenders has something of the neo-noir about it. Not that our expectations are subverted by what happens; it is instead the tonal control and sustained ennui that permeates the narration which transforms the simple ingredients of a conventional mystery into a memorable and lasting piece of literature.
In many ways, that’s what fascinates about Lost Souls. It should be just a good piece of genre fiction: all of the pieces are in place. But it’s not just a good piece of genre fiction, it’s something more, something which manages to transcend its genre and become something quite extraordinary. Collins had already been shortlisted in 2000 for the Booker Prize for his novel The Keepers of Truth, but ironically it is this crime novel which sees him fulfil the promise of his earlier books.
The novel is set in the mid-1970s, a skilfully revealed detail; our man Lawrence tells us when watching TV that Elizabeth Taylor is being interviewed by Johnny Carson. It’s pre personal computer, pre forensics, and the digital age – perfect for the lone cop who is trying to find something redemptive in his life, even if he does not consciously know this. It also means we’re not distracted by the latest fad in investigative policing. Another reason, ironically, why this novel still reads as if it were contemporary. The procedures of Lawrence’s investigation parallel his own struggle to find meaning, and solace in his life – he’s the underdog, and we want him to do good.
The narrative is understated. We are told what is happening at any given moment, but the interiorisation of the character’s conflict is omitted. It is this omission and, by extension, the admission of the character’s basic ignorance which is so stark and affecting. American literature is steeped in self-reflexive characters disclosing the twists and turns of their conscience, but the strength of a book like Lost Souls is the lack of convolution in the face of a crime. Lawrence’s self-awareness goes as far as: “my sense of the pathetic ran deep”. He’s not a complicated guy, and does not always understand why he does one thing or feels a certain way. In some respects, Lawrence is a victim too, albeit he survives, unlike the victim of the crime he is investigating.
Dostoyevsky once wrote that “We have all come out from under Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’”, a reference to the lasting influence of Gogol’s work, and in particular to his seminal story The Overcoat. Certainly, in the early work of Collins we see that strain of surrealism and the grotesque that Gogol released, eg the suitcase of meat which the character from The Meat Eaters transports to America from Ireland. And the rich titular echo that Collins’ Lost Souls carries from Gogol’s Dead Souls, whether intentional or not, is evident. Lawrence, as investigator, is there to uncover the truth, even as he is being misled, we feel as if he has walked straight out of Gogol, but by way of Raymond Chandler – and there is indeed a touch of the pulp-fiction about Collins’ masterpiece.
What’s so exciting about Michael Collins’ writing then is that it is unpredictable. He has at every juncture, from one book to the next, managed to side-step and escape the easy categorisations of his contemporaries. Not one thing, nor the other. Not literary, per se, and not a genre writer, his poetics is a chameleon one. He hasn’t written a book like Lost Souls since, not because he can’t, but because there is that indefatigable quality to his writing, the searching restlessness of a visceral intellect. He is a better writer for it.
Paul Perry is a poet and fiction writer. The author of several books, his latest co-authored Karen Perry thriller Girl Unknown is published by Penguin, and will appear from Henry Holt Publishing in the US in 2018
