“He worked laboriously, with a wide eyed lunatic’s intent by candlelight, frantically composing by night, typing up in a soapy lather the dreary doings of his day, furiously pounding computer keys to drown the noises of Gallagher and Freaney copulating in the nearby back room, their obscene groans and sighs punctuating the angry rhythm of his clattering typing. The bloating book became his rod and staff, and soon was making him mad. Everyone he knew was in it, their names unchanged, their foibles and faults held up for scorn and ridicule, their virtues venerated, their quirks revered, yes, all, all of them would be given their space to shine and their page to prance, he would pull their strings and make them talk and walk, like a demented crackpot deity.”
I finished reading the manuscript of The Abode of Fancy feeling a close personal connection to the author. This was an illusion. An illusion also reported by numerous readers since that time. However, that feeling illustrates the defining strangeness of this work: vast, uncompromising, weird but also intimate, personal, relatable. It is like a case of possession. Like reading the work of a man who was not always himself. But this is no lunatic’s diary. It is a skilled, controlled attempt to capture life and the life of the mind in one great verbal take.
I realised – without meeting him – that Sam Coll was very different to other writers and to other human beings. Something most writers learn early is that they’re in no sense entitled to a readership. Writers – even very successful ones – tend to have an acute appreciation of readers. At the same time they’re ambivalent about their audience. They want one, but they also have a tyrannical indifference to it. They want an audience like a king wants subjects: Quality by all means, but never equality.
That is also true of Sam, only the scale of his tyranny as an author is vastly greater than normal. The audience he speaks to are dead or exist only within the fantastical mythology of which this book forms a sort of tailpiece. Of all authors I have known Sam is the furthest from having any sense of communicating with real people in a real world. At the same time he remains an acute and howlingly funny observer of human beings, a consummate storyteller and a faithful, even obsessive collector of detail. This is how he combines an aloof, spiritual power with writing that glories in the base detail of ordinary lives. He is a distributor of haloes.
I used the word “verbal” to describe this work with good reason. It was written to be read aloud: It was often the material Sam used to sing for his supper at University. In that sense this work was a revelation to me and one which I was slow to grasp. In creating this mighty exemplar of Doggerel, Sam had elevated it into something beyond its category but he had also made me value something in my own nature that I had previously viewed as an aberration. Those who live in words – I mean personally, not merely professionally – should recognise the tremendous importance of wordplay, repetition, rhyming, timing, nonsense syllabification and other linguistic tics. This constant inner muttering sustains our sense of reality, because language is our firmament. The Abode of Fancy unwound the embarrassment I’d always felt on this score. It is a book that yokes all the power of our primal babble to the highest possible artistic effect.
Everything I have written here is what the marketing department of my soul tells me not to write. I have represented the author as aloof and out of touch with reality. I have emphasised the fantastical and whimsical aspects of the work. I have talked about language in a way that suggests it is a linguistically tricky book - hard in other words. I have called it Doggerel. In a world of mostly silent readers, I have advocated it as a spoken word performance. Yet I cannot wheel out the easy tropes – tropes that this mighty work could casually sustain. Sam Coll is an author with a unique voice, fantastical but always truthful, and I’m convinced readers will respond to The Abode of Fancy on its own inimitable terms.
Daniel Caffrey edited The Abode of Fancy by Sam Coll, which is published by Liliput Press. It launches tonight at the Workman’s Club, Dublin
