FictionOne of the major graces of narrative is its facility for putting on airs. Here is the relevant definition from the accessible Book of Literary Terms, where the formalist critic Lewis Turco examines the stylistic possibilities within prose: "Atmosphere is the aura of mood that surrounds the story.
It is to fiction what the sensory level is to poetry. In fact, it is often said that a story that has as its strongest element a mood or atmosphere is a 'poetic' story". The concentration in a "mood story" is on description, evoked sensation, and plain emotional affect. Potentially airy, these narrative powers are also easily earthed; the "setting" of the story, advises Turco, has a "great deal to do with these evocations of mood".
Fred Johnston's concentration on poetry earlier in his career has been increasingly well refracted through his more recent preoccupation with fiction. The Neon Rose, set in a contemporary Paris so effectively evoked that one is left with an arrayed sensory impression of the city as a breathing entity, is his fourth and easily most poetic novel to date. Through the fine decor of much of Johnston's language, Paris emerges here as less a moveable feast than a fixated misery, not as a capital where people go to cultural heaven but as a bohemian outpost of needs and desires where one can both creepingly and suddenly fall into hell (an author's note tells us that the moment of inspiration was a meeting with a young Irishman begging on the rue de Rivoli).
The novel's three sections are structured according to the happenings over three days recounted from three points of view. A young Irishman sits in jail, dazed in the present and confused about himself and his native country, but determined on confessing to a murder he seemingly did not commit. A "little nervous avocat" looks after this Irishman's case amid his own work and family problems, diplomatic issues, and personal complications with his lover, Marcel. And a young girl, the one witness to the truth about the killing of a cantankerous painter, is on the run on the streets she has always known well ("Word is she was street trash, peddled her ass for a score").
Johnston's publisher, Bluechrome, an independent UK house launched in 2002, professes on its website to be a promoter of poetry and "literary or experimental fiction". Whether that "or" be taken to denote that literary and experimental are much the same thing, or that Bluechrome are interested in either literary or experimental fiction, an equal problem applies because the word "experimental" would at this stage require practically its own book of terms and definitions for any precise or agreed meaning to emerge. Not of least practical concern should be the potential negative definition of the word in that it popularly denotes a category of work that is simply uncertain, untried, fundamentally unfinished.
It may be that the wider than normal indents on the page here (ultimately, they only annoy the eye) and the use of sometimes four and sometimes five and sometimes six dots to indicate ellipsis (three, rather, is correct) are nods to typographic experimentalism, but there is little else that might be taken for daring. Johnston is simply doing something familiar very well. While his storyline is unexciting, and while his characterisation, with the exception of the finely drawn girl, is somewhat predictable (the young ex-pat Paddy angry with Ireland and with Daddy; the French provincial who feels awkward in the metropolis), this is compensated for by acutely observant descriptiveness and affecting atmospherics.
We may not, just yet, have the best of Johnston, but we do have for the moment his mood and his Paris.
John Kenny lectures in the English department of NUI Galway
The Neon Rose By Fred Johnston Bluechrome, 176pp. £9.99