VIOLENT dreams, friendships and blood hatreds angels of death, surreal fantasies, terror, various frustrations, a veritable arsenal of axes, knives, bombs and other menacing objects, along with the blackest of black comedy, are the devices that Irish writer Mike McCormack calls upon in an impressive debut collection, Getting It in the Head (Cape, £9.99 in UK). There are 16 stories in this book, some weak, several are excellent. One of them, the title story, is superb. It is impossible to miss the craftsmanship here. More importantly, he never pushes a story too far. The level of control in these often brutal tales is remarkable, even at the most extreme moments and extremity is central to McCormack's bizarre vision he is never tempted to push his narratives beyond their limits.
But he certainly pushes the reader's nerves and stomach as far, or further, than they might wish. By the end, even the admiring reader is left wondering whether, although writers are not morally bound to tiptoe over the reader's sensitivities, McCormack's talents rely for effect entirely on extremes.
"On the very evening I burned down the left wing of our house my father told me that he hated me. He just stood there in the shadow of the gutted roof thumbing a shell into the rifle . . . just telling me quietly and for the last time that everything about me made him sick." So begins "The Terms", the story of a strange battle of wits told from the viewpoints of both father and son. The laconic, first person voice suits McCormack, a careful writer with a perverse genius for presenting the most shocking, confessional tales in lucid, precise prose. Most of his narrators are mentally disturbed, clearly beyond salvation but unnervingly resigned. Calm, bewildered or angry, they are always coherent and mostly responsible for their predicaments.
There are some victims among his cast of perpetrators, such as a grieving couple who lose their child, or the young Irish man in "Blues for Emmett Ward" who arrives in the States for vacation work and seems to have found instant sex only to be later discovered suspended by his arm from a wire mesh fence, brutally beaten and knifed in the belly "with a heavy rivulet of blood draining from the corner of his mouth". He has also been robbed of one of his kidneys.
A dead artist remembered by his doctor is the subject of the grotesque comedy, "Thomas Crumlesh 1960-1992 A Retrospective". It soon becomes obvious that Crumlesh is no ordinary artist and that the narrator is not a typical art critic, either. Crumlesh's "art" consists of dismembering himself, and in pursuit of this he needs a supply of body parts and a helpful doctor. Dr Frank, the narrator, is willing. The artist ends up very famous, dead and in many pieces following his instructions, removed his remaining left arm and head messy, dispiriting work. I then boiled the flesh from the arm and skull in a huge bath and using a solution of bleach and furniture polish brought the bone to a luminous whiteness." The narrator offers his version of the events from the safety of prison.
A impressionable young librarian makes the mistake of spending a bunch hour listening to the adventures of a circus performer who has perfected the art of eating glass. Within a week she is scaling the walls of the local cathedral in the hope that devouring the Christ Child from a stained glass window will cure her of this awkward new habit. It is not one of the best stories, but its offbeat ending, with the unborn Christ Child preparing for a "very different" second coming, underlines McCormack's subversive approach to religion and ritual. In "A is for Axe", a chipped piece of a weapon used in a patricidal killing is "passed among the jurors in a scaled plastic bag like the relic of a venerated saint". The father killing narrator, has few illusions about himself "As a child, nothing marked me out from the ordinary, except for the fact that I had been hit by lightning. I had been left in the yard one summer's day, sleeping in my high springed pram when the sky darkened quickly to rain and then thunder. All of a sudden a fork of lightning rent the sky and demolished my carriage and one of his ears disappears, as in "The Terms" the son is marked by a having a huge head McCormack favours freak disfigurement. (There are frequent stylistic and thematic repetitions throughout the collection).
These stories dazzle, but they don't always convince. However, McCormack does prove that a writer can work within a narrow range of extremes and still appear original, thanks to the uniformly sharp, controlled tone of his wacky narratives and their arresting, announcement like opening sentences. "I have just returned from burying my son, I think. I say that not out of certainty but defiance. What is beyond doubt is that I have returned from burying someone and he was very small and a blood relation", the narrator tells us at the beginning of "Old Man, My Son", in which the narrator's small son transforms into his dead father, "a hero of the War of Independence and probably of the Civil War also although he rarely spoke of this second adventure". The old man, who died three years earlier takes over the child's body and dies again taking the boy with him.
Father killers, son killers however, the best story the title one concerns a fratricidal narrator who shares the narrative with his victim, himself a boy obsessed with death and mayhem. The brothers are very different Owl is a child prodigy, his older brother is a waster convinced of little except for that "Owl's my younger brother and I swear there's not a weirder kid in the whole of creation." The story succeeds through the skillful balancing of the two narrative viewpoints (a less talented writer might have forced this story to novel length).
It is also the final story in an impressive debut. On arriving at it, the reader will have decided that McCormack is a clever, risky writer of the Pat McCabe school of domestic violence, though he wisely operates at a less frantic pitch. Apparently breaking free of the old stereotypes, he is also alert to the weight and wealth of tradition its obsessions, its rituals, even myths such as fairy changelings. Getting It in die Head is an accurate title the mind, not the emotions, is McConack's target and these deadly, exact stories score several bullseyes.
