"Somewhere Near Venice", from Shelf Life Magazine Issue #14,

Somewhere near Venice, Guy began talking with a heavy, elderly man, a refugee from Germany on his way to Trieste. The gentleman in the carriage was not handsome, but neither was he particularly bad-looking; he was neither too fat, nor too thin; he could not be said to be old, but he was not too young, either. The land itself was beautiful, with hills that ran down to the sea, and there were cold green waves that broke on the rocks that marked the edge of the land. No sound can be heard from the fields. But I don’t understand the least thing about my illness, and I don’t know for certain what part of me is affected.


The supine figure could almost have been sleeping were it not for the eyes. When the Simibirsk, of the Russian Volunteer Fleet, had at last completely vanished, carrying away the three sisters to Shanghai, I came back to my room at the hotel. She sighed, and sipped, and then to my dismay trotted them out. Of blood that laughs when the tenets mutter ‘Weep’. Then Roscommon stumbled out and tore down our badminton net. From the open windows of her sickroom, a warm draught stirs the loose white hair at her neck, bringing scents of coal smoke, jasmine, opium.

You was in India, and that’s not the East any more than this is. Liebermann edged forward. Janet must have opened the window before she left. Was he born in Paris? “Drink – Rum”.


A dazzling ray of light slanted in through the trees. I was eating chocolate cake and drinking fragolino, a sweet swarthy wine distilled from the strawberry grape, in my bath. A woman in a black dress with a lace collar had led them to the table.





Seamus Sweeney is a writer from Dublin. He won the 2010 Molly Keane Short Story Competition.


Note on the composition of "Somewhere Near Venice"

Take a bookshelf (perhaps you can do this with a Kindle or the like as well, but an old fashioned shelf of old fashioned books has a certain physical reality to it). Take the first book on the left. Copy the first sentence. Then, copy the second sentence from the second book. Then, the third sentence from the third book. Then, the fourth sentence from the fourth book. I'm sure you are getting the picture. You can either confine yourself to fiction (I did) or not. On our shelves, as well as the volumes already there, there are infinitely many other possible narratives waiting to be combined. I imagine a perfect library in which this method can be used to compose an entirely fresh and coherent new story.

Books used:
The Great Fortune - Olivia Manning
Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol
Dream Angus - Alexander McCall Smith
Sorochintsy Fair - Nikolai Gogol (from "Village Evenings Near Dikanka")
Notes from underground - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Witchdoctor of Chisale - Stephen McWilliams
Futility - William Gerhardie
Flashman and the mountain of light - George macdonald Fraser
Gormenghast - Mervyn Peake
Zodiac - the Eco thriller - Neal Stephenson
The Difference Engine - William Gibson and Bruce Sterling
Time For A Tiger - Anthony Burgess
Vienna Blood - Frank Tallis
The Fit - Philip Hensher
What a strange creature is man - Johann Peter Hebel (from The Treasure Chest)
"The Balance" - Evelyn Waugh (from Collected Short Stories)
He who fears the wolf - Karin Fossum
Quentins - Maeve Binchy

The Scarface Project: Macbeth and Scarface (or, Scarface and Macbeth)

The Scarface Project: Macbeth and Scarface (or, Scarface and Macbeth)

"The Solitary Golfer" Written in 2004. Published on nthposition.com March 2012

Simon loved being on a golf course. Happiest playing the course alone, free of having to compete with another player, free of the steady succession of patients, he found the game an unexpected source of solace and freedom. In his surgery there was control, there were books, the internet, even Sandra’s advice on the mobile if need be - but there was still the unknowable, the potential chaos and hassle brought by every new patient.
Thursdays he took a half day. Before Paul Gildea had come back from America, he used this time to read and daydream. After this, he played golf with Prof Gildea each Thursday. They had been in medical school together, and lived with each all the way through college. Simon found that he began to enjoy the experience of being out playing golf, and began to play every Thursday, even if Paul Gildea was at a conference or otherwise engaged.
At ten to one that morning he had seen Mrs Watters. She had been attending the practice for ten years. Always presenting with headaches, or backaches, or general fatigue, nothing was ever discovered to be the matter with her. Simon knew, for Beda the practice nurse knew, that Mr Watters drank - not in a spectacular, destructive way, but in the slow corrosive way of late middle aged disappointment. It seemed obvious to Simon, at this stage, that Mrs Watters' great disappointment with her life had transmuted itself into aches and pains, but every time he asked how things were at home, or if she felt stressed, or if things were OK between herself and her husband, she smiled and denied anything was wrong. This would usually frustrate Simon, but he found Mrs Watters likeable, always feeling a strong desire to put his arm around her and tell her that it was alright, no one would judge her if she admitted the truth.
Today, Mrs Watters looked a little more drawn than usual.
"I'm very tired, Doctor."
She had been tired two months ago, when she was last seen, and Simon had ordered routine bloodwork which was - as always - absolutely fine.
"Are you more tired than two months ago?"
Simon was hungry, and was consciously trying not to seem irritated, for anxiety not to offend her.
"Its more intense tiredness. Then I was tired all the time. Now I'm tired right through me, all the way."
"Has anything happened?"
"No, nothing, everything is fine. It's only that - well my appetite is totally gone." This was another frequent symptom of Mrs Watters', investigated many times.
"Do you get food into you?"
"It's a struggle. I don't, really."
Simon had resolved the last time to limit the investigations on Mrs Watters. This was a recurrent resolution.
"Let's go back to the tiredness. How are you sleeping?"
"I'm sleeping better than I was, but I just feel exhausted. I go to bed for a nap after a few hours and sleep the afternoon."
This was a new variation. Simon paused, and then launched fluently into a explanation he had given many times before.
"Now Mrs Watters, you know that isn't a good idea. If you nap during the day, you'll have a worse quality sleep at night, even if you sleep. If you just stay up through the tiredness, you'll feel better in the long run."
"I've tried that, I've really tried, but I'm just so tired."
"I really think if you try for even a week, it'll make a big difference."
What he disliked about golf was having to take it seriously. It was a chance to be in the open air, to daydream. It was an escape from the cares of running a clinic, not only the stress of seeing patients but of managing the practice, ensuring everyone got paid and had their ego massaged appropriately. Paul used the game to regale Simon with malicious gossip about medical and academic figures Simon had usually only dimly heard of, if at all.
The day had begun with towering slate grey clouds looming from the Atlantic, usually the harbinger of the inescapable rain. Today, however, the day had turned out sunny. Dr Simon Harris, who took everything he told his patients seriously, shifted a little uneasily in the sun. He had no sunblock or sunglasses, and thought of all the old ladies and gentlemen he had solemnly commanded to always cover themselves in Factor 50 at the very least, and to make sure to wear proper ultraviolet-resistant sunglasses. Prof Gildea, who liked to holiday in Florida ever since working there as a medical resident, strutted confidently in the sun. Simon, feeling fat and red-faced beside him, was crushed at cutting such a ridiculous figure.
Futhermore, he was worried about Mrs Watters. He had managed not to order any investigations, which was a victory. And yet he thought back to his consultation. She did look like she had lost weight. She looked drawn. Why hadn't he done a quick physical? She was the last patient before lunchtime, or on Thursdays finishing for the day, and he had been impatient. Despite his liking for her, his desire to comfort her and help her, he had been impatient. Thursday afternoons were a time he felt younger, when Paul Gildea was a satisfyingly bitchy companion and, by his gossip, seemed to treat him as an equal.
The night before, after dinner and a few glasses of wine at Paul’s house, Simon had lain awake for two hours, or maybe more, picking over the endless I-me-my-mines of his old friend’s conversation. He felt guilty at resenting Paul, and wondered if it was rooted in resentment at how far his academic and social star had risen. No, he didn’t think so. Paul was still very nice to him, very considerate. He suddenly thought - one could be considerate, kind even, and yet utterly self-absorbed. Indeed, the listener - or rather the one who had the privilege to attend to the egoist’s remarks - with their individual virtues, could become part of the awesome, humbling egotism of Paul Gildea.
For it was an egotism so monumental it humbled, a force of nature; which Simon found it hard to blame Paul for. Paul had always had a fairly healthy opinion of his own worth, but in the last year the self-absorption seemed to have taken nearly entire hold of his person. Simon noticed it in his every utterance - everything he said seemed intended largely to reflect the greatness of Paul Gildea. It was impossible to converse with him any more. He delivered monologues, anecdotes which he seemed to have learnt off by heart. Simon had a mental image of him getting up early each morning and polishing his lines in the mirror each morning. Paul did not so much brook no interruption as carry on unregarding of not only interruption, but the normal conversational give-and-take. It seemed at times as if he was afraid, as if he felt that to allow the other to speak would compromise him in some way. Only on the golf course did he seem to relax - a little. For there, while he needed to dominate the conversation, he seemed to want to entertain.
On the par four 15th, Simon hit the ball sweetly, full on. For once, he knew he had hit a good shot. He experienced the keen pleasure of something done well. The satisfaction of achieving. At instants like this, Simon understood why some became so fixated on golf. If only it could be a succession of these moments and nothing else, free of the false bonhomie hiding so much resentment and disappointment, free of the losing and the failure.
The ball flew high and true. It would get close to the green, Simon thought. No, it would get closer - it would make the green. It flew right towards the hole, and Simon and Paul both were seized by a feeling of certainty of what was about to happen. The ball neatly disappeared into the hole.
“A hole in one!” said Gildea, redundantly. “and on a par four too!” It was the sort of obvious thing the new Paul Gildea would say, except Simon did not mind, for this time it was said simply and unaffectedly. For an instant the achievement transcended things. They were simply two figures on the golf course, enraptured by one of those special moments that made sport worthwhile.
In the silence, Paul addressed the ball. He played (as Simon almost always did) woefully and holed in ten. The quiet continued as he completed the hole.
Walking to the next tee, Paul said “A funny thing happened the other day” and Simon knew that what he was about to hear would certainly not be funny. He tightened his buttocks and curled his toes, and tried to assume an interested expression. Does Paul notice the disappointment, disdain even, on my face? he thought. Simon however was already in anecdotal midstream, and Paul knew from experience it was impossible to steer back to any shore.
That morning, before they had gone to work.
"I need a break. We need a break, I should say."
"Where would you like to go?"
"Well, I know I don't want to just go to Connemara and do what we always do."
"Oh, you know I don't mind much where we go."
"But you never want to go anywhere new."
"Well, I guess I do think that if you own a holiday home, you should get use out of it."
"I know, I know. But we've been done six weekends already this year. We've got great use out of it. We get nearly as much out of it as our own house."
"I have no problem going anywhere."
"But you always do, Simon, you always worry about the money."
"Well, that isn't so unreasonable."
"Simon, we have nothing to worry about."
"We still have to finish off the mortgage."
"Yes, in triple quick time. Everyone else is buying property to invest, to let out. While we are just in hock to your fantasy about living without debt."
"Is it a fantasy? We are nearly there. In another year it'll be a reality."
"Look, why not celebrate by going somewhere really nice?"
"Like where?"
"South Africa."
"South Africa." he trailed off. A trip to South Africa would hardly be bad. "Would it be expensive?"
"We could always take out a loan?"
"Why?"
"Not this again. Oh, Simon, this is so bloody irritating."
"I just don't see the point in getting into debt."
Simon was happy enough to stay around and read novels during his holidays or perhaps go to the bungalow in Connemara. Dutifully he went on ski-ing holidays with Sandra and the Maxwells - she a psychiatrist from Sandra’s college class, he engaged in some line of business Simon could never pin down - despite the fact that the activity held no interest for him whatsoever. He would gingerly slide down the basic slopes, while Sandra and the Maxwells went straight to the black ones. These holidays had resumed after a break of some years now the Maxwells children were older. The children too could ski with verve and confidence. All Simon could do was the snow plough, badly.
At moments of loneliness in the early years of college, Simon would think to himself “I was the brightest student in one of the best schools in the country. Therefore, I’m one of the brightest people of my age in Ireland. Therefore, I’m not too far from being among the brightest people of my own age in Europe.” He drew comfort from this. He imagined himself, after a few years of medical practice, pioneering some new treatment or - better yet - conceiving an entirely new concept in medicine. Then, in retrospect, his early years in medicine, barely passing each exam despite long hours of looking at textbooks and anatomy atlases.
He had always been around pass or at most low second class honours standard. Academic achievement was something that you never talked about, but everyone coveted.
Harris didn’t think he was a bad GP. He was kindly, and sympathetic, and had developed enough clinical confidence to have a pretty good idea what needed to be referred on and what could be kept at his level. He knew many of the patients, particularly the older ladies, had become slightly dependent on him. He had a certain edge of fear, the fear not just of litigation but of the shame of anything that he could possibly accuse himself as malpractice. As an intern, once he noticed an elevated sodium on a patient who had subsequently died, but hadn't discussed it with anyone superior, until he was asked about the patient an hour or so later. Simon knew - he knew at the time - that it would be stretching the point considerably to blame him for this, but he still felt that if any, even the remotest, possible blame attached to him, he was complicit in a wrongful death.
Is this what I want? he often asked himself. He still indulged in the schoolboy dreaming of making some great discovery - a Harris constant, a Harris’ procedure, a Harris equilibrium.
Life was good. Sandra was extremely congenial company. They had a beautiful house in Galway and a neat bungalow in Connemara. They had had no children.
It was the alphabet that brought Professor Paul Gildea, Professor of Medicine at the University of Galway, and Dr Simon Harris together. Gibson, Sorcha. Gleeson, Sandra. Gleeson, Suzanne. Gildea, Paul. Harris, Simon. That little group, for six years, sat in tutorials together, gave presentations to each other, was ignored in outpatients and ignored on ward rounds, and ultimately filed up one after another for their degrees, their brief moment with the President of the College. Of the six, Simon had married Gleeson, Sandra, had lost touch with Gleeson, Suzanne and Gibson, Sorcha, still played the odd game of golf with Fadden, Eamon and was the best friend and confidant of Gildea, Paul.
Paul had returned to become Professor of Medicine two years previously, the youngest incumbent in living memory and wildly believed to be the youngest Professor of Medicine in Irish medical history. He had come back from Boston, having established an international reputation in his field.
Calm, judicious, politically adept in the widest sense, Professor Paul Gildea was the risen star of Irish medicine whose horizons were still expanding. The only question was, what next? He had already been inducted onto various committees, and was spoken of as the most influential voice in shaping health reform in the country. All sides, even the most seemingly radical, in the often vicious debates about the nature of the reform seemed to feel that Professor Paul Gildea was on their side.
With Simon, Paul could relax. They played appalling golf together, laughing until Simon’s cheeks seemed to hurt at the successive awfulness of each of their games and for once Simon felt it wasn’t such a bad game after all. That was the first year of Paul’s return, the first few months when things seemed as they were. .
Sandra shoved The Connacht Advertiser under Simon's nose. She wheeled around, obviously gleeful; Simon tried to decide if it was innocent or malicious glee.
"Look who it is."
She pointed vaguely at the page. Simon looked down, but could only make out a sea of print and photos.
"Who? Where?"
"There." She pointed at an ad in the left-hand corner.
It was a full page ad in the tabloid section of the paper. “Dr Simon MacSorley, Natural Healer” was printed in large letters on the top of the page. “Simon MacSorley, a Registered Medical Practitioner with a degree from the University of Galway and qualifications in Chinese and Ayurvedic (Indian) Medicine, will be in attendance at the Merlin Park Hotel every Saturday during April”, it read.
“So that’s where he is,” commented Paul. Sandra had taken back the paper. She started reading from the advertisement in an archly sarcastic tone. Paul hated it when she read stories from the paper in tones of either righteous indignation or of outright mockery. She would say something like “you should read this” and, after he had made some noncommittal noise, begin to read it out aloud. It was annoying, but a habit he objectively saw was so trivial that he could never bring himself to say anything to Sandra.
“Dr MacSorley has travelled Asia and South America studying traditional healing in those countries,” she put a special emphasis on the word ‘countries’, “as well as immersing - immersing - himself in the faith healing tradition taught by Fr Antonio del Amici in Padua, Italy.”
If Simon Harris was someone who never quite fulfilled his promise, Simon MacSorley did not have any promise to squander in anyone’s imagination. He had been a completely unknown presence to his peers as well as to the faculty when an undergraduate, both as a preclinical and as a clinical student. He had failed into the year Simon Harris' graduated form after beginning two years previously, and somehow managed to get through despite having to repeat nearly every exam. MacSorley was neither a big drinker nor a great socialiser - indeed no-one knew him well. He graduated with his peers as a sort of afterthought. There was a certain amount of bitterness expressed by some. They had slaved so hard, had turned up at so many lectures and on so many early hospital mornings to be roundly ignored, that it seemed unfair that MacSorley had the same degree as they did. There was even talk of a petition.
By now he was the object not of sorrow but of pity. MacSorley had become an infamously hopeless intern - not lazy, not dangerous as such (enough checks and balances were in place), but hopeless. He was adequate at internship, but his was an adequacy that would go no further. He managed not to land a job after Intern year and spent time wandering around looking for work, and had then got a place on one of the nascent GP schemes. Soon he was dismissed from this for chronic non-attendance at his Obs and Gynae rotation. “By mutual consent” was the phrase used in the inevitable gossipy exchanges in the medical world.
Mrs Reilly was one of Simon’s regulars. At least thrice weekly she attended the clinic, with the elderly constellation of anxiety, arthritis, hypertension and at the back of it all loneliness and a fear of the next world.
Paul was neither particularly anti-alternative medicine not completely for it. He could reconcile an ungrudging appreciation of its possibilities with a cynicism about the scientific basis, or lack thereof, of the enterprise. His attitude could be summarised as: it might make them feel better, but does it actually work?
Mrs Reilly’s major complaint was rheumatoid arthritis, for which she was on a great range of conventional and unconventional treatments. None seemed to make much difference to searing pain of the evenings. She habitually wore a little brass band, purportedly magnetic, on each wrist, as well as various scapulars.
But today things were different. Mrs Reilly walked in - no, she bounced in. Paul, in the five years he had been attached to the practice, had known her to be his most consistently unhappy patient. Always the pain of the arthritis, always the worry of being worried.
“How are you, Mrs Reilly?” he asked.
“How are you, Doctor?”
“I’m fine. I have to say you look marvellous.”
“Doctor Mac Sorley has me cured,” she announced.
Doctor MacSorley’s name was being mentioned more and more by the patients. Most of them felt just as bad, or worse, after whatever exactly MacSorley did to them or for them - nevertheless, their reverence for him held. Simon began to feel a resentment at this unquestioning allegiance.
Simon had his memories of first year physics, and his later reading of popular science magazines, to thank for his big idea.
Every so often, seized by an enthusiasm for science, he bought a copy of the New Scientist. Seduced by the fascinating variety of the world of science depicted therein, he would subscribe to the magazine, and over the next year accumulate a stack of unread copies. For he was much more interested in the publication as an abstract entity than a reality. He would flick through the news at the front, then the letters and the amusing column at the end, start on one of the feature articles which always seemed to promise much more than they delivered, and that would be that.
He would unwrap each from the plastic wrapping, for he would feel guilty if he left the magazines not only unread but unopened (like the medical weeklies) After a while he would put the growing pile into the attic, with the other unread copies.
It was a long summer for him. Sandra’s annual leave had all been taken earlier in the year, and St Elizabeth’s Maternity was much busier than usual. Thus he was spending the earlier part of most evenings alone. The slight disappointment he had began to always feel grew. He began to think on what might have been. He should have studied history, or even better done pure science. Then he would have achieved something, left some kind of mark.
He had always felt an affinity for Simon MacSorley, possibly because of their shared first name, but more fundamentally because they were both, in very different ways, at odds with the mass of the class. MacSorley had done something with his life, he thought. Something ridiculous perhaps, but remembering Sandra’s cut phrases of disdain, Simon felt a great sympathy for him. Sandra at times like that took on the form of the great, impersonal world, crushing the spirits brave and eccentric enough to follow their own paths.
Simon Harris had never really been an enthusiast for “travel”, but the idea of MacSorley’s travels - not the travels themselves or the places he had gone, but the idea of them, with their search for the healing, the search for the sublime, appealed to his sense of life as a novelistic series of grand gestures. He had come to believe that the rational calculation of advantage was not only impossible, but not a true motivator for any human being, no matter how seemingly rational. People acted as they were emotionally impelled to. The rationalisations followed. This was not a call to indulgence of whims; Simon’s own thrift, for example, was his own emotional need and also in his own interest.
He was not naturally given to ruminating, and after a short while he would get up, pace around the house, and start reading a book. Or watch TV for a while, although he disliked the passivity. It was better than the ruminating, and then Sandra would come back and they would talk over the events of the day.
One evening this ruminating went on longer than usual. What might have been, if only I had used my talents, he thought. A prize he had won in school for science writing - it was on quantum physics, Simon forgot most of the details - had come into his mind. It felt so recent; his self-image was the same as that fifteen-year old. This is what the passing time means, he thought, the realisation that possibility has come to an end. And then, returning suddenly to his usual essential optimism, he thought no, that isn’t necessarily it.
He got up and went to the attic, and began to dig around the stack of old New Scientists. Then he found it.
“The Computing Power of the World in a cup of tea.” The cover showed a cup of tea in plain white mug, against a white background. One could barely tell where the cup ended and the background began. Only the crescent of brown liquid reassured the viewer that this was a cup of tea. It was an article he had never finished, but the idea had stayed with him.
The article itself he skimmed over, reading the enticing opening paragraph with great attention but gradually losing interest as the article became more detailed. The idea of immense computing power in a little liquid stuck with him. Sometimes he wondered if something like the colloid plasma expanders who used to write up for intravenous administration for so many patients when he was a young doctor might do the job.
If only he had devoted his life to something like this! It was not too late. But where to begin? After all, he couldn’t even finish the article.
Then he thought of the savings he had accumulated with Sandra. They had bought a house in Galway when the prices were reasonably, and two doctors had no problem getting a mortgage at at time when this was not to be taken for granted. As the mortgage reduced in scale, their not inconsiderable salaries had gone into high-interest accounts. And all through the years Simon himself had put a thousand pounds here, a few hundred euro there, into various saving certificates and government bonds and forestry shares.
“The Irish Investor’s Bible” - that was the subtitle of Investment Republic, the magazine which Dr Harris subscribed to. Usually he would hop over from the surgery at lunchtime, and would pick up the post. He hid this from Sandra, feeling a vague shame. It would be like being found with a self-help book, of which he had more than a few hidden in drawers and amongst piles of clothes Simon liked to keep in touch with the world of investments, as high yield and low risk as possible. These aspirations are of course mutually contradictory, and up to now he had always leaned towards the low risk.
Therefore, for a long time he had never looked in the section called “Investment Opportunities” Investing in a company as opposed to a savings plan, guaranteed by a reputable financial institution, had never appealed to Simon, but now - mesmerised by the idea of money as a stairway to, if not scientific eminence, than the visionary status of a Craig Venter, he looked eagerly every month, especially for the magic q word. He might not understand quantum computing, but he knew that his greatness, his destiny, lay in the field.
And one day it appeared. Quark Quantum Qumputer Inc. Simon giggled at the name. How could it be so incredibly perfect? Then he read the brief profile. Q3, as they referred to themselves throughout, were a start up company based in Duluth, Minnesota. Their CEO was Allan Archibald Montgomery. They intended “to bring the quantum revolution into every living room.” They were looking for an investor with one million U.S. dollars to kickstart their work. They had a promising prototype quantum computer. For more details send an email to info@q3.com. Simon accepted this invitation.
A week later so some folders came through the post. Simon had got into the habit of coming back home at lunchtime to check the mail. There were pages and pages of diagrams - the prototype computer was a small gel which exploited gammatronic properties of Polybendium. That sounded good. There were many press cuttings - from newspapers such as the Pennsylvania Democrat-Enquirer, the Skokie Constitution-Telegraph, the Alabama Vanguard and the Peoria Post-Palimpsest, from magazines such as Investment Frontiers, Technology and Computing Quarterly and The Monthly Atlantean. Simon had never heard of any of these publications before, but they were all evidently genuine - in the margins of each photocopied piece there were items of unfakeable local colour - Senators and Congressmen and Mayors praising or denouncing this or that, Skokie and Peoria residents achieving notable feats or bemoaning official apathy.
There were pages of financial details, which boiled down to one salient fact - investors who put their money into Quark Quantum Qumputer would have a unique opportunity to get involved in the tomorrow’s biggest technology - today. Not only were riches promised, but a place in history.
Why not? Why not? The thought stayed with him all through the afternoon and evening clinics. He sent another email later that evening, before Sandra came home. This was addressed directly to Allan Archibold Montgomery. In it, Simon proposed that he invest one million dollars in Q3
Two days later, he received a reply.
“Dear Dr Harris,” it began. As he opened it, Simon felt a surge of joy, of anxiety. “We would of course be absolutely delighted to have you on board. In exchange for your generous investment, we can guarantee you a seat on the board of Q3, and 20% of all profits for the next ten years. As the Q3PO prototype is nearing the end of beta testing, we anticipate a launch date in the next eighteen to twenty months.”
It continued in this vein for a while, and ended with a request for wire transfer of funds to an account in Duluth. They would dispatch contracts of agreement immediately, and once returned signed Dr Simon Harris would be “on board” the Quark Quantum Qumputer bandwagon.
“Separate accounts and separate beds”, Sandra had once read before marriage, and sometimes repeated, “are the secret of a successful marriage.” Simon was glad she had ignored both parts of the saying, and she entrusted their savings to Simon. Cashing in all their savings plans, Simon knew he could raise two hundred thousand euro. Not enough.
What about the house? His name was the only one on the deed. Sandra had never bothered to make any enquiries about it. She need never know. Their income was pretty much guaranteed, and once Q3 came good there would be no problem in any case. There was the flat above the King’s Head that they had bought as a buy-to-let investment. Every academic year it was let to students, and then in summers it would be let to tourists, or JYAers from the States.
Simon couldn’t face evicting the students now, right before their exams. For he wanted the money quickly; he wanted to have made the investment yesterday. There was a rush of impatience in him that would not be satisfied to wait. As he sat in front of Montgomery’s email, his thoughts turned to Paul Gildea. Arrogant, masterful Paul Gildea, strutting around the golf course, talking about his keynote presentation to the European Society of Renal Medicine or somesuch body of chancers. Paul Gildea. Simon resolved that he would outstrip Paul Gildea, outstrip him easily.
Sandra rang at this point. She had been driving home when a call came from the hospital - a woman in the twenty-third week of pregnancy coming in. She had to rush back to the maternity hospital. It could be late when she got back. She was sorry, Simon told her not to be.
He would do it. Tomorrow, he would go into Connacht Building Society and remortgage the house as soon as possible. He could arrange to cancel the morning clinics for a few days next week, arrange to have a valuer come round, and within a few days the remortgaging would be arranged. A house three doors down with only three bedrooms had gone for six hundred thousand euro the previous month. Theirs should easily realise at least that. At the current rate of exchange, he should easily be able to accumulate a million dollars.
Three weeks after he had went into the Bank of Ireland, and waving his passport at the disbelieving manager, arranged to have the million dollars transferred to the Q3 account, Simon sent another email to Montgomery. Where are the memoranda of agreement that were to be sent, the contracts? He had been anticipating their appearance in every post. He then thought that they would be delivered by registered mail.
There was no reply. And no reply either to the succeeding emails. At first, Simon told himself that something had perhaps gone wrong with the email server. He also wondered if the money had disappeared into the ether. There had been something unbelievable about the series of transactions. He had been a millionaire, and then no longer a millionaire, without ever seeing any money. A check at the bank had confirmed that the money had gone into the Minnesota account. The account had, further enquiries confirmed, since been closed.
Simon would always have been terrified of just this eventuality. Yet now he faced it with utter equanimity. After all, their salaries were equal to the mortgage repayments. And despite the evaporation of Q3 - their website still existed out there in cyberspace, but no-one answered the phones - Simon felt that at least he had staked his all on something. Sandra noticed his detached air, but didn’t say anything. It was just Simon. She felt no guilt when she rang to say she was working late, and then drove to a room in the Radisson Hotel to change for dinner with Paul Gildea.
There was no reason things couldn’t go on as they were, Simon realised with relief and disappointment. There was no reason things couldn’t go on as they were, until one day Sandra came home. She came into the living room, where Simon was reading the Irish Times, evidently holding herself together with great difficulty.
“I had a needlestick today. In theatre.”
A needlestick incident. Of itself, this wouldn’t necessarily be anything to worry about, he thought. There would be a tiresome series of tests. It happened to him every so often. Usually he ignored it. In hospitals, and especially in theatre, it was harder to just carry on - so many people saw it.
Sandra continued with a clipped delivery. “She’s HIV positive. High risk. High viral load. It’s always the way.”
What did that mean, “it’s always the way?” Simon thought. Then he realised that Sandra had abandoned her mask of self-control and was weeping openly. He went to embrace her, folding his arms around her awkwardly.
She cried and cried, and then composed herself. Then she told him she needed to take some time off work for the series of blood tests that would be required. The initial tests might be negative, but she would need to have them again over the months. Due to the bloody nature of her branch of medicine, she would have to take this time off work.
“Still,” she was almost smiling as she wiped away tears, “we have all those income protection insurance things, don’t we?”
She was smiling fully now, with a look that said “I always thought you were a dry stick, but now look who’s right.”
Simon felt fear grasp his intestines. There was no way to avoid it now. Perhaps he could tell her half the truth, tell her that he had cashed in some of those policies, but leave out the mortgage and the bulk of their savings.
But he realised that he couldn’t - not anymore. Each lie would only lie buried for a little while, and would then be uncovered. He would have to tell her everything.
“Sandra, I have to tell you something about that.”
She looked alarmed. He wondered what was the best, the most persuasive way to explain what had happened.
“Sandra, you do know that when I was young, I was one of the most brilliant boys in one of the best schools in the country...“ he began.
Simon walked out of the house. It would always be empty for him from now on. It was the end of the academic year, and the flat above the Kings’ Head was becoming free. He got into the waiting taxi, looking back at the door. Sandra wasn’t there.
It had all been smooth, really. Respective solicitors had taken care of everything. One day he had gone back, to get his clothes and a few books. It had been pre-arranged that Sandra would not be there. The practice was finished, after all.
When he got back to the flat, he went straight to the bedroom and lay down. He was wrecked, too tired to move his things from the house into the flat. They could stay in the car another couple of hours, what harm?
What will I do now? He thought, and for the first time he realised that this was more than just what would he do for the rest of the evening. This was what now for the rest of my life. He couldn’t go back to the practice, that was certain. While his medical registration was obviously unaffected by all this, the incident at the conference had ended it all forever. His patients had been taken over by Dr de Morgan, an eager young man with none of Simon’s apprehensions and hang-ups.
He looked through his phone numbers. He still had Simon MacSorley’s number, as he hoped. He went to find a pay phone, for he could no longer pay the mobile phone bill.
Three months later he was walking along the beach at Berehaven. Running up a sand-dune, he felt exhilarated. He had become used to the life as Simon MacSorley’s Personal Assistant, seeing the desperate men and women who came to see him.
The day of the interview with MacSorley, he put on a suit. He went back to his parents' home to pick it up. It was the suit he had worn for work experience with an estate agents firm when he was in school. He had lost so much weight that it now fitted once again.
The interview hadn't lasted long.
"Ha, you. Not so up yourself now, are you?"
"I'm sorry."
"You and that Sandra. Weren't you great? Well, how the mighty have fallen, eh?"
"Look, I don't need this..."
"But you do. You wouldn't be here if you didn't. And I can tell you something else too. All of this is bull. Only fools and dopes could believe it. You have got to pretend you do, and you don't have to pretend very well, because Simon boy you wouldn't believe how bloody stupid people are. They believe what they want to believe."
Simon came to hate the work more than he hated Simon. However he slept well, and felt full of energy and enthusiasm. He made the little bit of money that was needed, and most of all he had no limit on his time. He could walk in the wind and rain, and felt connected to the universe then. He had tried. The universe carried on, oblivious to our efforts, our triumphs, our failures.
As he reached the top of the sand dune, he suddenly realised how close he was to the golf course. The realisation came just as the course itself came into view, and all at once he could see Paul Gildea and Sandra on the course. They were laughing, and Gildea was standing astride Sandra, taking her hands through the motions of the swing. She never played golf before, was Simon’s first thought. He then noticed their physical proximity, their ease together.
Simon saw them on the course, and told himself: To hell with them. I feel sorry for them, I feel sorry for their lives. Not half as beautiful as mine is now.
He said this to himself a few times, but he didn’t feel it. He didn’t feel sorry for them. Try hard as he could, he really longed for the warmth of Sandra again. The wind picked up a step, and the gust made Simon shiver. And with that shiver, Simon suddenly felt the beauty of the world, and he felt sorry for the laughing golfers.

Review of Antonio Melechi's "Fugitive Minds" for nthposition spring/summer 2004

There are two tendencies in popular science, particularly popular psychology and neuroscience. One could be called reductionistic. We are assailed by books claiming that "we" are "just" collections of neurons, or idiot machines to reproduce our DNA, or somesuch. Books touted to "explain", finally and definitively, why we are the way we are. The other is the perpetually chippy and confrontational, content not merely to propound a sweeping explanation for everything but to dismiss as absurd, stupid or downright evil all alternatives.

The regrettable proliferation of inverted commas in the last above paragraph perhaps indicate how these books rub off my own taste and temperament rather than objective critical opinion, but it is a pity that popular science writers seem less and less keen simply to explain and illustrate, rather than hector and hold forth.

The fly jacket tries to set this up as Antonio Melechi versus the monstrous regiment of materialist biological psychologist and psychiatrists: he "argues that this materialist vision of the human mind and behaviour promises more than it can deliver." This is true, but on one level misrepresents the book. Melechi is refreshingly undogmatic, and while his inclination is obviously to champion the importance of cultural factors in twilight states, this is no aggressive polemic. The emphasis is on the interplay of cultural and biological factors, and Melechi's stress on the cultural side is not just a reflection of his own background but a corrective to the prevalent tendency to champion the biological side. But he is no blind foe of any application of biochemistry and neuroscience to psychology.

For instance, in the essay on Near Death Experiences, Melechi concludes that "many of the elements that are 'universally' characteristic of the NDE, from geometric forms to the 'life review', do not require metaphysical explanation; they are best explained in terms of a secret heritage called 'the body.'" William James, far more than Freud, is the presiding spirit of these essays. In the introduction Melechi writes of James' scorn for the 19th century materialists who eagerly diagnosed saints and mystics as epileptics and hysterics. This is Melechi's attitude too, one that is properly sceptical of wild claims but never outright dismissive.

He writes, for instance, on the possible relationship between Lewis Carroll's history of migraines and the genesis of Alice in Wonderland. The shrinking and expanding, the "curiouser and curiouser" phenomena that Alice encounters, all echo descriptions of a migraine aura. Yet Melechi is aware of the limits of this approach; writing on the temptation to see Jabberwocky as influenced by the migrainous jumbling of words, he deflates the idea by observing that the poem was intended as a parody of Anglo-Saxon.

One of the most fascinating chapters is on hearing voices. I was unfamiliar with the work of Marcus Romme, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Maastricht (what would Europhobes make of that, I wonder), who campaigns for the normalisation of hearing voices, and the Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes, whose idea of the "bicameral mind" is purported to underly the guidance by voices of the Old Testament Prophets, the heroes of the Iliad and Odyssey and other ancient texts. The later discussion of the work of John Mack, the Harvard psychiatrist of whom Melechi writes "of late, [he] has been increasingly impervious to criticism and debate. The Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, which has been less than even-handed in its criticisms of Mack, should take some responsibility for his exile" should warn one of the dangers of accepting authorities whether they be tenured professor at Harvard or self-appointed police of the borders of science.

The book is not just concerned with psychopathology (or perceived psychopathology) There is much on the twilight states that we all experience - sleep, dreaming - as well as ones which, while not universal, are very common - such as sonambulism and déjà vu. There is much on psychiatric exotica like latah, koro and arctic hysteria, and obsolete psychiatric diagnoses like nostalgia, once a dread disease of migrant workers. It functions best as a collection of essays, very well written and filled with literary and historical references, about various aspects of psychology rather than as some kind of argumentative tract. Even the most rigid biological determinist would surely be able to read these for profit and entertainment

Link: http://www.nthposition.com/fugitiveminds.php

Review of "The Invention of Morel" by Adolfo Bioy Cesares ,nthposition Spring 2004

Later, a slightly different version of this was published by SF Site: http://www.sfsite.com/06b/im346.htm


"Dreamlike" is a disconcerting word when used to praise a work of art. "The dream has nothing to communicate to anyone else... and is for that reason totally uninteresting for other people" pronounced Freud, whose famous work on oneiromancy was based on his own dreams - perhaps thus proving his own point. Anyone who has been bored at a party by a detailed description of a weird/freaky/astonishing dream of utter banality will concur. "Dreamlike", when used to describe art, is usually shorthand for "boring and impenetrable but vague enough to perhaps seem artistic."

The invention of Morel, however, deserves the reclamation of "dreamlike" as a word of unambiguous praise. Adolfo Bioy Cesares is somewhat in the shadow of Borges, his great friend, in the South American literary canon. They collaborated on detective novels various other projects; Borges once called Bioy (as he was universally known), 15 years his younger, his "secret master" for helping to lead him from Baroque overwrought prose to a leaner, Classical style. Suzanne Jill Levine, in a perceptive introduction that pleasingly doesn't reveal any of the secrets of the narrative to follow, observes that Borges meant this in a double sense; the great Anglophile was well aware of the meaning of "master" as a designation for a young boy.

Borges, for his part, led Bioy away from an over-suffusion with Surrealism and Joycean stream-of-consciousness. In this volume, Borges' "prologue", really an introduction, is a defence of the fantastic in literature. Like the prefaces to his own collections, it is an understated mini-essay steeped in the familiar erudition.

Octavio Paz wrote of The invention of Morel that it "may be described, without exaggeration, as a perfect novel" and Borges writes "to classify it as perfect is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole", all of which has the ring of exaggeration, imprecision and hyperbole. But it is "perfect", in the sense that it is an exquisitely formed little tale with no superfluity of plot or language. The apparently slightly arbitrary features of the physical setting make perfect sense in the end. It has the property of the detective story, the sense that nothing is included that won't directly affect the plot - as Borges observes, "the odyssey of marvels he unfolds seems to have no possible explanation other than hallucination or symbolism, and he uses a single fantastic but not supernatural postulate to decipher it.".

Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad was modelled on Bioy's book, and the tale is suffused with loss and regret and a haunting beauty. According to Levine's introduction, a number of films and TV movies have been based on the book, surprising perhaps because of its emotional delicacy but unsurprising because of the major role film and the representation of reality come to play in the novella. Bioy's own fascination with the Twenties star Louise Brooks, whose pensive, bobbed image adorns the cover, informed the genesis of the story.

The story is of an unnamed narrator, a fugitive from Venezuela after some unnamed crime, who comes to an island in what seems to be the Indian Ocean. As the narrator's informant, an Italian rugseller in Calcutta, puts it "Chinese pirates do not go there, and the white ship of the Rockefeller Institute never calls at the island, because it is known to be the focal point of a mysterious disease, a fatal disease that attacks the outside of the body and then works inward." The disease is hardly mentioned for most of the rest of the book, only to play a crucial part in the neat way it all comes together.

On the island, the narrator finds he is not alone. A group of men and women - they seem like holidaymakers, but he is unsure - are also there. Hiding from view, he falls in love with one of the women, and tries to make his feeling known to her. Like Levine in her introduction, I am reluctant to say much more about the plot; too much, perhaps, has been given away already. Borges' comparison with The Turn of the Screw is apt - it is an eerie, brief masterpiece, of the right duration to make for a supremely vivid afternoon's reading.

Link to original review: http://www.nthposition.com/theinvention.php

Review of "An Odd King of Fame: Stories of Phineas Gage" by Malcolm Macmillan

At 4.30pm on 13 September 1848, the foreman of a group of railway construction workers in Cavendish, Vermont, suffered a horrendous accident that secured his later role as one of the most famous patients in the history of medicine. Virtually all humanity - famous, unknown and infamous - were, are or will be patients at some stage, but Phineas Gage is among the select few whose fame rests entirely on their status as patients. Some of Freud's cases - "Rat Man", Judge Schreber, Anna O - are perhaps Gage's main rivals of this score. But while Freud and all his works have been closely examined and hotly contested over the years, Malcolm Macmillan, Adjunct Professor in the School of Psychology at Deakin University in Australia, found in 1983 that while various stories of Gage's accident were widely known, little detail was. As the blurb puts it "almost nothing is known about him, and most of what is written is seriously in error."

For the reader who has never heard of Phineas Gage, and may well be rather sceptical about his fame, I give a typical extract from a modern textbook, in this case the 1996 edition of Principles of Behavioural Neuroscience by Jackson Beatty:

The importance of the cerebral hemispheres for emotion, and in particular the frontal lobes, was made strikingly clear over a century ago by the case of Phineas Gage, the foreman of a railroad crew who suffered a remarkable injury. An accidental explosion drove an iron rod into Gage's cheek and out through the top of his skull. Miraculously he survived the injury but suffered a massive lesion of the frontal lobes. Before the accident, Gage was a model citizen and employee, but the frontal damage transformed his very character. Gage's physician described the change as follows:
"The equilibrium or balance, so to speak, between his intellectual faculty and animal propensities, seems to have been destroyed. He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which was not previously his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint or advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operation, which are no sooner arranged that they are abandoned in turn for others- His mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said that he was 'no longer Gage'"

That's the textbook version in neurology books, and such a striking story has naturally entered a wider consciousness. Macmillan gives many examples of the story's use in documentaries, novels and other unexpected places. For example, in Roger Kimball's The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America, the very first figure we encounter is Phineas Gage; based on a 1994 New York Times report, Kimball writes that "pondering the sad state of contemporary American cultural life, I have often recalled the sad story of Phineas Gage. Like him, our culture seems to have suffered some ghastly accident that has left it afloat but rudderless: physical intact, its 'moral centre' is a shambles." On the morning of 13 September 1848, Gage would hardly have suspected he would be drafted into the culture wars of a century and a half later.

Macmillan even uncovers two rock bands called "Phineas Gage" and "Finneus Gauge", and a song by Slackdaddy called "What's the matter with Phineas Gage?", of which he writes primly "although no one I know who has listened to the song has been able to understand more than a few words, the group neither seems to sing anything of significance about Gage nor to answer the question posed in the title of the song."

There is no doubt that Gage suffered the accident, and that it had a dramatic effect on his life. Nevertheless, Macmillan shows, the account that has entered both scientific and popular discourse is flawed. Firstly, we know very little about Gage's personality and habits before the accident, and secondly the after effects were not, contemporaneously, reported as being quite so dramatic.

Within twenty-four hours of the accident, a first report was (anonymously) printed in the Ludlow, Vermont Free Soil Union. Having described the accident, the paper reports that "the most singular circumstance connected with this melancholy affair is, that he was alive at two o'clock this afternoon, and in full possession of his reason, and free from pain."

"Gage's physician", as cited (second-hand) by Beatty above, was Dr John Martyn Harlow. Harlow mentioned very few psychological changes in his initial report of 1848. Henry Bigelow, Professor of Surgery at Harvard, wrote in 1850 that Gage was "quite recovered in faculties of body and mind." It was Harlow's account of 1868 that began to introduce the changes; the passage Beatty cites is taken from this source. Later writers began to embellish even more, adding drunkenness, braggadocio, a vainglorious tendency to show off his wound as part of Barnum's Traveling Exhibition and an utter lack of foresight where these were unmentioned by Harlow.

In 1848, Macmillan writes, there was strong resistance to the idea that function could be localised to any particular are in the brain. Bigelow's verdict was a victory for advocates of localisation, implying that the frontal lobes served no particular purpose. By 1868 however localisation was beginning to hold sway, with Paul Broca's work on localising language function to the left hemisphere. Macmillan shows how differing psychological and neurological theories shaped the presentation of Gage's story.

Macmillan explicitly states that this is not intended as a work of postmodernist relativism. Rather he is simply arguing that the subsequent stories of Gage bore little relation to the original facts that were known about him. Harlow's account is pretty much all we know about Gage, and it is important to separate it from the subsequent encrustation of myth.

Quite aside from the pressures of neurological debate, a number of other stories have clung to Gage. The various accounts of him showing off his wound in a tent on Boston Common and in Barnum's circus seem to derived from a passing reference in Harlow's 1869 report to Gage's stay in New York at "Barnum's, with his iron", which Macmillan presumes must mean Barnum's American Museum, and there is no evidence Gage toured with a circus.

As Macmillan writes, the textbook accounts of Gage are not wildly wrong. "If we divide the story into seven elements - rarely did a single account contain major errors in more than three of these elements", and he finds that the more inaccurate textbooks seem to have depended on paraphrasing subsequent writers rather than Harlow's report. This can be seen as a warning to authors in all disciplines to be wary of citing secondary sources routinely.

The story of Phineas Gage, as represented in the textbooks, is not a lie or a myth, but simply an exaggeration. Macmillan's conclusion puts it best:

Vivid though Harlow's description of Gage is, it is far from providing the detail we need for a full analysis of Phineas' behaviour before and after the accident. That lack, together with the slightness of our knowledge of the specific locale and extent of the damage to his brain, provides too meagre a foundation on which to base hypotheses of the relation between the frontal lobes and their psychological functions- What has to be remembered is that his was the first case to point to a relation between brain an personality functions. That is its lasting importance.

Macmillan is exceedingly thorough and fair-minded in his approach. Some may even find the attention to detail excessive, with modern CT images of Gage's skull, biographical chapters on Harlow, genealogical tables showing the lineage of Gage and Harlow. Macmillan, however, writes in a lively and accessible style. A book perhaps of interest only to a few, but nevertheless a fascinating example of how a medical case history "got legs".

Review of "Long For This World" by Michael Byers for nthposition, Spring 2004

(Note from 2012: to be honest I didn't like this book that much but didn't have the confidence to just say so)

"The main idea of the novel is to depict the positively good man. There is nothing more difficult that this in the world, especially nowadays." Thus wrote Fyodor Dostoyevsky on The Idiot, his own tale of a flawed yet Christ-like figure crushed by passion and capital. Dostoyevsky came to regard The Idiot as an artistic failure, and indeed feared the same as he wrote it, writing to his niece: "Of all the good figures in Christian literature, Don Quixote is the most complete. But he is good only because he is at the same time ridiculous... Sympathy is aroused for the good man who is ridiculed and who does not know his own worth, and this sympathy is aroused in the reader too."

Michael Byers' debut novel is about a positively good man, and as Dostoyevsky feared The Idiot would be, it is a wonderfully written, acutely penetrating failure. Henry Moss, the geneticist-physician who is the leading character of the novel, is not perhaps a Christ-like Prince Myshkin, but his native decency and kindness thrusts him into an ethical dilemma in which forces of money, of professional ethics, and of compassion and love for his patients all combine.

Moss' work is focused on Hickman Syndrome, a fictional syndrome that closely resembles Progeria, a disease marked by much accelerated ageing. Children with Progeria suffer the physical ravages of a lifetime in a decade and a half. Byers has changed Progeria in creating Hickman - for example, Hickman patients suffer cognitive decline, not seen in Progeria. However the inspiration is clearly Progeria.

Byers creates Moss' occupational and emotional world deftly. Set during in dot com boom Seattle, the Mosses are set outside from the vast fortunes being made all around. Moss' Austrian wife Ilse, a physician herself now frustrated in a medical administration role, feels particularly keenly the fact that in boom times fortunes are made not only by the clever and resourceful but also - but especially - by the stupid and sheeplike. Their adolescent children Sandra and Darren stand on the cusp of adulthood, and Moss' son Darren mirrors Moss' favourite Hickman patient, William.

There's a slightly rote feeling to Byers handling of the characters; now the focus on Moss, now on Ilse, now on Sandra, now on Darren. Byers captures the professional warmth and compassion of Moss well, as well as the less pretty self-righteousness of medics (particularly in the character of Ilse) and there's an Updikean lushness to the invocation of middle-class suburbia. Some may find the elegiac tone a little wearing at times; however there is plenty of fondly-observed humour, particularly in the adolescent characters.

Giles Benhamouda, a three-year old with subtle but clear signs of Hickman, is referred to Moss, and not unexpectedly routine genetic analysis shows he has the mutation for Hickman (in the novel Byers has imagined the discovery of a "Hickman gene" in 1985, and in a case of life neatly mirroring art (or art-in-progress), in April 2003 the Progeria Research Foundation Genetics Consortium discovered that the disease is caused by a spontaneous mutation to the Lamin A gene.) What is unexpected is the discovery that Giles' entirely healthy teenage brother also carries the mutation. He carries a further nucleoside sequence which seems to undo the effects of the Hickman mutation. Moss is stunned to discover a potential cure for Hickman.

The ethical problems this raises power the rest of the novel. Most obviously, there's the chance to make big money on this, and Moss is in due course contacted by various pharmaceutical type. They talk the language of money perhaps, but its testament to Byers' skill that they are made into caricatures or cardboard cut-outs of greed - they too are decent people trying to make a living, excited by the possibility of great financial gain perhaps but that is not necessarily evil or ignoble.

The more painful dilemma Moss faces is whether to use the treatment he develops to treat William, who is heading inexorably towards death, or to wait for the wheels of the FDA and other bureaucracies to grind exceedingly slow. Moss would risk sacrificing not only his professional licence but also the integrity of the treatment itself to treat William. The action unfolds gradually - Byers is certainly a slow paced author - and with the maturing of Sandra and Darren, Ilse's unhappiness with her administrative role acting as a sort of counterpoint to the main plot. Life goes on, inexorably, and ageing is as real for those not affected by Hickman as those who are.

Borges wrote that at the end of Ulysses we know the most intimate details of Leopold Bloom's life, down to the amount of stools in the toilet bowl, yet he is somehow unknowable still. The accumulation of detail is not necessarily the key to living, memorable characters. The telling detail, the revealing phrase, in a few words tell and reveal more than the hyperrealist approach to character. I can't help feeling that a book focused more narrowly on Moss, and the ethical dilemma that faces him would, to put it bluntly, work better.

One trivial but rather jarring note: the author's biography tells us that he "was born in 1969, the son of a research geneticist and a computer programmer." Perhaps this is an ironic reference to two of the disciplines that underlie the book, and Byers has spoken about how his father worked with patients with accelerated ageing (not to the same degree as Progeria) Nevertheless, it strikes an odd note in an otherwise brief author's bio - is the suggestion that, by a kind of Lamarckian inherited adaptation, it is a "qualification" of some sort to write the book?

Link: http://www.nthposition.com/longforthisworld.php

"The Waxwing Slain" my first story published on nthposition, April 2004.

Traffic had been light, so running into a string of cars at the Goatstown crossroads was disappointing. I was driving against the main bulk of traffic coming away from Dublin, which had built up quite considerably - at least my line is small, I thought, as I looked at the solid mass of unmoving cars beside me, travelling in the other direction. It was High Summer, one of those days when the sun almost nauseates with a rancid, piercing light. Both my windows rolled down all the way, the airconditioning set to the highest setting - despite all this, the smell of melting plastic persisted.

As I eased into the end of the line of cars, indicating right for Stillorgan, I heard a strange sound which, nevertheless, nagged at the edge of familiarity. It took a moment to realise what it was. It was my own voice, reciting the poem which I had published a few months before, The Waxwing Slain. I must explain that this poem was not entirely my own work, though we'll come to that later.

My voice was coming from about six or seven car stereo systems scattered among the line of traffic to my right. All the cars driving in the opposite direction also had their windows down. With recordings of The Waxwing Slain being played on stereos scattered at various points in the block of traffic, a kind of polyphonic speaker relay was set up. Each listener was at a different stage in the poem, though all were within a minute or so of the start. One driver actually started playing the recording just after I realised what was going on; the opening line, "I was the shadow of the Waxwing Slain/By the false azure on the windowpane" chimed into the ether. Most of the others were about a minute further along. All this created a canon effect. At certain points, just as in a musical canon, the babel of voices - my own voices - resolved into a harmonic. One came as I listened, deliberately keeping my gaze at the car in front of me to prevent recognition - the point when I read "Was it Sherlock Holmes who/Reversed his shoes?" I seemed to have read these lines with particular emphasis, and a succession of explosive "Was it"s came from the stereo relay.

It's a platitude that one's own voice sounds odd, sounds faintly ridiculous, when heard recorded. My own voice always sounded gloopy and bland to me, but this canon of Waxwings did not sound like my voice. It sounded robotic and musical at once, which was why it took me some time to recognise it as my own. Or, indeed, to recognise the words as my own (as they ostensibly were), although we'll come to that later. Before I can tell you about my life as a literary success, I must tell you about my life as a literary failure.

The history of literature - the movements filled with lofty ideas, the endless manifestos and counter-manifestos, the all-too-serious sense of mission - can be considered a history of envy. Or rather a series of envies - between supposed friends and fellow writers. That has been my experience both as literary failure and success.

Since some stage in mid-adolescence impossible to pin down, I have considered myself a writer. And not just a writer, but an artist. A literary artist. The person who awoke my never-sleeping envy threatened that sense of self; because, at an age when I was still constructing elaborate fantasies of my glorious literary career, he had not only written but published three novels. And he stole my name.

The literary fantasist constructs an entire career in their reveries. The ecstatically received debut, a mould-breaking work that sets the tone for new fiction. Interviewers cast themselves worshipfully at the feet of my wit. Casual remarks that achieve the status of aphorisms. The speculation mounts for the second novel. Can he deliver? It hardly seems possible. That first novel, after all, was a stunning condensation of twenty-something years of experience and an eternity of timeless insight. And then the triumphant return, the sense of a richness and maturity that surpasses the previous work. The literary fantasist daydreams trenchant and controversial interviews that establish him at the peak of the profession.

Of course, the literary fantasist prefers to consider the interviews, the reviews, the covers, the blurbs far more than the actual business of sitting down to write. I saw "Andrew Browne" on covers and frontispieces, in an austere, tasteful font. I saw phrases like Andrew Browne... the best novelist of his generation, blurb quotes like "another triumph for Andrew Browne" or "it is not too soon in Andrew Browne's career to proclaim him... possibly the best writer in the English language today." I even, in time, imagined the name "Andrew Browne", like JD Salinger, spurning these impedimenta of the literary-publicity complex and standing, naked and alone, on the cover of his books.

Imagine when a contemporary, and what's worse, a somewhat despised contemporary, begins to achieve literary fame - perhaps not with the hyperbolic excesses of my imagination - but a genuine fame. What's worse, imagine that contemporary has a name that differs only by a silent "e" from one's own. Andrew Brown, a writer to watch this coming year. Andrew Brown's third (third!) novel builds on the success of his previous work.

Andrew Brown and myself have much in common. We both are well-built, rather beefy in fact - and thereby give an impression of robust good health. We both look like hearty chaps, just about to head for a couple of steaks after a day's rugby or rowing or foxhunting. This is not an advantage when one is spending one's college years attempting to look like one is wrestling with the major issues of existence. Poets and philosophers are stereotypically consumptive, anguished looking fellows, and the literary fantasist is a great man for stereotype.

We were both members of the college literary club, under the auspices of which weekly meetings were held. Here dreadful poems on loss of faith and tepid prose vignettes of drunkenness would be read out, before the real fun began of praise or blame, carefully considered for maximum impact. Both Andrew Brown(e)s kept silent; I wrote some poems that were read out anonymously and unjustifiably excoriated. He probably did too.

I got to know Andrew Brown from the trips to the student bar after these evenings. The underlying discontent with the literary club we shared must have drawn us to each other, that and the shyness with girls neither of us ever really shed. It was a long time before me realised that we shared a surname - he went by "Andy" those days, whereas I have always been an Andrew, irreducible to any diminutive. Andy, as (for the sake of clarity) I will refer to him, was never less than friendly and polite to me. In the early days of our friendship, I saw this friendliness and politeness as fear, as symptomatic of an inner weakness. Of course, I was still at that adolescent stage (that some never leave) that confuses obnoxiousness and arrogance with strength.

Andy was generally unpretentious, but he had a small stock of what I would call "party pieces." These were declamations on some literary or aesthetic subject that he had, evidently, rehearsed before, probably alone. I heard some at least four or five times. One particular favourite was provoked by any discussion of the alleged decline of literature. These discussions are of course beloved throughout the ages - the self-selected few, mourning the unstoppable conquest of barbarism, derive great pleasure from the thought that they alone keep the flame of culture burning. The barbarians are always at that gate. Andy was rightly sceptical of this. One of the passages of his monologue concerned the trivialities the authors of antiquity concerned themselves with (this was part of an argument that any contemporary fixation with trivia was nothing new) - "the great themes - the transformation of people into animals and animals into people, various sexual positions, the glorification of whoever happened to be paying the writer at that particular moment..." Like all similar monologues, delivered with an air of authority it managed to convince the listener that here was someone who knew what he was talking about.

I kept in touch with Andy in a desultory way after graduation - an email or text message every couple of months, meeting in Dublin every four months or so for strained conversation revolving around mutual acquaintances. We both eventually started work in jobs hardly commensurate with our Bohemian leanings; he as a sales rep for a drug company, I as part of the public relations team of a major bank.

One day I got a text message from Andy, obviously not sent to me individually but sent to many, telling me that his first novel was to published three months later by a major international publisher. There would be celebratory drinks in the Stag's Head the following Friday. It was the first I had heard of a novel, let alone that it was ready for publication.

In the Stag's Head on Friday an assortment of hangers-on, people from college neither of us had seen in years turned out. I was surprised that there was hardly anyone from Andy's life beyond college. In that crowd, I suddenly realised, it was very possible that I was Andy's closest friend.

The novel was called Sweet Science, a solid, well-crafted story of a failed boxer's decline and fall. There was nothing particularly wrong with it, although nothing (to my thinking) particularly memorable either. While I congratulated Andy to his face, privately I felt confident that whenever I would finally get round to writing a novel, it would make far more of a mark.

With his second, Land of Lost Content, Andy began to garner more serious attention. It was an inventive variation on that most worn-out of topics, the coming-of-age story. It followed the conventional path of these novels - the protagonist, from a comfortable middle-class background like the one both of us shared, went to college and had the usual romantic and intellectual experiences - first love, crisis of religious faith. Rather than maturing, he regresses to childhood, which was the slight twist on the formula. There was a freshness and vitality about the writing that marked out Andy as a genuinely promising talent. A third novel, Mercy, a short, simple tale with Gothic overtones, set during the Civil War, consolidated his reputation. Around this time we began to spend more time together. We still had the same rather strained rapport, the same wariness. It says something about his essential loneliness that I realised around this time that not only had I been his closest friend at the Stag's Head gathering, I was his closest friend in the world.

Perhaps Andy occasionally detected some resentment on my part. There would have been a sharpness on the phone, perhaps the occasional noticeable blankness as I drifted into my own thoughts as he went on about some issue with his agent or other. On the whole, however, I managed not to show this resentment, and felt suitably guilty. There was a politeness, a formality about our relationship. I could never imagine us teasing each other about anything - romance, work, literature.

My own writing had ground to a halt. Various ideas and plans fizzled out for want of persistence on my part. Andy's success had stoked my ambition. Now I wanted not only to be published, but to stun the literary world. There was, as always, a plethora of young literary aspirants. I felt I needed to rise above them all, Andy included, in one motion.

All potential subjects seemed hackneyed, played out. I decided that what was needed was the creation of something utterly new. I wanted to write something sui generis, the first of a whole new genre. What is it, to create something utterly new? Something absolutely original? Is it even possible? I would seize on an idea and, in short order, exhaust it.

I tried, Lord knows I tried. I conceived of Tyranny Considered One of the Fine Arts, a series of essays on lesser-known but nevertheless impressively bloodthirsty tyrants. Following de Quincey's argument - that when murder is done and the guilty punished, a sort of connoisseurship can take over - I applied it to tyranny. Queen Ranavolana I of Madagascar, Heliogabalus of Rome; such was my human material. Unfortunately, I couldn't really believe that tyranny was a mere art. Over the years, I've often liked to see myself as a rather amoral, insouciant figure, a Wilde or Baudelaire casting elegant poses on the brink of hell. Yet earnestness kept breaking in.

My other attempts to forge something new revolved around science, more particularly mathematics and physics. I read a few popular accounts of the various theories of Infinity - Galileo's realisation that an infinite set is one which contains an infinite set, Cantor's discovery of the transfinite, and his fruitless search to prove the continuum hypothesis. I conceived a mathematical novel, one whose protagonist was the mystical idea of Infinity.

I came up against the insuperable obstacle that Infinity is not exactly a sympathetic protagonist. Perhaps an abstraction can be made the hero of a story (and I mean the actual abstraction, not a personification of it), but it eluded my craft.

I moved on to what struck me, initially, as more fertile ground. Could God have created the world any differently? Could there be a world where the gravitational constant, or the boiling point of Mercury, or the laws of plate tectonics, be any different? Moving from the theoretical to the particularly, could there be a world without New Zealand, or Wlliam Ewart Gladstone or Nabokov's Pale Fire?

I was working on these ideas - working on a series of meaninglessly complex diagrams of the new theory of non-existence. I hadn't actually written anything at that stage. I had reached a point where writing was pointless, lacking any plan of attack - I had nothing to write about, only grandiloquent fantasies. Deep down, I knew that I was thrashing about, with no direction.

One day Andy gave me a box of odds and ends he was throwing out, trying to "declutter" himself, as he said. It was a nice gesture, though I don't think he realised the implied condescension. Maybe he did - maybe my conception of Andy as someone well-meaning and kindly who unjustly aroused my resentment is wrong. Perhaps he was really a Machiavellian manipulator of human desires, obligations and aims. I am more or less entirely without what could be called "political" guile, and sometimes tend to see it in every action of everyone else. Perhaps Andy shares this trait with me, too.

One of the objects in the box was a blank notebook. At first glance it was an old, worn notebook, but on closer inspection this was a trompe l'oeil. It was a new, rather heavy notebook, whose carefully cultivated look of being worn was a trick of the marketing trade. Like all writers - both real writers and literary fantasists - I have an inexhaustible appetite for the how-to tips of other writers. One piece of (to my mind unhelpful) advice that I once read was to buy some expensive pens and some expensive paper, and to use these to plan your work. By some sort of sympathetic magic, the materials were supposed to elevate your creative mind. I always thought it rotten advice, too redolent of gimcrack ideas of what's "artistic". Which is not to say I rejected it.

Thus I decided to play with the notebook. I wrote a few sketchy phrases. First some automatic writing - I set a pen (a cheap biro) on the paper and began to write "Rome did not fall because the depredations of barbarians, but fell for other reasons. It fell after some years of pain." I stopped. The automatic quality had disappeared from the writing, in my mind I had begun to try to construct some kind of meaningful sentence in my account of Rome's fall.

I wrote a few more random phrases and words. "Tubetrain. Tubetrain." I doodled a little, creating a grid, encircled by a serrated line. I wrote "Andy Warhol never existed."

Why the last, the negation of Andy Warhol? What I had written in the notebook had reflected the varied preoccupations of the time, although I'm at a loss to explain "tubetrain." There was a small Warhol exhibition coming to Dublin. I meant to check it out. I had often been in the habit, especially during boring phone conversations, of doodling phrases with an at best tangential connection to the conversation. That I should randomly write such a phrase did strike me as odd, but not exceptional. Nevertheless, it stayed in my mind.

The next day, in town, I picked up a free gallery guide. I noticed that the Warhol exhibition was no longer advertised. Unusual, I thought. Later, I looked at the gallery website. Again no mention.

A couple of years before, I had lent my copy of David Bowie's Hunky Dory album to a girl I was trying to impress who I had since lost touch with. Various rather embarrassed emails (one drunken evening, I had made completely unreturned advances to her) had failed to produce a response. Thus, a few days later, I decided to buy another copy when I saw it discounted. It was only when I got home that I noticed that the song 'Andy Warhol' was missing. Presumably this was some kind of money-grabbing scam, a new release leaving out one of the tracks to force one to buy a compilation. Trying to track down some information on this on the web, I did an search for "david bowie", "hunky dory" and "andy warhol."

I got no results. Refining it to "david bowie" and "andy warhol" produced none either. Then "andy warhol." None. Presuming that the arbitrary god of the Internet had struck again, I tried another search engine, then another. It was strange, Andy Warhol had been deleted from the ether completely. I tried various art sites, and again Warhol was completely absent.

I went to the bookshops, looked in directories of art and found the same result. Andy Warhol had been written out of art history, indeed all history. Oddly, there didn't seem to have been such a seismic shift in the art world. No other artist seemed to have disappeared from view, and his ideas, such as they were, seemed to have become popularised anyway. For instance it was Truman Capote who said, in 1973, that in the future everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes.

There was only one source of information on Andy Warhol extant, and that was in my own small collection of art books. It will surprise you how calm I was about all this. I did not doubt my sanity, and as I still remembered my little scribble in Andy Browne's notebook, I didn't doubt what had happened. With great equanimity, I accepted that I had access to a supernatural power of some kind. It's amazing, when this actually happens, how calmly, indeed almost languidly, one accepts this. After all, it is no longer supernatural but natural, part of the world.

At first I assumed that this was a once-off, some kind of aberration in space-time. I doodled some more in the notebook, stating the non-existence of prominent and not-so-prominent people living and dead.

Gradually I discerned that some things had their own necessity, and some things didn't. Named living persons, and the artistic creations of named living persons, were immune to the notebook's power. After some more experimentation I realised this applied not only to people - I managed to negate the existence of the dodo, of Halicarnasuss, of the Falkland Islands. What exactly happened to the population of the Falklands I'm not entirely sure. Perhaps there was a slight rise in the population of Britain. I managed to reduce the number of extant works of Aeschylus from seven to four, but the tragedian himself proved stubbornly resistant to elimination.

What was equally striking was the fact that, while the world seemed to lose these creations and indeed creators with surprisingly little change, they continued to exist in my library. I carefully kept my eye on a copy of Pygmalion while negating it in the notebook. It continued to exist, but the play itself did not have an existence in the outside world (oddly, My Fair Lady did, "based on an idea by George Bernard Shaw", an unpublished, fragmentary outline for a story)

One day I wrote "There was never a book called Pale Fire, by Vladimir Nabokov." I enjoyed Nabokov too much to try and negate him, but was amused by the possibility that my favourite of his books would become a private pleasure for me. I assure you I had no thought of personal gain.

With Nabokov's book duly expunged from libraries, from bookshops, from the collective memory (it seemed) of book-lovers, I settled to read the book. It is a rare pleasure, one denied us in this age of mass production, the joy of reading a work of art created just for oneself.

As I read, a thought struck me. I had always felt that the central poem around which the work is based was itself a fine piece of literary art. It deserved appreciation in its own right. It may strike the reader as blindingly obvious now, but the sudden realisation that nothing whatsoever prevented me from publishing the poem Pale Fire as my own work only hit me then. It was simply a matter of typing.

The rest you know - the long poem The Waxwing Slain which was universally praised and whose enormous commercial success resurrected poetry as a mainstream art form. Within months there were numerous audiobooks, a film adaptation in the works. The imaginative leap for a young Irish scribbler to convincingly inhabit an ageing American professor mourning a dead daughter was widely commented on. No one knew the leap was via a Russian émigré author, still well-known from Lolita..

Thus The Waxwing Slain audiobook, blaring at me from all available speakers on the Goatstown crossroads. I smiled to myself at the moment, the feeling of one's fame being crowned. The lights changed and I drove on. Looking back, this was the highpoint of my career, the moment when I felt most satisfied with it all. I felt Nabokov himself would appreciate the turn of events.

Andy, who I must admit was the first living person I tried to negate, had found work on his next novel increasingly difficult. "It isn't the same" he said, "before I had seemingly endless ideas and no craft, and now I have all craft and no ideas." He surprised me by getting married. I was his best man. It was one of the last times we talked. At the wedding, I felt uncomfortable with is obvious resentment of my literary success. It was how I had been to him, I saw now.

I've written two more novels. The Violent Bear It Away and Day of the Locust. Reviewers worldwide have lauded my versatile imagination, my ability to inhabit entirely different linguistic worlds. They are a little puzzled how at my works American setting, set in a specific time without any apparent awkwardness, or the air of a period piece. Of course, I typed those two novels, directly transcribing (occasionally with very slight editing) from the only extant copies in my own library.

But there was no joy in their creation, or in the reception they received. The moment had come when I realised that literary success as an end in itself was a sham. The elaborate daydreams when I dreamed of rave reviews and blurbs were revealed as rather tawdry fantasies. For the first time in a long time, I wanted to write a story, regardless completely of the sensation it would create, the reputation it would forge for me. I began to write this story.

And who will understand me, now that Andy Warhol and the dodo and Pale Fire are not only not with us, but their existence has ceased? There comes a time in anyone's life when to confess - to a loved one, in a religious ceremony, or in the full glare of the world in a book or television programme - becomes an unbearable need. I, alas, have no audience that can comprehend my acts; all will assume this is merely a clever fiction. Even Andy will think it merely a tasteless literary in-joke, so I intend changing the names of all concerned. Only I, or an ideal and hence non-existent reader, will know that this is a confession.

Link: http://www.nthposition.com/thewaxwingslain.php

Original text of Review of "Mortal Coil; A Brief History of Living Longer" by David Boyd Haycock for TLS

Submitted 31/01/09

There was quite a lot of editing on this, will try and put up the published text too.

Mortal Coil – A Short History of Living Longer.
David Boyd Haycock
Yale University Press,
2008.


In March 1626, Sir Francis Bacon stopped his carriage to stuff a
chicken with snow. In so doing, he contracted the bronchitis that
would kill him. This experiment was intended to investigate a
potential means of immortality. Bacon, four years earlier, had written
his History Naturall and Experimentall of Life and Death, intended as
manual of the prolongation of life. This age-old ambition assumed more
urgency in the early modern era, as humanists began to question the
received authority that three score and ten was the limit of human
existence. Reports, utterly unencumbered by any documentary evidence,
of centenarians such as Thomas Parr who died allegedly aged 152 in
1635, further encouraged efforts at life extension.

The biblical patriarchs provided most inspiration for would-be
immortalists. Genesis reported that Adam lived to 930, Noah to 950 and
Methuselah to 969. St Augustine and Flavius Josephus had robustly
defended the literal nature of these ages, and in the early modern era
they served as exemplars of human potential. Clearly something had
gone wrong since Genesis, and what becomes a familiar cast of villains
as Haycock's narrative progresses were indicted – faulty diet, alcohol
lack of moral fibre, excess emission of seminal fluid, and so on. Two
distinct approaches to longevity are evident throughout the book – one
of lifestyle modification and one of seeking an elixir of eternal
youth.

For eternal youth, rather than prolonged age per se, was and is the
dream. Aristotle has held that as one ages, the body's life-giving
heat gradually dries out the organs and the flesh. Heat was both
source of life and source of death. For early moderns, reconciling
this with the longevity of the patriarchs was a challenge. For some,
it lead into millennial despair – the world was growing old and
decrepit and humanity along with it. For others, it was a source of
optimism, suggesting that prolonged, vigorous life was possible. This
optimism, fed also by occasional cases like Parr's, survived into more
secular ages sceptical and then dismissive of scriptural authority.


Haycock traces this search from early modernity right up to the
present day. The potential immortality of the soul is outside his
scope. Dreams of longevity are closely linked with other utopian
dreams – witness the interest of such figures as Condorcet and William
Godwin. The cast of characters is huge, and range from figures central
to Western thought such as Descartes (who believed he could live for
five hundred years) to obscure charlatans and eccentrics. Despite
this, there is a pedestrian quality to the book. Some of the curiously
limits of the human imagination when it comes to possible means of
prolonging life. As Haycock describes yet another scheme for longer
life, usually consisting of a simple diet, celibacy, sleep, frugality
and refraining from anything that could be described as excitement,
one feels like one has been here before.

There are exceptions to this rule. Francis Bacon, in his complicated
scheme, encouraged consumption of rich fatty meats, sweat fruits and
honey. The idea that red wine bestows health is not a new one
conveniently discovered by French epidemiologists – in 1638 the London
physician Tobias Whitaker wrote The Tree of Humane Life hoping to
prove "the possibilitie of maintaining Life from infancy to extreame
old age without any sicknesse by the use of Wine." Cryogenics, based
on the idea of refrigerating the corpse for thawing out at a later
date when medical science has obligingly discovered how to reverse the
thousand natural shocks flesh is heir to.

The unintended consequences of the search for long life are often more
interesting than the search itself. Haycock traces the roots of the
Royal Society to Bacon's proposed establishment of Saloman's House, an
institution devoted to the long-term advancement of learning. Modern
endocrinology developed in part as a by product of the search for a
"magic bullet" of longevity. The early twentieth century attempts to
use testosterone to rejuvenate – such as Serge Voronoff's grafting of
monkey testes onto human ones, and Eugen Steinach's use of vasectomies
– attracted much public attention, and mockery. W.B. Yeats submitted
himself to Steinach's procedure followed by hormonal injections in
1934. Dublin wags dubbed him "the gland old man", perhaps confusing
Steinach and Voronoff.

In the final chapter, Haycock brings us to the contemporary world of
genomics and a modern medicine that has unravelled many of life's
secrets and , in the Western world anyway, can sometimes seem capable
of the miraculous. We meet Aubrey de Grey, celebrity posthumanist and
possessor of a beard of Dostoyevkesyian proportions (free of grey
hairs.) de Grey enthusiastically believes there is a human being
currently alive who will live a thousand years. This will be an
incremental process – as the centuries progress, means of prolonging
vigorous life for another twenty years or so will be discovered,
rather then there being one great discovery revealing the key to long
life. de Grey is far from a mainstream figure, and other
gerontologists are profoundly sceptical of the possibility and
desirability of such long life.

Fully engaging in these debates is outside Haycock's scope (and in a
footnote he intimates a belief that the danger of environmental
catastrophe far outweighs the problems of a vastly older population)
but one feels that if he had considered them more explicitly, the book
itself would possess more vigorous life. In the index we find a host
of eminent medical and philosophical names (almost all male, despite –
or maybe because of – the well known tendency for women to live longer
than men) but not that of Alois Alzheimer. All utopian dreams have
within them the stuff of nightmare, and long life is no different.

Original text of review submitted to TLS of "Take Me To The Source" by Rupert Wright and "The Blue Death" by Dr Robert D Morris

Submitted on 02/07/08

ake me to the source: In search of water. Rupert Wright

The Blue Death: Disease, Disaster and the Water We Drink. Dr Robert D Morris





Thales of Miletus, the earliest identifiable philosopher and scientist (in a fairly loose sense of both terms) held that "everything is water." That this is the first philosophical and first scientific statement is no accident; water is central to human existence. In the West, however, the words of Jake Gittes in "Chinatown" are apt – "I turned on the faucet, it came out hot and cold, I didn't think there was a thing to it. "Rupert Wright, who has previously written books about life in the Languedoc region, begins his discursive, digressive, suitably elusive book with the sudden cessation of water supply in his French home. When he bought the place, the fact that it came with its own water supply was another romantic touch. Only when it stopped did he realise that there was indeed "a thing to it."



Wright has written an entertaining tour of the world of water, if such a tautology is possible in a world that is mainly water. From the gigantic excavation of a third water supply tunnel for New York, happening almost invisibly to passers-by in Midtown Manhattan, to a sommelier instructing bored Parisians in the appreciation of spring and mineral water, to the hunger-striking Bishop of Barra in Brazil trying to stop the damming of the São Francisco River, humanity's relationship with water is by turns inspiring, absurd, and tragic.



Water policy is steadfastly unsexy. All over the world, Wright notices, oil ministers are Harvard-educated, Rolex-wearing, Armani-clad; water ministers wear cheap suits and use their mobile phones to tell the time. Wright is no reflex contrarian, but his scepticism about some of the received wisdom about water and water policy is bracing. One truism of bien pensant opinion he seems wearied by is the wars of the coming century will be a fought over water, a notion he imagines Flaubert consigning to a contemporary Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues. Only one war, he writes, has ever definitively been fought over water – "more have been fought over salt." Water has been a tool of war rather than a cause of war, and the need for water drives co-operation as much as competition (Europe's oldest law court the Tribunal de las Aguas de la Vega de Valencia, consists of eight magistrates who have convened every Thursday at midday since the Tenth Century to ensure the fair distribution of Turia River water.)





Wright is much more interested in how writers and artists have described and depicted water. Poetry flows throughout. He is particularly enraptured by the single flowing sentence that is Bloom's reflection on water in Ulysses. That dry systemiser Stephen Dedalus disliked bathing and suspects 'aquacities of thought and language'; hydrophilic Bloom boils the kettle and embarks on an epic sentence of reverie and connection about water. Three other texts especially inspire Wright - John Cheever's "The Swimmer", Roger Deakin's "Waterlog" and Charles Sprawson's "Haunts of the Black Masseur: The Swimmer as Hero" and he has something of the ruminative charm of Deakin and the digressive erudition of Sprawson.



No mention of Ulysses in Dr Robert D. Morris' "The Blue Death" (Morris, incidentally, uses his professional title on the book's cover.) While Rupert Wright does not gloss over the lethality of water-borne infections and the mass misery and death that can be caused by consuming water, Morris, a public health physician and water researcher, focuses exclusively on water-borne threats. Water, as a substance itself, is not centre stage – indeed is hardly mentioned. An aside that "safe water is not an end, but a process, an ongoing struggle in which improvement is always possible and often necessary. Purity, it turns out, is fleeting" is the closest we come to the philosophical reflections of Wright.



He begins with the tale of John Snow and the Broad Street pump. Snow is to epidemiologists what Indiana Jones is to archaeologists, and Morris lays of the suspense a little thick: "Snow felt he was finally closing in on the proof that might muffle his critics. The ground itself would need to shake to divert his attention from the task at hand. He would soon discover that an epidemiological earthquake like no other had its epicenter on the north side of the Thames." We move on to the battles over cholera of Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur ("like seasoned gunfighters, they would meet in the streets of Alexandria with test tubes blazing until only one man was standing.")



The tone shifts suddenly halfway through. Morris is no longer describing the heroic age of epidemiology and public health, but is centre stage. A meta-analysis he performs linking long-term consumption of chlorinated water with cancer earns him the suspicion of the water treatment industry and, it seems from his own account, the Environmental Protection Agency. Again we are reminded that water is "unsexy" – public attention, for Big Water, means bad news. Outbreaks of cryptosporidium in Milwaukee in 1993 and E. coli 0157:H7 in Canada in 2000 illustrate the weaknesses of water processing systems that have changed little in a hundred years. Morris is no neutral in these matters, and closes the book with an eight point plan for ensuring safe water (step 7, by the way, involves the universal use of point-of-use filtration for drinking water.)



Wright writes ruminatively, philosophically, sub specie aeternis,, while Morris is the researcher in the arena of current controversy and impatient with the slow pace of change. Wright is amusedly tolerant of bottled water and its attendant absurdities; Morris is angered by a fad whereby more water is used to produce the bottle than goes inside. Both aim to reveal the truth about the ubiquitous and invisible substance that we are learning not to take quite so much for granted – water is everywhere, water is eternal, water is indestructible, and water is scarce, fleeting, and fragile.