Mourning

Trilogy #2

by Richard Makin

Mourning is the final part of a trilogy by writer, poet and artist Richard Makin, following Work (Great Works) and Dwelling (Reality Street).“The first two novels in Richard Makin’s trilogy started life being serialised in monthly parts online – in the best Dickensian tradition. But Mourning, like its predecessors, is no 19th-century novel. Without recognisable characters or plot, it continues to mine textual sources – science-fiction scripts, dictionary definitions, the languages of arcane ritual and of everyday life – achieving an astonishing non-narrative, never-ending coherence.” Ken Edwards“The writing is that it is. This is prose you must learn to experience before you begin to interpret […] the pages in their beautiful and delirious abstraction are ordered poetry.” Iain Sinclair“Opening with a necessary forgetting, this beautiful and disturbing book works through an accumulation of faltering incipits which force us, quoting Gertrude Stein, to ‘begin again and again and again.’ Owing much to Nouveau Roman particularity and the decadence of fin-de-siècle prose, privileging arcane objecthood over organised personhood, Mourning is richly dark and thick with corporeal and writerly materialities. It is also, as it recognises only partly with tongue-in-rectum, ‘screamingly funny in its own way.” Jeff Hilson“Makin’s work is an experimental prose that connects, at its extremes, with both the novel and the installation.” Michael Peverett

Kindle Edition

First published May 1, 2015

About the author

Richard Makin is a writer, poet and artist currently living on the south coast of England.

Reviews

[Thor Garcia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Richard Makin is an extraordinary artist, the most insubordinate, bad-boy writer working today. He cares not a lick about narrative or character or other such theories that any child can understand. He scorns your traditions and conventions, which are useless nonsense anyway. What have you been going on about again? Oh, that old-hat stuff again. No, your cleverness isn't very. No, no interest in your lugubrious stemwinders. Yes, the centuries were appalling. Hm, no. Hm, I'm bored. Hm, I am turning up my nose. Hm, the less said the better.

“Another white floater attaches itself to the window pane, a big void of square," Makin writes in MOURNING. "Some of those depicted were silicon-based life forms, others carrion. All matter went up in flames. He has something to learn from me, but does not yet know what it is.”

Makin creates books full of this, hundreds of pages, thousands of words. On and on it goes. Aborted declarations, shattered elaborations, truncated descriptions, corrupted cliches. Reflections of the familiar, the strange, the comforting, the types of sentences we've seen millions of times. Sentences plucked from Western monoculture, from the flotsam, from experience, from the act of putting one word after another. Absurdities and ironies and sentimentalism, unblinking and unwinking.

It's not a game and it's not an experiment. It's not a theory and it's not a joke. It's not particularly brave and not particularly clever. It is merely jaw-dropping. Singular. Unrelenting and unforgiving, it exists in a space beyond the tawdry demands of ideology and social critique. It's a hoot that'll put you in a trance state, that'll make you rethink all your so-called notions of literature, words, context, meaning.

Makin's making a good point. And he will outlast you. He will break you. Your mind will play tricks. He will help you see what's not there. No, he won't help at all. His only concession is to creating concise, sometimes elegant sentences. But they are far from easily digestible. Nobody's sure what's going on here, but it's exceptional, even a marvel.

“A duct that conveys urine from the kidneys to the cloaca is yet to be invented," he writes. "I dared not venture out all the weekend. I wanted to say that her place could not remain empty forever. And we could see nothing in the mist. That was the cue for me to exhaust myself, to renegotiate. (Or is all this the pretense of remembrance?)”

The terrain is bleak, terrifying, hilarious. What's he driving at, anyway? What's he got in there? What is meant by the title? Who or what are being mourned? Let the inscrutability amaze you. Dare to control it. Dare to implant meaning. Try to box it. Run wild with a theory. No, don't. Cut yourself adrift and ride the flow. Let the sentences and words wash over you freely, sensuously, technocratically. Watch as your brain is triggered, making connections bereft of context.

Words are holy. Words are wholly lacking. With MOURNING, Makin demonstrates once and for all that he is one of the most blackly humorous and disenchanted voices of modern literature. His severely amputated prose-poetry acknowledges no obligations. It ignores all the so-called rules you claim to care so much about. He is indifferent to your exertions and squabbles. The point has been lost. There never was a point. There never was a goal. Having goals shows how rude and arrogant you are. Everything is over. Nothing began. Don't even try. Makin is a great artist.