Levitation

by Sean O'Reilly

All of us know, deep down, that life is not a dream. Like some crude monster in the daylight, reality is sustained by our disbelief in it. Maybe this is why not much seems to change, not really.

Ever feel you have a totally different sense of time?

What’s the most terrible, outrageous thing you can imagine?

Remember I told you about the lonely thing?

Genres: Short Stories

228 pages, Hardcover

Published September 1, 2017

Reviews

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Why is it so tempting to tell the biggest lies in a barbershop

The Stinging Fly magazine was established in 1997 “to seek out, publish and promote the very best new Irish and international writing”, with a particular focus on new and emerging writers and on the short story. Stinging Fly Press was launched as a small publisher in 2005, with a similar focus to the magazine and its first publication was Sean O’Reilly’s Watermark.

Sean O’Reilly published a series of short stories and novels between 2000 and 2005, and was increasingly seen as one of the voices of contemporary Irish fiction before reading a roadblock after four years into what he has described as a “magnus opus” of a novel, and throwing his notes and even computer into the River Liffey.

This book, effectively a short novella (the title story which finishes the book) and a loosely associated collection of linked stories, is then his first for 12 years.

O’Reilly was born in Derry in 1969 and so grew up during the troubles and has described how this influenced his views on writing

You had to be careful about what you said and what you didn't say… there was a lot of secrets, a lot of not saying what you'd seen, who you were talking to, who you gave your name to. Everything around the spoken word was contaminated by suspicion and paranoia.

Other elements of O’Reilly’s life include: periods in London, half-completed creative writing courses in London and the UEA, involvement in anti-Thatcher politics, various periods of exile including a lengthy stay in Northern Scandinavia (which lead to him writing seriously) and then a move to Dublin where he teaches at the American college. These influences come through in the various short stories.

The opening story – “hallion1#” (with a second part later in the book – “hallion2#”) differs from the other stories both in setting (Northern Ireland in the troubles) and style (a first party stream of thought) with the hallion (slang for a useless lout) in question addressing his baby son – who he is pushing in a pram, looking for a babysitter - as he waits to be kneecapped for petty thievery, the handicapper being about as useless and unmotivated as the victim.

The story contains a line capturing life in the troubles: you’re better off not knowing / if something is about to kick off a shooting maybe or the boys scouting a dump you need to turn your eyes away / try not to believe its happening / do something else and this line seems to provide a theme for the remainder of the short stories.

With one exception, these are more conventionally written, typically Dublin based, set on the margins of society and about tumultuous relationships (some with explicit sexual detail) and typically with at their heart some form of failed masculinity and (going back to the quote above) a certain wilful refusal to really confront the truth of the situation being faced. Many of the stories feature characters who work in or visit a barbers shop, so linking to the final novella.

“Rescue”: a wife flees to her father’s house in the countryside when her rescue-dog bites her husband’s nephew, the wife and husband finally getting back together in a frenzied passion after a circus show;

“The Cavalcade”: a couple act as joint prostitutes, driven by the mentally unbalanced, violently inclined and sexually predatory female (herself an author of a novel about a girl in a private mental hospital);

“Free Verse”: an ex-prisoner is confronted by his ex-girlfriend (whose husband he killed in a fight) for writing poetry dedicated to her while in prison – his excuse there was a writing group inside and the tutor pushed me to keep going with it and its only a small unknown publisher;

Downstream” – a man reflects on his recurring flings with a lover who he meets in London against a background of Poll Tax riots and later Anti-War protests;

“Love Bites/Free Horses” – a girl thinks back on the joyriding death of her young boyfriend;

“The Three Twists” - I struggled to understand (although the title was a nice reference to the “three twists” of an old fashioned phone when the protagonist closes the story by calling the Guards - presumably dialling 999);

“Ceremony” – was the strongest of the short stories, a Lisa McInnerney style story of a man who attends the naming ceremony of the first child of his PPD suffering ex-lover, years after a split which he dealt with in a psychotic manner. The story contains my favourite line, which beautifully invokes an Irish rain storm The first drops [of rain] to hit the window were thick and distinct enough to have their own names, but was tarnished by a scatological ending.

“Critical Mass II (Abandoned Work”) – is simply too anomalous to work in this collection, the outline of a surreal narrative, interwoven with author’s notes on how to improve the story, seemingly based on O’Reilly’s time in Scandinavia.

The book closes with the title novella – the main protagonist of whom is Valentine, a humorously eccentric middle-aged barber, with a psychological block to driving, a sensitivity to the paranormal (a levitating man, poltergeist movements of a toy car, a speaking 1-year old nephew) and an obsession, who causes trouble when he cuts the hair of a released murderer. This story is narrated (at least occasionally) by, it would seem, O’Reilly himself, in his period between books (You dumped a book in the river I hear. Writer or something he is told) and it captures much of the sense of working class male Dublin with its pubs and barbers, and its close knit community.

Overall a very uneven collection – I would prefer a book based more centrally around the novella, with the side stories based more explicitly on characters who interact with the shop and with some of the more extreme violence or sexual explicitness removed. Nevertheless there was plenty in this collection to provoke and entertain.

As Valentine walks around Dublin, following an accident which leaves him temporarily unable to work (and ultimately leads to a revelation about the death of his father), we are told in what serves as a great summary of the book and its strengths.

As every native knows, the charm of Dublin is all about who you might meet when you’re out and about on its miserly handful of streets. It might be someone you haven’t seen in a long time or a face from only the night before. It might be a lover you’ve never forgotten or your brother’s handsome headmaster or an old landlord you still owe money to. The encounter could bring remarkable news or distressing information or more of the same drama despite the years that have passed.

My thanks to Stinging Fry for a review copy.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 2 out of 5]

All he could talk about was the men and their yarns. He lived it in there behind the steamed-up window, in the smoke and the mirrors, the razors and newspapers, the smell of wet hair under the creepy sallow light. You would believe anything, she used to tease him.
(from the story Love Bites / Dark Horses)

The Stinging Fly magazine was established in 1997 “to seek out, publish and promote the very best new Irish and international writing” and in 2005 they launched a new imprint, The Stinging Fly Press “dedicated to publishing the very best new Irish literary fiction, and is particularly interested in promoting the short story.

Joseph Roth’s last work, The Legend of The Holy Drinker, tells the story of Andreas, a vagrant in Paris, given 200 Francs by a holy gentleman on condition that he, in turn, donate the same sum to a local church when he can afford to do so. Flush with the money, he experiences an upturn in his fortune, but his good intentions to fulfil his pledge are frustrated by multiple distractions, notably his weakness for alcohol. The first morning after his windfall:

proudly, in spite of his tattered clothing, he walked into a respectable bistro and sat down at a table — he, who for so long had only stood at bars, or rather propped his elbow on them. He sat. And since his chair was facing a mirror, he could hardly avoid looking at his reflection in it, and it was as though he were making his own acquaintance again after a long absence. [..] He was shocked, especially when he compared his own physiognomy with those of the sleek and respectable men who were seated round him. It was fully a week since he had last had a shave — a rough and ready one, as was usually the case, administered to him by one of his fellows, who would occasionally agree to shave a brother-vagrant for a few coppers. Now, though, in view of his decision to begin a new life, nothing less than a real shave would do. He decided to go to a proper barber’s shop before going on with his breakfast.

He suited the action to the thought, and went to a barber.

When he returned to the tavern, he found his former place occupied, and he was now only able to get a distant view of himself in the mirror. But it was enough for him to see that he had been smartened up, rejuvenated, become a new man. Yes, his face seemed to be giving off a sort of radiance which made the tattiness of his clothes seem irrelevant — the ripped shirt-front, and the red-and-white striped foulard he wound over his frayed collar.

Why have I just quoted a completely different book? Well firstly one can never have too much Roth. But Sean O’Reilly’s Levitation takes its epigraph, indeed seemingly its inspiration, from the bolded words in this passage.

Levitation is a collection of short-stories – one novella length – set during the time of the Troubles (mostly implicit rather than in the foreground) through to the Iraq war protests and the smoking ban of March 2004, in the seedier streets of Dublin:

As every native knows, the charm of Dublin is all about who you might meet when you’re out and about on its miserly handful of streets. It might be someone you haven’t seen in a long time or a face from only the night before. It might be a lover you’ve never forgotten or your brother’s handsome headmaster or an old landlord you still owe money to. The encounter could bring remarkable news or distressing information or more of the same old drama despite the years that have passed.

And a common link in the stories is the presence of barber shops – a place of refuge for the male characters from the Guards or from their womenfolk, a place to swap stories and yarns, a place of hidden assignations – on Capel Street one of Dublin's oldest commercial areas (the building pictured is listed on the National Inventory of Architectural Heritage)



For more on the stories see the review from Gumble’s Yard (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...) and from Neil (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...).

Overall, this is certainly a striking and darkly humorous work – e.g. two stories have a no-hoper waiting for his kneecapping from an equally incompetent and procrastinating (echoes of Andreas) enforcer. But this didn’t quite work for me. It was rather uneven in style (two stories told in broken prose, and one completely experimental, but the others conventional), it felt odd to have the link of the barbers shops but then dilute this link by not making it the same shop in each case, and the subject matter didn’t particularly appeal. Also the bar on short-story collections has been raised significantly recently by writers like Joanna Walsh, Eley Williams and most notably Claire-Louise Bennett, whose brilliant Pond was also published by Stinging Fly.

The novella was my favourite of the stories and would almost work better as a stand-alone piece, telling the story of the rivalry between two barbers Valentine and Tintin:

If there was one thing Valentine Rice couldn’t tolerate any more, it was Tintin’s story about cutting the hair of some ordinary looking gent who turned out to be a killer, a serial killer perhaps. Valentine had been listening to it now for nearly twenty years above the noise of electric razors and cheap hairdryers and the traffic on Capel Street, which, as everybody knows, had got worse and worse. How one sweltering day, the story went, into the shop stepped a plain, tallish, lightly freckled gent, a broad chest under a loose white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, fortyish, no accent, humourless, and the only odd detail about him was how fussy he grew about his hair. It was a good story, it had to be said. People couldn’t get enough of the picture of Gemmel in the middle chair under the apron, studying his reflection in the mirror, before he went off to kill another woman.

Valentine Rice had cut the hair of famous, dissolute actors and musicians, that poet who dug up his dead daughter, all grades of Provo, a reincarnated Hungarian king, two false imprisoners, a Formula 1 winner, umpteen amateur paedos, a man who claimed he was being followed by an ostrich—but he simply couldn’t compete with an old-fashioned, homegrown rapist and strangler.

Thanks to Stinging Fly for the ARC.

[Neil · Rating 2 out of 5]

"As every native knows, the charm of Dublin is all about who you might meet when you’re out and about on its miserly handful of streets. It might be someone you haven’t seen in a long time or a face from only the night before. It might be a lover you’ve never forgotten or your brother’s handsome headmaster or an old landlord you still owe money to."

Levitation is published by The Stinging Fly Press. The Stinging Fly magazine was established in 1997 to seek out, publish and promote the very best new Irish and international writing. Eight years later The Stinging Fly Press imprint was launched in May 2005 with the publication of our first title, Watermark by Sean O’Reilly. Like the magazine, the imprint is dedicated to publishing the very best new Irish literary fiction, and is particularly interested in promoting the short story. Stinging Fly Press also published the wonderful and unsettling Pond which I read earlier this year.

Levitation is a collection of linked short stories and a longer novella. Mostly the link is Dublin and its characters (see quote at the start of this review), although the story Hallion told in two separate parts is set in Derry. This is a bizarre story of a man pushing his baby (the story is told by the man talking to his child) in a pram through the streets looking for a babysitter because he has an appointment to be knee-capped for thieving. Except that the man doing the knee-capping seems less interested in getting on with it than you might expect. It’s a stream of consciousness story that can be hard to make sense of but is darkly humorous.

And I think this could also be said of many of the other stories. They are more conventionally told, but all are unsettling to one degree or other and mostly they have some dark humour at least in the background. Some stories are sexually explicit and violent (you have been warned) and all seem to deal with difficult relationships. In Free Verse, for example, we read of a man who wrote poetry while he was in prison and dedicated it to ex-girlfriend. That sounds OK until you learn that he killed that ex-girlfriend’s husband in a fight. In one of the many moments of humour, perhaps a trade joke, he excuses himself by saying there was a writing group inside and the tutor pushed me to keep going with it and it’s only a small unknown publisher. In one story, Scissors, each new section starts with a large capital letter. When you collect all those large capitals together, they spell (spaces added by me) “YOUR HUSBAND IS A HOMO ASK CLYDE”.

I thought the best short story was Ceremony where a man attends the naming ceremony of the child of an ex-girlfriend who has post-natal depression. I found the story called Critical Mass II which has a parenthesised (Abandoned Work) in its title to be almost incomprehensible: a bizarre narrative mixed with the author’s notes on how to develop it further.

There are several other stories plus the longer novella that is the title story which tells the story of Valentine who is a barber. Barbershops feature heavily in the book as a whole. They are meeting places, places to talk. The book’s epigraph is a quote that says He suited the action to the thought, and went to the barber. As one character says Why is it so tempting to tell the biggest lies in a barbershop.

Parts of the book are very entertaining (think The Glorious Heresies), but it never quite seems to keep the level consistent, even within stories. I thought the novella at the end was going to make more reference to the stories that lead up to it and that would have united the collection, but that doesn’t happen and it ultimately feels rather messy.

My thanks to Stinging Fly for a review copy.

[Jackie Law · Rating 1 out of 5]

Levitation, by Sean O’Reilly, is a collection of eleven short stories narrated in a distinctly Irish voice. They are raw and often unpleasant in their imagery. The characters lack empathy and emotional intelligence. They are self-absorbed and eager to indulge in whatever provides personal gratification. In the minds of the men, sex conveys a type of ownership and is given priority over what would generally be regarded as common decency. The author describes in detail acts I would have preferred not to have pictured in my head.

The collection opens with Hallion, a story that later continues with Hallion #2. Although not drawn to the tale initially, these turned out to be amongst the more palatable offerings in the book. The writing style took some getting used to as slashes replace more regular punctuation. Hallion tells of a man desperately trying to find someone, anyone, to care for his baby son that he may keep an appointment for a kneecapping. Hallion #2 deals with the aftermath. As stories these work. They draw the reader in to the accepted violence of the lives being lived.

Free Verse introduces a poetry writing barber named Clyde who has done time in prison. On release from this incarceration he published a book of verse on the advise of his therapist. The woman who inspired him, and to whom he dedicated the book, is not impressed. She wished to forget he existed and resents the reminder, given to her by a journalist. She confronts Clyde with an ultimatum that he struggles to accept.

The barber shop, in Capel Street, Dublin, along with its staff and clientele link each story in the collection. With a sizable cast of characters it was, at times, a challenge to keep track of their various relationships.

Rescue tells of a marriage under stress. Portia and Tiernan, a couple who seem ill suited except, perhaps, in bed are separated when one of their dogs attacks a child at a social gathering. Portia flees with the creature, angering her husband as his carnal needs are not now being met. He turns to drugs, a habit she had previously demanded he breaks. Eventually he follows her to the countryside. Tiernan is angered that his wife will not put his needs first.

The Cavalcade offers further degeneration. Two young people and an older man act out some sort of dominant/submissive sex game. Each are emotionally damaged. Graphic details of their encounters are provided. I found this sickening to read, pornographic in nature.

Downstream is also crude. Sex games are played, actions described, little understanding displayed between the players. Again, it was unpleasant to read.

The Three Twists offers more of a story, although with violent undercurrents. It provides little relief.

Love Bites/Dark Horses has a younger cast but the plot is somewhat opaque. Older family members have been caught misbehaving. There may be an abortion being dealt with. A young girl turns to the church but fears voicing her secrets.

Despite the sex, drugs and violence, many of the characters do still attend the Catholic church. Such hypocrisy added to the distastefulness rather than providing anything of depth.

Ceremony is set around a naming ceremony for a baby. It portrays men who feel hard done by, damaged to an extreme, if the women they want to have sex with do not act as they wish. For no reason I could fathom details of flatulence and the need to defecate are included. The characters are unlikable enough without the need for such typically schoolboy particulars.

Critical Mass II is described as an abandoned work and is written in this style. Again, unpleasant details detract from the story arc. A sister smears spit across her brother’s mouth, her bad breath repeatedly mentioned. The boy appears to be a sacrifice or seer. It is, as titled, unfinished.

Levitation is set in the barbers shop and includes many of the characters from the previous tales. It has a story arc but not one made entirely clear. As the final offering in a collection I was not enjoying reading, I had hoped for something stronger in this, the longest tale. It was not to be.

As mentioned, these stories include copious drug taking and sex. I became bored by the repetition, searching behind these porn inspired, teenage tropes for whatever meaning the author intended to convey. In the end it all became too murky. If there is brilliance it has been shadowed by the discomfort of the prose’s leering gaze.

[Colette Willis · Rating 5 out of 5]

What I love is when a writer pushes the boundaries, then says to you, look, see what I’ve done, makes you complicit in the act of invention. The best stories here, or at least my personal favourites, are the ones that undermine the act of narration or even the idea of story itself. Like Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things in written form.

[Supersplurk · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books of short stories I have read in a while. Really enjoyed it, dark and humorous in equal measure.

[Rosa Wichuraiana · Rating 2 out of 5]

Found it on the shelf at a writing retreat. I felt like I was reading some of the especially bad short stories in the fiction classes I used to teach, the ones by 18 year old boys who are trying to confront their own toxic masculinity but go wandering off into self gratification instead. Then I learned that the author actually teaches fiction classes too. Oh well.

[Dermot]

Thought the experimental stories in this collection were excellent (Hallion, Hallion #2 and Critical Mass) but the ones with more conventional plot and characters I didn't like at all. I hope Mr O'Reilly goes down a more experimental path for whatever he does next. Cos he has a quare talent