Midfield Dynamo

by Adrian Duncan

From award-winning author Adrian Duncan comes his first collection of astonishing short stories. These modern stories have been written over the past decade, half having been previously published in The Moth, The Stinging Fly, Dublin Review and elsewhere, half completely new. Patterning and happenstance make up the rich quotidian lives of the characters portrayed in these strange, energetic tales. The loose figures of young artists, footballers and artisan engineers act out against diverse backgrounds from Dublin’s northside to Hamburg, Abu Dhabi and Accra, lives tethered yet adrift in a random universe of hard scrabble and occasional illumination. The prose is spare, precise and imagistic, the humour dark and absurdist, shot through with an underlying humanity that has become the trademark of this remarkable writer.

Taking inspiration from his childhood fascination with football team formations, Duncan arranges this collection with an eye to how each piece interacts with the ‘While looking at a starting eleven and imagining the team’s possible patterns of movement on the field of play, one question always What is behind all of this?’

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction

Paperback

Reviews

[emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

‘Gaffer wants you,’ he says as he sits, panting for breath, ‘kicked off a bit out there.’

The one about ‘football’ is the best piece in the collection (but I wouldn’t go as far as to say that it’s one of the best works of ‘fiction’ that I’ve ever read about/with football). It’s especially ‘good’ probably because the rest of them really don't ‘hit’ quite as hard (or at all). It would have been better off as a longer piece of writing on its own, like I suppose a 'novella'.

‘He was an oaf of a lad. His first shot flew past my left ear and I could hear a seam between the onion bags rip open. I looked around and spied, through the hole in the netting, the ball lodged in one of the luminous leylandii bushes flanking the front drive. As my enormous jug-eared cousin crowed and celebrated around the lawn in front of me—I must get rid of this guy, or he will be the end of me.’

I'd probably say that the opening/first one is the second best in the collection (and the one with ‘Sebastian’ plus the one with strong arboreal descriptions/setting were decent), but then most of the others were (in my opinion) not written well enough at all.

‘The tips of the trees bobbed around us in a slow asynchronous way, and the ziggurat creaked gently below. It was a warm and sunny afternoon and all of the different scents of timber coursed up through the air.’

‘The generators click, groan, hammer, whirr. Then the lights slowly come up, and the whole forest begins to glow and oh … it is glorious – the forest is blue-ness: blue lines, gleaming blue curves and shapes that break in senseless arcs across the trees, the branches, the leaves, the glowing sap. The blue light quakes up through the dark undergrowth, the branches, the leaves until it blasts outward, obliterating the sky, way, way up, where it rolls and radiates and sings, and I start to shudder and run through all the blinding gunk, strand and shadow—.’

The ones with women/sex/drugs were the worst of the lot. It reminds me of a life-drawing class I was in years ago — in which at one point, the teacher paused to look at the ‘drawing’ made by someone else, and then asked me (rhetorically) — ‘I’m not sure if they’re trying too hard to be ‘different’ or if they’re just not used to seeing another person naked’.

‘We took MDMA with a little librium; it was fucking extraordinary. Hours later we were laughing on the couch. My mind had voided upward, heavenward, foreverward. My pupils were rolling back in my eyes – like small breaking tides – and my mouth gurned, ground and chewed on dry, salty cud. I was grinning extravagantly at Van der Woude, who was regaling me about the sex clubs he used to visit in Belgium as a younger man. He said he missed that free and blissful part of his life dearly.’

‘—on a Saturday morning at around two, a Thai call girl arrived. I was so epically strung out that all I could do was sit in an easy chair and hold onto its arms for dear life as I looked on with horror at Van der Woude have sex expertly, endlessly, with this call girl on his couch. Hours later as the drugs eased into an expansive mellow I felt like I could try standing up. My eyes returned from searching the dark firmament of my skull, and I could see Van der Woude, grinning broadly now, recline, with the call girl sitting on his lap, she smoking a cigarette. Then he slipped his head behind her torso, splayed his arms either side and passed out.’

The stories with unrequited love/lust were particularly difficult to read because it was just so not to my taste at all. There were a few typos in the book, so I also wonder if he even had an editor? Because the one about ‘football’ was quite well-written, the bad ones, in contrast, just seemed extremely ‘not-worth-reading-at-all’ (trying very hard to be polite about it). To be fair, the only thing that really seemed awful in an ‘misogynistic’ or rather ‘xenophobic’ way is the lack of properly written non-white characters (especially in the story that is specifically based in ‘Abu Dhabi’). That wouldn’t have been an issue at all if he didn't only include nameless (barely any description of them) characters who he simply refers to as Asian ‘call girls’ and/or ‘erotic’ masseuses in more than one of his stories. If those are the only ones, then it's just, you know (surely I do not have to elaborate). They wouldn't 'stand out' so much and so questionably if he had just excluded them altogether, but that's just my perspective of it. Especially when they literally are such minor characters with no other descriptions other than that they are 'sex workers'?

‘He remembered her appetite for sex too, and the private promiscuity she had towards their love life. It fascinated him; but this difference between them then only marked him out as a conservative sexual partner, which she at first found sweet, then boring, then pointless. He held—only pornographic memories of her, memories he still pleasured himself to—his buttocks quietly beating his member into the inert gloaming of his fist, fantasising, from an unlikely place, her soft limbs, her groans—memories he knew no longer had any correspondence to his experience of her. For eight years he’d been buckled by these fantasies.’

I was quite keen to read his more recently published books after reading the one about ‘football’, but now I’m not so sure, because the last few stories were really, really disappointing. Not sure how to ‘rate’ this book to be honest, but 2* (which translates to ‘it’s okay’ according to GR’s rating system) seems rather fitting. Also, the fact that the writer introduced the book so beautifully, and promisingly by explaining how he’s decided to use football formations/concepts to ‘frame’ his stories? I just don’t think he used that ‘well’. It wouldn’t even have made much of a difference without it which again, is quite disappointing. Ultimately, I am just not the right reader for most of them.

‘My English-ness was exotic there, and my range of passing broadened in that forest in Brandenburg, short unlikely passes and long cross-field pings, switching play emphatically. I cast out nets of influence over the pitch that allowed my inner-city Leeds swagger to appear, and when it did – a nutmeg, a no-look pass – it was cheered brutally by the loving crowd. I’d wave to them at the end of games and they’d howl back at me. I scored eight times during the first half of that season—.’

‘—I always thought when I was playing well in Brandenburg: that I could run like this forever, that there is no limit to my Cartesian aptitude, that I am a conqueror here, that I am showing my football-culture to be finer and that I am ready to return and present myself again in England, the only place where any of this has worth, or makes proper sense to me; it is the only place where the admiration is appropriate, and, as my heart pounded and I tracked down their kickoff, I thought, it is the only admiration that will last satisfyingly beyond my career where I might be recognized for my deeds as an ageing, broad-shouldered and bronzed ex-pro in my forties and fifties and sixties, entering a café, perhaps, in some quiet West-Midlands town, or a restaurant in Newcastle, or the clubhouse of a cricket club on a quiet Tuesday afternoon in a suburb in York.’

‘Our stadium is an old thing in the middle of northern England, surrounded by long-stilled steel and iron works and a network of congealing canals. I often think the fans come here just to be among the decaying trusses that shelter our deep single-tiered stands—drunk and overweight men on cheap season-tickets who obsess over transfers to and from the club—This club was never great – but it seems to exist now only out of the ghost of some habit.’

[Lewis Fisher · Rating 5 out of 5]

so i picked up this book from work thinking it was a series of short stories revolving around football, and while story #8 is a brilliant footballing piece, the rest occupy this visceral haunted world that exude the sheer power that literature can have. chefs kiss

[Steve Green · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed some of the short stories in this book, particularly the first, and a couple further on. Some are surreal, some tragic, and some just a bit middling. I wouldn’t say I’d rush to read them again, but one line did make me laugh, though you need the context of the story to fully appreciate it.

“Are you serious, sir?”

[Toby · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really could quite happily have read the book of short stories about football that i had knowingly fantasised this was, even if i hadn’t beforehand the huge amount of pleasure i took from reading Prosinecki would have made it so.

Adrian Duncan is my favourite discovery of 2023, such a unique and compelling artist with a very precise way with words and everything i have read has been quite wonderful but Prosinecki stands a chance of being my favourite piece of writing about football ever.

I look forward to more of his work in my life.

[Juliano · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Every morning I take a tram into town. The carriages are full of ghosts, their morbid lovers and lawyers. I find it a hurtling distressing journey.” Midfield Dynamo, Adrian Duncan’s new/first short story collection, is a wonderful blend of realism and surrealism, its stories ranging from the life + times of young footballer players, to an artist living adrift in Berlin, to two brothers in a perilous house, strange, shifting. Duncan’s prose is restrained and uncompromising, but finds a subtle and enchanting lyricism, a flow bound to his many characters’ interiority. There’s a psychological undercurrent to these stories, particularly as they echo and overlap with one another; the aloof fathers and broken marriages, wayward sons and distant brothers. Coincidences and fate are two sides of the same coin — chaotic/random elements of life, “all patternless but quite beautiful”, are hard to distinguish from moments of order and grace. I felt this keenly in the ending of ‘Forty-eight Pots of Honey’, a quiet and meditative story, taking a startling turn at the end; with feelings of regret (and, elsewhere, “regretlessness”) permeating the emotional lives of most stories’ protagonists, Duncan is as concerned with decay and loss as he is with what might — or could — or even should — have been. I also adored the clever playfulness of the collection’s structure.

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really loved this collection of short stories from Adrian Duncan. Prosinecki is my favourite- a cracker!

[Gayle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Effortlessly strange, as always.