Michael
Mc Aloran
longshadowfall
Editions du Cygne 2017
book
review by David McLean
Mc Aloran’s new book is not about participating
in any sort of Irish tradition, although the fact that he is Irish
has obviously created an expectation that he be expected to care
about Beckett & the other notable Irish writers, if there are
any, especially since he does not create conventional prose in his
texts. It is not evident in what way Mc Aloran follows in any Irish
tradition given that he has developed an individual voice. Mc Aloran
takes this subsumption of his work under the patriotic assumption of
Irishness & some regional identity qua
writer with some grace, since it must be very frustrating.
What the books are basically about is the
circumstance that existence is extremely temporary & not driven
by some fundamental meaning whereby things fit into their various
places & are essentially & unproblematically what they are.
We are loathsome ugly clumps of meat – the failing echo of which Mc
Aloran writes is moronic repetition, it is the pathetic quest for
meaning: there are no razors that do not have blood on them, nothing
that does not rust, no flesh forever except the repetitive return of
more worthless flesh. The echo might be an originary echo, the sounds
that come out first are already echoes. The road, everywhere, is
marked by shit, it is full of shit. A perfect place for the shit that
is humanity to drag itself back to nothing.
I think that Mc Aloran would agree with my
assessment of humanity that I developed from Homer Simpson “People
do things because they are stupid & die because they deserve to”
- there is carrion everywhere: people die so often that it is
(almost) not even funny anymore.
The best aspect of Mc Aloran is the gloom. There
is no trace of the inability that the later (& better) Becket
regrets as he notices that words do not work, they just lie on the
page & suck. This is because what Mc Aloran is portraying is the
fact that meaning is not there, life sucks because it is meat that
fails to mean.
When we die we will have failed to speak, we will
have failed to mean, we will have failed to matter. This has
absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with modern society or any sort
of political criticism, that’s just the way it is. We are left with
“speech lack of claim/ words dead
foreign ice encasing fathom untimely said”
It helps to be mad, it helps to be drunk. Buy this
book. It’s available from the usual culprits & the publishers here.
