Review: From Out of the City by John Kelly

 

 

The year is 2040. Ireland is part of the European Alliance, and overrun by the American military. Dublin is a ruin of a city. The Phoenix park is now Fort Phoenix. Gunships patrol the bay. The American president's daughter, Princess, is studying at Trinity College, and so those ancient walls have been decorated with watchtowers and gun turrets. Students, at least those who the security services have decided do not pose a threat, pass through metal detectors to get to their lecture halls. An early scene shows a crowd of protesters gunned down at the signal of the Taoiseach. This is Ireland if every policy decision made from now to then is shortsighted and motivated by profit – private or otherwise. This is not a far-flung dystopia. It is a place just about recognisable from the angry mutterings of today's Dubliners: a city gone to ruin. 

 

All of this is relayed in a frequently inventive and multilingual voice which belongs to an octogenarian named Monk, the novel's narrator. But, as he tells us, this is not a novel, and despite appearances, it is not a thriller  or “makey up tale of suspense” either:

 

“It is, rather, an honest and faithful record of breakage and distress at a time when dysfunction – personal, local, national, global, cosmic and whatever lies beyond that again, beyond even the farthest pricks of our desperate little probes – pervaded all.”

 

A few pages later we learn:

 

“What happened, for all its quirks of language, action and coincidence was serious stuff and I'm not making it up. Even if I wanted to I wouldn't have the skills.”

 

In another passage, Monk notes he isn't inventing these events, while reminding the reader that the root of the word invention is 'discover', so he is inventing in that sense. These metafictional aspects are fun, and they eventually build into something worthwhile.

 

Like any good narrator, Monk knows everything about everything in this novel, which spans the southside of Dublin city and at one stage extends as far as Wicklow. And like any worthwhile narrator, he has no life of his own. He is the powerless voyeur, peering into the lives of the book's other characters, copying down what he sees. Monk lives in the home he grew up in. On the day he inherited it he threw his parent's furniture and knick-knacks into the back garden, where they still lie today. Monk chooses which history is worth holding on to and which should be thrown on top of the back garden rubbish pile. He describes his bedroom:

 

“...the ancient maps of Paris and the Dingle Peninsula, the curling snaps of smiling people long dead, and the sideboard with the stolen bust of Berkely fitted with old wraparound shades...”

 

 Evidently the history of his parents “Ammonia and Bleach” is one he wishes to discard.

 

Monk spends his days in the attic, sitting in front of a bank of screens, on which he surveys the news, the internet, all of Dublin as seen by CCTV, and the computers of his lodger Walton, and his neighbour Schroeder. As John Kelly is known for his eclectic and interesting musical tastes, it is tempting to assume Walton is named after Walton's music shop, while Schroeder could be named after the Peanuts character known for his prodigious piano playing. Schroeder, a failed novelist and one-time creative writing lecturer in Trinity College Dublin, seemingly and for no apparent reason (at least at first) has a way with women. Monk follows Schroeder's assignations, almost-affairs and disappointments with the impotence of the voyeur who can't reveal himself for fear of discovery – or that of the narrator, bound by the rules of writing.

 

As Monk details Schroeder's adventures in the city, he frequently digs into the history of Dublin to unearth the etymologies of street names. There are twenty-seven instances of this etymological excavation. It is interesting to see Monk perform this for his own name, as he recounts his father trying to communicate his chosen name for his newborn son to the midwife: “named for Thelonious... as in Thelonious Sphere...” This effectively embeds the man into the city, making him a part of a Dublin which has long since passed away. On other occasions Monk is content to let the English and Irish names of streets sit together, which nicely mimics the announcements that ring out on our current public transport system, and at the same time reveal the chasm that lies between the city's origins and the modern day, be it 2014 or 2040.

 

The American president is assassinated. Schroeder is embroiled in the aftermath, variously suspected, kidnapped, and seduced. This is the blockbuster plot, which lies, at times uneasily, with a focus on language and character. While Monk is at pains to remind the reader not to expect thrills, the assassination of an American president is a potent driver of narrative. The American security force's ensuing machinations obediently follow the thriller genre's rules. While From Out Of The City covers similar ground to those great conspiracy thriller films of the 1970s such as The Conversation, or The Parallax View, the tone here is not quite as serious. It is a distinctly Irish one of laughter and despair. It is the Irish characters, led by Monk, who shirk the defined roles of the thriller genre.

 

Schroeder was once “a fact collector” like Monk. After the failure of his novel, Lucky's Tirade (one of many nods to Ireland's modernist and post-modernist literary traditions) he changed, and lost his interest in the world beyond himself. He spends his time writing on his typewriter, as well as jotting down notes and thoughts which he then emails to himself. Monk, of course, intercepts these emails, and files them away in his records on Schroeder.

 

Everywhere you look in this novel information is being harvested, yet barely any of the characters seem to know what to do with it. Like Guy Pearce's character in the film Memento, Monk knows the past, but it is as if he cannot make new memories. He acquires mountains of data, yet apart from compiling it all for release on his death by his solicitor, he does nothing with it, and he still wants more. At one point he describes a policeman as half-man-half-filing-cabinet. You get the feeling he is slightly jealous. This is compounded by his next line: he is “is someone who has all the information but cares little for any of it.” Monk aspires to the state of archive.

 

Knowledge and its stunted sibling information circle and tease each other and the characters throughout From Out of the City. And truth hides from almost everybody, including the reader.  Returning to Monk's assertion that he isn't making any of this up, while reminding the reader that the root of invention is 'discover', so he is inventing in that sense, the reader becomes another character loaded with information and unsure of the truth of any of it.

 

Monk, Schroeder, Walton and the reader are amateurs in this game. Surrounding them are the UIA (United Intelligence Agency), a hyper-covert organisation which has displaced the CIA, and now runs operations across the world, and a host of professional spies with allegiances to various countries and companies. This world with spies spying wherever you look links to current day America's massive online spying programs; the reference is made most clearly when Monk writes: “anyone even attempting anonymity these days is considered an obvious risk to the state.”

 

Out of all the characters, there are three who are not driven by information. One is the American president, who is mostly unknown to the reader. The remaining two exist to give information to others. The first is an old school friend of Schroeder's named Claude. An ex-priest who had always been a little odd. The American president's daughter, Princess is the other character who delivers information rather than seeking it out. One of the two dies by the end of the book. The cause of their death is by none other than deliberate misinformation.

 

All of this is, of course, couched in John Kelly's writing. Without it these constructs would never have survived the journey from his mind to the page (and judging from the number of musical references, it is most definitely John Kelly's mind from which this novel came). There is an admirable striving for the lyrical in his sentences. He doesn't always hit the target, which is an unfortunate side effect of this style – as opposed to the Gordon Lish sentence which can confuse the banal for the profound – but there are many memorable lines throughout. A particularly nice turn of language is found in Monk's assertion that Ireland should have been rebranded as Anhedonia. In this word Kelly captures the essence of his Ireland in 2040 while retaining that audible relationship to Hibernia, our Latin name.

 

I've barely mentioned Schroeder's novel Lucky's Tirade, which is apparently “verbose, digressive, unconvincing and flawed.” There are extracts throughout the story. It is compared, by Monk, to From Out of the City itself. There are repeated criticisms of Schroeder's novel by Monk. At times these read like projected criticisms imagined by John Kelly in response to From Out of the City, and as such they read as unnecessary. From Out of the City is a refreshing Irish novel that examines the worst Dublin in the worst of all possible worlds, and what that means for the city and those that strive to live in it.