Thomas Moore Alone (2020)
I wasn't really sure what to expect with this one, and yes, the cover, leaves me a little uncomfortable - which is probably the point, but it seemed worth a punt given the quality of 2018's Small Talk at the Clinic. Small Talk was co-credited to Steven Purtill whom I assume was responsible for the visual element, although I could be wrong. Alone is similar in so much as that it says a great deal without anything like the sort of word count you might anticipate, and more impressive is that it does so without the visual element of its predecessor. Alone has the girth and depth of a novel, 162 pages, yet the lines are widely spaced and it took me about an hour to read. It's all about the gaps, about the details which seem to be missing from life, relationships, human existence and so on, or rather it's about feeling that there must be something missing and the difficulty in telling when you have nothing for comparison. Practically speaking, the shape and scale of this absence is mapped out across internet hook-ups and gay sex with multiple partners who drift in and out of the picture to varying degrees of emotional impact; but even to describe this seems like a distraction from what actually happens here, and the title really says it all: alone.
I wasn't really sure what to expect with this one, and yes, the cover, leaves me a little uncomfortable - which is probably the point, but it seemed worth a punt given the quality of 2018's Small Talk at the Clinic. Small Talk was co-credited to Steven Purtill whom I assume was responsible for the visual element, although I could be wrong. Alone is similar in so much as that it says a great deal without anything like the sort of word count you might anticipate, and more impressive is that it does so without the visual element of its predecessor. Alone has the girth and depth of a novel, 162 pages, yet the lines are widely spaced and it took me about an hour to read. It's all about the gaps, about the details which seem to be missing from life, relationships, human existence and so on, or rather it's about feeling that there must be something missing and the difficulty in telling when you have nothing for comparison. Practically speaking, the shape and scale of this absence is mapped out across internet hook-ups and gay sex with multiple partners who drift in and out of the picture to varying degrees of emotional impact; but even to describe this seems like a distraction from what actually happens here, and the title really says it all: alone.
Pain like anything though, is transitory. People miss that. Being happy is simply a state - not a goal or intended or ideal destination. It is a state, like pain, that we experience at points. People get off track when they decide that happiness is something that they should be aiming for - as in their goal is to become happy, for happiness to take over and become their default state.
The cover may leave you a little uneasy, as may some of the sex described within, I suppose, but if so you're missing the point of the novel and that which it communicates - which is the sort of emotional understanding that might otherwise elude description by means of words, particularly words suspended in such economic prose. It's as though the book is only the physical expression of something much bigger and which, once you pass the discomfort and the sense of unease, is revealed as quite beautiful in its own, unfamiliar way; and perhaps unfamiliar only because we, as a society, are otherwise so full of shit these days that we don't recognise the real stuff when we see it. What Moore does in this novel seems so deceptively simple that it's quite difficult to pinpoint what that might be, and easier to say what he doesn't do; but whatever the case, he's clearly a master.
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