He wants to impress his mother. But how? He decides to build her two towers in a forest that she owns. In this baroque fairytale of engineering folly, titled Two Towers in a Forest, the draughtsman hero is caught between the exacting precision of his profession and the deranged beauty of his obsessions. When he explains to his friend Allen why he wants to use balsa as a construction material, his reasoning is simple: “Workability and fragrance.”
Adrian Duncan’s arresting new collection of stories consolidates his reputation as one of the most captivating and distinctive voices in contemporary Irish writing. His previous two novels, Love Notes from a German Building Site (2019) and A Sabbatical in Leipzig (2020), signalled the arrival of a writer gifted with an exciting attention to the formal possibilities of fiction and an unfailing eye for neglected details that shore up a life. The building sites of the novels provide much scope for exploring the vocabulary of construction in ordinary human stories – shape, structure, resilience, collapse. These recur in Duncan’s stories.
The title Midfield Dynamo points to another kind of structure, not so much the structure set in stone or concrete as the evolving structure of the football strategy. In a note to the reader, the author explains how he has organised the stories in the “somewhat old-fashioned” 1-4-4-2 team formation.
In one of the strongest stories, Prosinecki, a soccer player seeing out the end of his days in a small provincial club, gets a momentary glimpse of what happens when workability and fragrance converge: “The ball slows into its languid arc, and as his body coils and his eyes wince shut, bringing into the great pre-impact dark that every footballer knows, I gasp deeply, once more at the impotent, incidental and unforgiveable beauty of it all.”
The difficulty for many of the characters in these stories is that the strategies go awry. This ranges from the grandfather in Midfield Dynamo, who loses a bookie’s premises on account of misjudging the odds on a horse in Leopardstown; to Vincent in About the Weight of a Bucket of Salt, a struggling artist in Berlin who is taken hostage by his own cussedness, dithering eternally between principle and paranoia.
Inventiveness
One of the downsides of construction is that, of course, you get to see it all. What is under the floorboards, behind the walls, concealed in the ceiling. The widowed narrator of Trusses lies in a bed in the house he built with his friend Carl and looks up: “The damp patch in the ceiling is so bad I can see right through to the underside of the timber truss. This whole ceiling will need to be repaired. Perhaps the roof felt is rotten too.”
The stories detail the hidden underside of lives that are lived with whatever dignity people can muster, the cracks, the crevices, the patched-up and botched compromises, the furtive fumbling for clarity and the occasional moments of grace.
In Design no. 108, the narrator reminds us that he and his brother live with their family in a house built to plan: “Our house, I should say, is pure Bungalow Bliss, straight from the book, design number 108, ‘The Hazels’.” Except, of course, that nothing goes according to plan. Accidents happen, addictions take hold and the engineer finds that the cavity blocks in the walls are “criminally substandard”.
This does not mean, however, that Midfield Dynamo indulges in a version of suburban Gothic. Duncan is too respectful of the quiet energy with which many of his characters conduct their lives to paint them into prisons of quiet desperation. On the contrary, like Wojciech, the elderly survivor of the second World War in Half Bird, Half Bear, Duncan’s creations persist in their attachment to life and to the labour of meaning.
As a visual artist and filmmaker, Duncan is particularly attuned to the force of image (in Forty-eight Pots of Honey, he writes of “my headlights merely registering the moth-wing flares of snow swooning into my path”). But he meticulously avoids the metaphorical overkill of a prose constantly hankering after the condition of poetry.
In three short years, the author has placed himself at the very forefront of writing in Ireland. Midfield Dynamo is further proof of the range and ability of a writer who has nothing to fear from the “old-fashioned” team formation of determination and inventiveness.
Michael Cronin is director of the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation.
