Colin Barrett on Thomas Morris: ‘a forensic melancholy and tender humour’

The town of Caerphilly is not, in fact, fictional: it is a real place, located in the south of Wales several miles from the relative cosmopolis of Cardiff city. “Town” is third in the list of autocomplete terms suggested by Google when you type in the word Caerphilly, beaten out in the search engine’s predictive prompts by first “Castle” and then ‘Cheese’. A click through Google Image prioritises the plethora of photographic portraits of the town’s gorgeously ramshackle Norman-era castle with its surrounding moat and interlacing series of engineered water islands, and in particular the castle’s damaged southeast tower, listing disfiguredly away from its foundations like a ruptured molar.

Castle, Cheese, Town: so Caerphilly exists, but in another sense, it doesn’t matter that Caerphilly exists, because Tom Morris still had to make the place up, over and over, in his wonderfully assured debut collection We Don’t Know What We’re Doing.

Setting not just a single story, but an entire collection of them, in not only the one place, but also a place you happened to have grown up in, is a daunting ask for any writer: while on one level it makes a certain kind of sense to sift the textures of fiction directly from one’s own experiences (and of course every writer does this no matter how apparently removed their work’s premise is from their autobiographical circumstances), the potential downsides of such an endeavour are numerous. Not just personally – opprobrious locals may forever after accuse you of getting the town “wrong”, or of doing it an injustice – but also technically: not everyone is James Joyce, or Thomas Hardy, or William Faulkner or Flannery O’Connor, and restricting a suite of narratives to the same setting brings with it the risk of ending up with an aesthetically homogeneous collection, stories that suffer from a narrowness or crampedness or sameyness of subject matter, tone and scope.

But in fiction, and especially in short stories, nothing is ever just one thing, never just tself, which is why the conceit of a repeating locale, instead of acting as a limitation or curb on imaginative possibility, actually offers the wised-up writer an opportunity to improvise, to generate prismatic variations of tone and sensibility against a common background. And the lovely, paradoxical thing you discover in any case ( paraphrasing Joyce) is that the harder the writer works to particularise his setting and characters, the more universally recognisable become just those things to the reader.

A cursory read through a few pages of this book will reassure you that Morris is a writer with a gift for the incisive and telling particularity. Tone wise, he infuses each of his judiciously weighted sentences and paragraphs with both a forensic melancholy and tender humour, and he depicts his characters and their plights with exactly the correct amount of distance and intimacy – it is tempting to play on easy ironies when writing about the young, doubly so if you are a young writer yourself, but Morris never succumbs to this easy out. His characters are often diffident, bungling, wracked with longing, frankly unsure of who they are, who they should become, and how on earth they will get there, but he stays with them in their incertitude and ambivalence, delineating their soul-deep confusion with expert lucidity and subtle empathy, and never, ever judging.

There are, of course, young men in here – Morris is very good on the febrile and weirdly mechanistic nature of young males in group settings, the way they can become bludgeoning banter generators or wielders of petty, arbitrary cruelties in order to escape precisely the fate of being the one exposed or ridiculed in public. (To quote Kevin Barry quoting Norman Mailer, when two men say hello to each other in public, one of them loses. And to augment the quote: when two or more men meet in the street, everybody else loses.) He captures their gauche, clanging rhythms and telling moments of inarticulacy masterfully in the perfectly calibrated, cringe-infused and ultimately moving Dublin-set stag story, All the Boys. And there are the women of Caerphilly – careful and considered, they come across as unassumingly credible characters, ineffably distinct from the men but not showily so. There are also the middle aged and elderly, the chronically introverted and the stridently public, the strange and the alone and the lonely. Everyone is here, in short, for Morris’s Caerphilly is a world.

My favourite story, perhaps, is the last. Entitled Nos Da (the Welsh for “good night”) it’s a sci-fi/realist domestic drama that gracefully meshes the disparate sensibilities of Richard Yates, Donald Barthelme and Charlie Kaufman and with a premise I cannot ruin, but the cosmologically-scaled Caerphilly invoked here is at once palpably real and yet suffused with an otherworldly gloss. In the wintry, ruminative rhythms of this story of inexpiable loss Morris dramatises the enigmatic relationship between time and feeling, and the sometimes insurmountable gulf that opens up between experience and meaning over the course of a life.

Nos da is a wonderful ending (and afterlife) to the Caerphilly we have come to know in the previous nine stories. Each of these tales on their own offers abundent evidence of the skill, control, charm and maturity Morris already possesses as a writer. Some are bawdy and droll, some glanced with whimsy and perversion, some deeply scored with pain and love and everything in between. The world inside We Don’t Know What We’re Doing is Caerphilly, and Caerphilly holds many worlds. There’s even mention of the castle (it is an important recurring trope) and, best of all, the annual Caerphilly Cheese Festival.

Colin Barrett is the author of YoungSkins, winner of the 2014 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, the 2014 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the 2014 Guardian first book award

We Don’t Know What We’re Doing by Thomas Morris is published by Faber, at £12.99. Hodges Figgis offers a 10 per cent discount to Irish Times Book Club readers.

This month, we will be exploring the stories with articles by the author, critics and fellow writers. The series will conclude with a podcast discussion with the author; Martin Doyle, assistant literary editor of The Irish Times; and Sorcha Hamilton, to be recorded at a live event in the Irish Writers Centre, Parnell Square, Dublin, on Thursday, January 28th, at 7.30pm.

http://irishwriterscentre.ie/products/thomas-morris-in-conversation-irish-times-book-club

Morris is editor of The Stinging Fly magazine and edited Dubliners 100, a Tramp Press collection of stories updating James Joyce’s original to mark its centenary