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Hewbris by Ian Macpherson: very smart and very funny lunacy

Little is as it seems - or is it? - in this wonderfully inventive follow-up to Sloot

Ian Macpherson becomes one of his own characters in his hysterical latest work

Kevin Gildea
Sat Dec 17 2022 - 05:00
Hewbris
Hewbris
Author: Ian MacPherson
ISBN-13: 978-1915693037
Publisher: Bluemoose Books
Guideline Price: £9.99

Spoiler alert: Hewbris is the follow-up to the wonderful Sloot – a comic meta mash-up novel in the tradition of Flann O’Brien in which a murderer is revealed. On the back cover of Hewbris the identity is disclosed, so perhaps read Sloot first?

Hewbris (a Dublinese pronunciation of Hubris) is equally a meta comic mash-up that revolves around a murder; there are two deaths here and, unusually, the surprise is the identity of one of the ‘victims’. A Whowasitdoneto.

Whereas Sloot was set in Clontarf, Hewbris is set in London, specifically the comedy scene, with excerpts from comics’ sets; given the nature of this material it sometimes feels like the 80s, other times more contemporary. It is apt that the boundaries of time are fluid as spaces become movable in a memorable scene (think the transportation of Francis Bacon’s studio to Dublin) because all identities ebb and flow in a dizzying tide of flux.

Hewbris is a mirror book of Sloot – a rollicking reflection through character and reference. Sloot was a paean to home and was shot through with a sense of mortality, giving it an emotional depth. This is absent from Hewbris but the increasing lunacy of its invention makes up for it as it takes its O’Brien creed and pushes it to hysterical ends.

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All is plural. Hayden McGlynn – ex-comic, newly minted screenwriter – is the alter ego of the author (Ian Macpherson) and, as in Sloot, the latter inserts himself into the text. Yet this is complicated further because the hugely successful Irish actor Wolfe Swift is preparing to play Hayden in the new autobiographical film Hayden has written, and his method leads to madness; thus, we have three characters spinning as peeling identities from the original and so, à la Derrida, questioning the authenticity of the original ‘I’. Copies proliferate, copies of copies proliferate: “The duvet cover had a young Hayden woven abstractly into the fabric…”.

Hewbris takes a wee while to get going but when it does, it’s like the Magic Mirror Maze scene in Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai crossed with a Tex Avery cartoon: very smart, very funny.

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