Topographia Hibernica by Blindboy Boatclub: Short stories that fail to play to the author’s obvious strengths

As a fan of Blindboy and his podcast, it’s surprising to find such scarcity of dialogue in his story collection. He is, after all, a master conversationalist; be it reaching the seriousness, depth and knowledge of the pinched-bottomed puce-faced arts programme contributor, or veering into madcap musing, akin to a drunk realising he has dropped a boiled sweet from his mouth while leaning over his dying granny. No matter, let’s see how this plays out, we might discover something.

His stories have that sense of “let’s see how this plays out” – but a lack of talk and interaction means many characters fail to take form, and the book feels like a series of sketches that needed thrashing out and refined. There’s plenty of violence, surreal imagery and absurdity in a fool’s paradise, as you’d expect (a thread of animals eating eyes makes natural sense in Blindboy’s kingdom). But like a plasma television that’s just been looted, you can only carry it so far until it becomes a slog.

The finest story in the book, The Pistils of the Dandelions, is based on cats (not much yapping anticipated there, obviously). Its inventiveness and sensitivity carries the reader along in a Dickensian odyssey of two kittens and their mother, “in the wasteland of their youth”. There’s no happy Dickens denouement here, as you’d expect, as it gradually tails off into Tarkovsky-style oblivion, posing questions on our roles within the natural world. It’s a fine piece of writing, tender and moving, and I hope the author appreciates when I say he has pulled off Chekov’s dog with a modern twist.

Blindboy has a fun, fuliginous, flowing mind as one of the finest talents in the long oral tradition of this country; the podcast arena is where he excels

If only there were more like it. Instead we have flashes of Blindboy’s obvious talent scattered throughout. St Augustine’s Suntan is the next best story – a funny, hyper-realistic take on religion’s incredulity, beginning with a schoolboy reinventing himself as a sort of sin mule: “Before long, other youngflas (sic) would offload their sins on me, big sins like robbing from shops or stabbing their baby brother’s legs with a compass. But I began to feel guilty, by confessing to sins that weren’t mine. So I started to do them … ”

‘I have not had contact with my siblings for many decades, nor did I attend my parents’ funerals’

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But much of Topographia Hibernica feels dashed off when you read Pamela Fags or The Cartpiss Astronaut. There’s always a sense the writing has not been worked at enough, not rigorously redrafted and clinically edited enough to fully ignite the sparks lighting Blindboy’s mind.

I’ll Give You Barcelona is a missed opportunity for spitting in the eye of toxic male masculinity – an ideal subject that fans would relish Blindboy hammering – but the story, based around a podcast by Corey Shunt (geddit?), is gobbed in such manic fashion that it woefully misses the mark. Elsewhere, when writing more earnestly or with relative introspection, like in The Poitín Maker or Rat Lungworm, Blindboy just runs into dark alleys of dullness.

Blindboy has a fun, fuliginous, flowing mind as one of the finest talents in the long oral tradition of this country; the podcast arena is where he excels. This book, I hope, has been a happy experiment for him. But the format rarely delivers his inimitable voice and imagination with enough skill, force or flair, and towards the end it begins to fall on deaf ears.