Cameo is a work crowded with possibility. The latest work from the Irish writer consists inter alia of a series of summary accounts of novels written by a certain Ren Duka. The author of these novels produces a memoir entitled A Cold Dark Place, excerpted in Cameo. Also excerpted is Night Taxi, the musings of Henry K Dillon – a Dublin novelist and taxi driver – who is said to be the fictional brainchild of the equally fictional Ren Duka.
Into this writerly labyrinth step Dina Tatangelo (a New York-born author of hardcore erotica), Tommy Rhys Cunningham (a gay actor from Belfast facing trial by internet), Akira Nikishido (a manga artist from Tokyo with a taste for graphic violence), and “Rob Doyle” himself, though whether he is there as character or as author is a moot point.
In this metafictional hall of mirrors, characters are constantly referencing other characters: Tatangelo is inspired by the writings of Duka, Rhys Cunningham acts in films based on Duka’s novels, and Nikishido turns Night Taxi into a Japanese manga. The language of the reviewer is routinely folded into the accounts of the different fictional outputs, often in a mock-heroic mode of comparison. In the case of the novel Ren Duka Bets on the Horses, for instance, we are told that “[t]hese racing passages have been compared to the Nouveau Roman [sic] as practised by the likes of Alain Robbe-Grillet”.
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One person’s literary experiment is, of course, another’s bothersome tricksiness and readers will divide on whether they want to engage with Doyle’s ontological equivocation. Yet, it is worth pointing out that Cameo is part of a subterranean tradition in Irish writing ranging from Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759-1767) to Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), where the architecture of writing itself (the respective roles of authors, characters, and readers) becomes an object of play.
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As the follower of any competitive sport will tell you, play can be a deadly serious business. Cameo is not short of ironic putdowns (one author is described as belonging to that “rare category of those who’ve written more books than they’ve read”), but the dark subject matter of much of the writing has an edginess which makes the formal experiments more a matter of earnest exploration than narcissistic display.
In previous works such as Threshold (2020) and Autobibliography (2021), Doyle – like many writers of his millennial generation – firmly situated personal life experiences in the work, dissolving fiction into nonfiction and the reading life into the life that’s been lived. These unstable boundaries play out in the narrative jumpiness of Cameo’s storylines and the generic restiveness of the Ren Duka novels, which run the gamut from historical fiction to thriller to science fiction and erotica.
In the last of the novels, The Death of Ren Duka, the reader is told that fiction is “anticipated fact” and that it was “nothing other than non-fiction in another of its dimensions, an ultra-realism that records the unfolding of time and space across planes both visible and invisible”. It is this sense of the uneasy trade-offs between the real and the imagined that bring a sharpness and ethical consequence to Doyle’s writing which might otherwise lose itself in the shallow waters of cranky self-regard.
Cameo moves around a lot with Dublin, Tokyo, Berlin, New York and Beijing among the cities name-checked in the novel. But it is Paris, or more specifically writers associated with the French city, that lie at the heart of the book’s literary web. Dina Tatangelo, the heroin-addicted author of “art trash”, declares approvingly that “French writers were always the ones who took it too far”, and Baudelaire, she claims, “has never let me down”.
The French poet, dark priest of the romantic agony, with his unflinching depiction of a city caught in the maw of social and industrial transformation, anticipates Doyle’s own preoccupation with experiences of addiction and excess in a contemporary world where disruptive reality routinely outpaces fictional speculation.
Akira Nishikido, the mangaka in Cameo, is attracted to the moody monologues of Henry K Dillon, the hero of Night Taxi, and in particular to the Dubliner’s conviction that “reality is coming apart, and that a disintegrating cosmos is no longer the preserve of psychotics and visionaries”. The fragmented narratives of Cameo read as an attempt both to register that disintegrating cosmos and to explore the continuing relevance of visionaries, whether secular or religious.
Youthful apostasy is always one step away from metaphysical curiosity as the years take their toll on unbelief, and a number of the novel’s characters, in their own puckish and irreverent way, eventually delve into the otherworlds of mystical communion and the belief systems of their childhood.
Cameo is a brave and risky enterprise, whose frankness will unsettle certain readers, but whose intelligence and ambition mark Doyle out as one of the most enduringly distinctive voices in contemporary Irish fiction.
Michael Cronin is professor of French at Trinity College Dublin
