The subjects of Lee Rourke’s stories are ground-down office drones, contemporary equivalents of TS Eliot’s who, undone by death, flow over London Bridge in ‘The Waste Land’. If the city wears them out, it also offers mystical sustenance and the possibility of chance encounters meaningful enough to disrupt the drudgery. In ‘The Geography of a Psychopath’, Matt Hamilton is drawn to a random woman, Irina, by the promise of a book she has in her possession – a compendium of strange London facts. He’s as surprised as we are when she invites him back to her flat, bends over the kitchen table and instructs him: ‘Fuck me here like this!’
In ‘Footfalls’, ‘simple office assistant’ Martin Hack becomes obsessed with the creative swearing of two builders he passes every day on his way to work. Aaron Farrington, in ‘The Only Living Boy on Oxford Street’, has the most thankless job of all: standing in the road holding a ‘rather large, awkward advertising placard for a ubiquitous high street sandwich chain’. It’s made bearable only by the knowledge that a beautiful girl is going to walk past him, twice, as she does every morning.
Rourke’s stories are dense with authentic London detail – only someone who regularly takes the 38 bus can understand why it might be appropriate to set a story on it – and manage to be at once bleak and jaunty. At their best they’re a delight, but at times their faux-naive simplicity (‘It was two o’clock in the afternoon…’) feels slapdash, as if Rourke were more interested in establishing himself in a specific cultural pantheon than
in crafting work that truly moves and endures.
An overexcited introduction by 3:AM magazine editor Andrew Gallix underscores this, likening one tale, apparently straightfacedly, to ‘an episode of “Nathan Barley” penned by Herman Melville and shot by Mike Leigh’ (a formulation which does the past-its-sell-by-date Hoxton satire of ‘Tale of an Idiot’ no favours) and another, intriguingly, to ‘The Rakes fronted by Julian Maclaren-Ross with Patrick Hamilton on bass, Ann Quin on drums and Maurice Blanchot on kazoo’. But the stories shouldn’t need this buttressing of explained context. As it is, they expend so much energy gesturing beyond themselves rather than simply being that they seem to aspire to some other status entirely – art prank, perhaps.
