Notes on Jackson and His Dead
Hugh Fulham-McQuillan
Dalkey Archive Press
The narrator of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past describes the involuntary triggering of a memory as though ‘the past is hidden somewhere outside the realm, beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object.’ Variations of this epistemological concept are present throughout Fulham-McQuillan’s eloquent debut collection. Characters in its eighteen stories often find themselves contemplating the worlds, histories, and stories that are hidden within, or just beyond material things – be they photographs, film, writing, or landscapes. In ‘Entrance to the Underworld’, a narrator listens to the sister of a man who has seemingly fallen down a sinkhole into hell and imagines his personality; ‘Spiral Mysterious’ sees a detective consider the role of an unexplained film in a murder investigation.
There’s a playfulness throughout in references to history and literature, and ‘Theme on the Character and the Actor’ – which places the assassination of Lincoln, Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, and the historical event of Julius Caesar’s murder within a Möbius strip – offers an unexpected lesson. It’s clear why the author is compared to the likes of Poe: from the eerie tale of a man who gets rhinoplasty to look like a deceased Italian composer, to the titular story, in which a documentarian discusses the case of a man who leaves shells of himself in his wake, a sophisticated taste of the macabre endures.
Words: Paulie Doyle
