Eight short stories plus a glossary and an author’s note, credited to Thomas Rabies. The note names its own ancestors outright: Finnegans Wake, and the sound poetry of Jaap Blonk and Maja Ratkje. That’s a serious lineage to claim, and for the most part the collection earns it rather than borrowing the coat.
The organising idea
Every piece runs on the same engine: an ordinary Harrogate ritual dressed in church Latin. A food delivery becomes a catechism, “a bleep absolving both parties of ever having to say a name.” A supermarket becomes “the green cathedral,” self-checkout a small absolution performed by a girl with a lanyard. A pub becomes a third place run as a religion of attendance, “devout of a Thursday.” Clearest of all is “Argentina 2-1 England,” which folds a football result straight into the mass: “Missa est Messi. The mass is ended. Go.” None of this is a one-off joke. The whole cycle wants the reader to feel that Harrogate’s small rituals really do function as liturgy for people who no longer have, or want, the churched kind. That’s a substantial idea to carry across eight different settings, and it’s the thing holding the wordplay up, not the other way round.
Back to the Viconian question
Worth raising again here, because five of the eight pieces do it, and do it literally. “The Stray and The Stairs” opens on “Unlocked with meatidigits.” and closes on the same words with the full stop swapped for a trailing dash. “ASDA, Bower Road” echoes “Not knowing why” at its close. “Bettys” echoes “A wee cup of tea, she said, that was all she’d have.” “The Stray in Blossom” echoes “It starts as a rumour.” “Valley Gardens” is the most interesting variant: instead of repeating “Nice to get out” whole, it breaks the phrase across its final three lines, “Nice. / To get. / Out -“, so the fragmenting performs the exhale the phrase describes.
That’s an actual Finnegan’s Wake move, near-exact return rather than the Harrogate Community Radio manifesto’s rhymed variation, and the trailing dash each time does the Wake’s trick of a sentence that refuses to end. But the scale is honestly calibrated. Joyce ran the seam through six hundred pages as one continuous loop, the last sentence completing in the first. Here it happens eight times in miniature, once per story, each a small closed circuit rather than one long open one. A book that let its account of a dead grandmother or a life aged out of a pub dissolve into six hundred pages of unbroken portmanteau would lose exactly what makes “Bettys” and “Major Tom’s Social” land. Calling itself a cycle rather than one continuous text is the right choice: Vico’s recurring history applied to a life told in vignettes, not to history itself.
What’s working
- “Keeping is what Yorkshire does instead of hugging.” Used more than once, and it earns the repeat. It’s the whole cycle’s emotional thesis in eight words.
- The grandmother’s death is never written. She’s present in “Bettys,” then absent and grieved in “The Stray in Blossom,” missing ten springs of blossom, and the gap between the two pieces does work no sentence about grief could do as well.
- “Major Tom’s Social” earns its Bowie references rather than dropping them in for colour. Ground control, Starman, the capsule that moved on, all of it lands on the actual subject: ageing out of a third place that stays exactly the same age while its regulars don’t.
- The glossary is a piece of fiction rather than an index. “This glossary gives you the ingredients of the invented words, not their meanings… If an entry seems to be withholding a joke, it is.” The author declines to do the reader’s decoding, in keeping with everything around it.
Where I should’ve pushed back
My note claims the writing “is not built for meaning,” that “sense is optional.” Worth disputing directly: this collection is full of sense, a marriage, a death, ageing, the loss of a pub once belonged to, told with real clarity under the density. Calling it meaningless is a pose, the kind experimental writers often reach for so nobody can accuse the work of failing at something it never admitted to attempting. It undersells writing that has more emotional coherence than the note lets on.
The return-to-the-opening device is strong the first time, in “The Stray and The Stairs,” and still strong the second and third. Read straight through, by the fourth or fifth it starts to announce itself a paragraph before it arrives. That’s a risk of the whole sitting rather than a fault in any single piece.
A handful of phrases do heavy duty more than once: “I took note, nobody asked me to,” the ha’penny-exchequer knees, the hum itself. Presumably deliberate, church responses recur too, and a reader who takes them as ritual refrain will read the cycle differently to one who starts to hear them as habit. Both readings are available in the text, and it doesn’t fully settle which one it wants.
Overall
It holds up as a cycle rather than eight unrelated exercises in density, because the liturgical idea is genuinely load-bearing and the grief is handled by absence rather than statement.