Down From London

 

Feeling oneself become another daytime drinker’s “ventriloquist’s dummy” in a local pub seems obliquely in tune with the thrown voices of the previous story now thrown into the next…

TO SEE THE SEA by Sean Hogan

“Your death advancing frame by frame, millisecond by millisecond. Would it be possible to indefinitely delay the moment if you slowed down time enough?”

Another work of gluey Zenoism and other timeless points between youth and age… an engaging and page-turning work despite the implied slow ‘tepid leaks’… and I feel somehow in tune, too, with Robert in this story, down from London, to this downbeat seaside place where I live now and his eventual symbiosis with the arty statue (male, but otherwise featureless) placed out at sea, a work as if by Antony Gormley or Maggi Hambling… a place where he is trying to avoid unwelcome acquaintances, including a dubious Ex who keeps ringing him up. A place of blue numberless house doors, of “palsied karaoke” and pensioners like me with “congealing breakfasts”. And Dobbo, that man in the pub, who says of me in this story: ”Fuckin’ DFL. Comin’ down here with his airs and graces. He got what was comin’ to ‘im.”

The full context of the above: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/06/08/uncertainties-v/