“The ucker hasn’t kicked the bucket yet”

Two consecutive reviews today —

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JAMES HANLEY: The German Prisoner

“There is a peculiar power about rottenness, in that it feeds on itself, borrows from itself, and its tendency is always downward.”

Things rot from the head down, as we recognise today. Here with a madness from metaphor of fog and trench war, and when I say madness I mean madness and mudness, an 18 year old German ‘ucker’ kicking the bucket, as an Irishman and Englishman as soldiers — whose backstories and behaviours now literally trench the very reading brain, no mistake, especially trained and traduced by our own troubles today — get confused by the trenches without a guide …

“You know its not the trenches I hate. No. Its this damned business of getting into them, and out of them again too.”

and they torture this prisoner of war and themselves to death and I don’t care a damn if that spoils the plot, as the plot has spoilt me worse than anything I can funkin do to you. Tara’s o’Garra, Gorman (his head-gutted officer), later the German, Grudge …”The men moved on. And now, what had merely been a germ, became a disease, an epidemic.”

Pendulums enforced. bedmates gory Irishman and Englishman linked by war almost sexually? The German they capture in the mud and fog their Bowenesque shadowy-third?
“Rotten ground; mashy muddy ground. Christ the place must be full of these mangy dead.’”

A ‘watch stops’
‘Hear that ucker moaning down there.’

‘The ucker hasn’t kicked the bucket yet,’

Watch stops, and we’re halfway there again into that trench, and then a half of that half, forever halved, I guess.

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And from the previous story above, we reach a story that mentions a Mrs Warboys…

BARRY PAIN: The Autobiography of an Idea

“Now, then, shall I make this man my parent? If I crept through that sandy hair into the whitey-grey brain, what a change there would be. He would be conscious that he had got a new, tremendous, imperial idea.”

Every idea is autonomous and needs, so as to exist, first a mind, then an inkstand, later a parent in public print.
This for me is genuinely the perfect page-turning short story, a real active discovery and also a passive revelation, about which I shall tell you little, for fear of plot spoilers. But it does seem by instinct to be intrinsic to ‘gestalt real-time reviewing’ with its theme about the literary singularity, with connections and preternatural leitmotifs between two authors and so forth, even to the point of one’s saving someone else from suicide becoming tantamount to saving oneself from a similar act of suicide. The obverse of Hanley’s co-habited trench above?
This is a story about your succeeding in life by creating the best laughter-inducing plot for any story ever written as well as obviating the lack of self-respect in your act of thus annulling the pangs of pain of bereaved grief for a loved one that you shouldhave been sobbing out at the same time, by allowing another Pain to use its idea for the same story!

“…it would make the dead laugh.”

PS: The above conceit about ‘Pain’ is not a plot spoiler, but just my own attempt at a humorous quirk stemming from the Intentional Fallacy!!

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Full context of above reviews: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/2022/04/26/penguin-books-of-british-short-stories-2/