Beyond Here Lies Nothing
Beyond Here Lies Nothing
Gary McMahon
(Solaris 2012 )
As befits the conclusion of a thousand pages of narrative, this third instalment of Gary McMahon’s ‘Concrete Grove’ trilogy draws to an expansive ‘close’. Myth, fable-sly and fabulous, emerges as McMahon lures us to the dead heart, crisp as a black leaf, of what drives the terrain of its part-derelict and yet still violently and daily dispossessed council estate. In this final episode nothing disappoints. Drawing together the various strands – branch and intestine; a visceral, sensitive and eyelid-peeling epic finish that opens a front door on layers of hurt, ideology, inegality, dream and desire.
With its edgy and hastily annotated map up front, the repeated invocations of “Loculus” and an attic horde of Forteana , in Beyond Here Lies Nothing we are on the ground between poisoned dreams and a twisted geography of uncreative survival. It has to be something about the place that causes it to finally spill its guts, and sure enough it is, but any reader would be hard pushed to anticipate quite the seizing complexity of the space that then emerges and the general malaise from which it comes. Roads may ripple, familiarly, as if in ‘Quatermass and the Pit’ and swarms of hummingbirds black out the sun, but nothing ‘sums up’ either the horror or the meaning of the estate; this is too multi-layered. There are no simple root causes; but there is a deep decay, the decomposition of a people who once constructed identities around work, production, association and culture rough and smooth, but now are made monsters “demonise[d]... in the news and in TV shows.... And we accept the role they force upon us – we adapt and we take it on, sucking it all down... All we have is their disdain.... lap it up like beaten dogs.” No wonder, then, that when Creation comes it feels so close to Destruction; no wonder, then, that the gravediggers of the estate are “all already dead, marra” .
O, there is a simple underneath to the Grove estate (it is a part of everywhere), and a Thing beneath the underneath, but such things and Things of substance (and the divisions between them) can quickly shift, return or dissipate. There is the grove of oaks hidden within the concrete, but their nostalgic re-emergence establishes nothing that is not quickly contained. Even the clicking monster knows what is “good for him”. He tries to repair the damage to the balance; he is “a product of the status quo”. There is no simple conservation and no final banishing of pain: in a book full of weeping, all hangs around a single tear. Pain is numinous and to abolish it is to abolish everything in ‘the Grove’. But ‘equally’ (and here’s the multi-layered nature of the ‘balance’ of McMahon’s myth), when Pain is UnderKing, when pain becomes the everyday language, then loss is both its creation and its destruction; not benevolence, but only bene-malevolence can dig its grave. Nothing escapes this estate of The Real. There is no succour in fantasy; that only leads each of those who entertain it – story collectors, robed chanters, effigy builders – back to face the hollow body of dispossession: the predating of the legless by the legless, the monster that tears in order to repair, that rips its victims into the monsters of Creation. To this, Beyond Here Lies Nothing is a witness.
Crab Man
Go here for all Crab Man / Mytho's other reviews
Gary McMahon
(Solaris 2012 )
As befits the conclusion of a thousand pages of narrative, this third instalment of Gary McMahon’s ‘Concrete Grove’ trilogy draws to an expansive ‘close’. Myth, fable-sly and fabulous, emerges as McMahon lures us to the dead heart, crisp as a black leaf, of what drives the terrain of its part-derelict and yet still violently and daily dispossessed council estate. In this final episode nothing disappoints. Drawing together the various strands – branch and intestine; a visceral, sensitive and eyelid-peeling epic finish that opens a front door on layers of hurt, ideology, inegality, dream and desire.
With its edgy and hastily annotated map up front, the repeated invocations of “Loculus” and an attic horde of Forteana , in Beyond Here Lies Nothing we are on the ground between poisoned dreams and a twisted geography of uncreative survival. It has to be something about the place that causes it to finally spill its guts, and sure enough it is, but any reader would be hard pushed to anticipate quite the seizing complexity of the space that then emerges and the general malaise from which it comes. Roads may ripple, familiarly, as if in ‘Quatermass and the Pit’ and swarms of hummingbirds black out the sun, but nothing ‘sums up’ either the horror or the meaning of the estate; this is too multi-layered. There are no simple root causes; but there is a deep decay, the decomposition of a people who once constructed identities around work, production, association and culture rough and smooth, but now are made monsters “demonise[d]... in the news and in TV shows.... And we accept the role they force upon us – we adapt and we take it on, sucking it all down... All we have is their disdain.... lap it up like beaten dogs.” No wonder, then, that when Creation comes it feels so close to Destruction; no wonder, then, that the gravediggers of the estate are “all already dead, marra” .
O, there is a simple underneath to the Grove estate (it is a part of everywhere), and a Thing beneath the underneath, but such things and Things of substance (and the divisions between them) can quickly shift, return or dissipate. There is the grove of oaks hidden within the concrete, but their nostalgic re-emergence establishes nothing that is not quickly contained. Even the clicking monster knows what is “good for him”. He tries to repair the damage to the balance; he is “a product of the status quo”. There is no simple conservation and no final banishing of pain: in a book full of weeping, all hangs around a single tear. Pain is numinous and to abolish it is to abolish everything in ‘the Grove’. But ‘equally’ (and here’s the multi-layered nature of the ‘balance’ of McMahon’s myth), when Pain is UnderKing, when pain becomes the everyday language, then loss is both its creation and its destruction; not benevolence, but only bene-malevolence can dig its grave. Nothing escapes this estate of The Real. There is no succour in fantasy; that only leads each of those who entertain it – story collectors, robed chanters, effigy builders – back to face the hollow body of dispossession: the predating of the legless by the legless, the monster that tears in order to repair, that rips its victims into the monsters of Creation. To this, Beyond Here Lies Nothing is a witness.
Crab Man
Go here for all Crab Man / Mytho's other reviews