Recently Read: Stephen Downes & Louis Armand
Here are two novels I recommend, both with embedded photographs and both, oddly, by Australian writers, although Louis Armand is now based in Prague.
Here’s the premise of Stephen Downes new book The Hands of Pianists (Fomite Press, 2021): “A neurotic freelance writer aims to prove that pianos kill elite pianists. For decades, he has grappled with the guilt that followed an accident in which he severed his talented sister’s fingers. ending her promising career at the keyboard. His investigations centre on the violent deaths at 31 of three great pianists.” At first, I will admit that I was skeptical. Downes’ narrator is an obsessive driven by his guilt and I don’t have much patience with obsessives. But as it turned out, I read the book in two non-stop sittings, fascinated and ready for more. My initial prejudices melted away when I saw that the narrator’s true obsession was a global search for meaning through music.
The three men whose deaths are being investigated by the narrator are genuine virtuoso pianists who all curiously died at the age of 31. American William Kapell died in 1953 returning from Australia when the commercial airplane he was in crashed south of the San Francisco airport. Australian Noel Mewton-Wood also died in 1953, committing suicide. He apparently blamed himself for failing to notice symptoms of the disease that would cause the death of his partner a few days earlier. New Zealand pianist Richard Farrell died as a passenger in a car crash in Sussex in 1958. In this well-written, digressive, almost Sebaldian novel, Downes takes the reader into the minds of pianists to explore what music and performance means to them. For someone like me, who frequently listens to classical music and attends concerts, Downes gives an insider’s window from the professional’s perspective. He writes about stage-fright, pianists hands, the quality of different pianos, recorded music, and much more, in addition to writing about the aesthetic qualities of music. The book moves from Australia to London to the Czech Republic. My favorite section is a visit to the Czech campus of Paul McNulty, the foremost builder of fortepianos, who builds them completely by hand for some of the foremost musicians of our time, one fortepiano at a time. In Prague, during a visit to the Kafka Museum, the narrator encounters a ghostly “Dr. K,” who challenges him on the nature of his quest. Have you transferred “your guilt about your sister’s accident,” he asked, “to a dead instrument?” By the end of the book, the narrator admits that “my notion that pianos kill pianists was unraveling.”
The Hands of Pianists includes several dozen small black-and-white photographs, many apparently by the author. A few are purely documentary in function, but many are very evocative, helping the narrative feel more like fiction.
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Canicule is French for the dog days of summer. In Louis Armand’s Canicule (Equus Press, 2013), three men struggle with their pasts, their passions, and their failures. The book culminates with two of the men, Hess and Wolf, meeting to scatter the ashes of the third, aptly named Ascher, who has committed suicide by self-immolation.
Hess is our first-person narrator. He’s a screenwriter who can’t get anyone to return his calls anymore. But he has a dream about “the perfect film. . . about three characters whose lives are completely empty.” “But why not tell it like it really is? Begin with that much, keep it in the margins, let the story speak for itself. The full two reels’ worth.” And so some of the chapters are written in third-person, free-indirect mode, with Hess just another character in his own story.
“Three boys in a fading kodachrome” first met in 1983, “the year the US embassy in Beirut got bombed. . . the sunset of a world with no future.” Wolf’s father was murdered on live television during an airplane hijacking in the 1970s. Depressed, his mother tried but failed to commit suicide and murder Wolf by putting rat poison in their milk one day. Ascher, an East German, was orphaned at ten, when his parents were killed in an auto accident. When the Berlin Wall came down he found himself angry “at having grown up at the fag-end of a defeated ideology” and proceeded to join “a succession of more and more radical groups. . . looking for the edge.” But in the end, Ascher’s wife walked out on him and took the children, and he ended up impoverished and friendless in an attic in Hamburg, where he finally killed himself.
Canicule is bleak and, to some extent, the men’s lives seem to be a reflection of the times they in which they live. But after a while I didn’t give two cents about the male characters in Canicule. Their masculinity had left them utterly adrift as adults and they were blithely ignorant about the damage they did to the women that got drawn into their circle. But what kept the novel intriguing was Armand’s ragged, inventive writing and Hess’s continual attempt to re-imagine his story as a film. Each chapter begins with a photograph, most of which appear to be film stills from classic movies (none of the images are credited or identified). Hess tends to see the world filtered through film terminology. “All of a sudden Ada turned towards him, tears in her eyes. Like Maria Falconetti in Dreyer’s Jean d’Arc. That silent terror in the exchange of looks, shot-reverse-shot, between Falconetti and the mad monk Artaud. Martyr and prelate. History’s revenants, like blackened celluloid dolls. And right before his eyes she began to dissolve, a piece of film erupting into invisible flame.” But, in the end, even Hess questions his own belief in film. “Somebody dies and right before your eyes they turn to celluloid. Is that all there is?”
Vertigo 
Feb 18
Mural
In Stephen Downes’ new novel, Mural, the narrator, known only as D., is a man who has been imprisoned for untold crimes. He has been asked to write down his thoughts on a laptop provided by his psychiatrist. (“You can’t kill yourself or others with that.”) Over the next two hundred pages, he proceeds to pester the poor psychiatrist who might eventually read this document with case studies of his own as he tries to find some sort of explanation why some obsessives (like himself) get pushed to violence, while others manage to avoid it. It is his observation that the difference between someone with a benign passion and someone with a violent obsession is razor thin.
In his first novel, The Hands of Pianists (2021), Downes gave us a neurotic narrator on an obsessive international mission fueled by his guilt. In Mural (Transit Lounge, 2024), we have an imprisoned narrator who is violent psychopath. Each man, in his own way, is hoping to find a way to wipe away his past. D. has long been ruminating over the lives of several men with obsessive behaviors. The first case study he writes about on his laptop is Harry Ellis (Henry Havelock Ellis, 1859-1939), the famous British sexologist. Ellis famously decided as a teenager “to make the problems of sex his life’s work” (as D. puts it), and yet he was apparently a virgin when, at the age of thirty-two, he married a woman who was a lesbian. Ellis, who spent most of his teenage years in Australia, returned to England and became a psychologist who wrote extensively about homosexuality, transgender, and all matters sexual (along with literary criticism and travel books), all the while managing to keep his overwhelming sexual obsessions in check.
D. goes on to provide his psychiatrist with several other stories of obsession and murder. There is the man he met while hiking one day, newly released from prison after killing his parents. He had been raised in the Methodist church, which “excluded its adherents from joy, from real life,” the man claimed. One Good Friday at a dinner of terrible salted cod, sick of his parents, he got a hatchet, killed them, and telephoned the police. Then there is the man obsessed with the prehistoric Carnac Stones in Brittany, who started to believe that the stones were moving every night. This eventually led him to murder and suicide.
Finally, D. gets to the subject that seems to be the burning issue with him, a mural behind the pulpit where he once went to church services for some twenty years. This mural “terrified” him, and he had spent years brooding over it, wondering if it could have somehow corrupted him. He almost hopes this is the case, hoping it might “excuse my perversions.” Some time ago, D. decided to try to decode the mural and understand the person who made it, so he revisited the church to see it again. The mural reminded him of things like the movies Blade Runner and Alphaville and the architecture of Paris’ La Defense.
The mural, which exists, was painted in 1935 by an obscure artist named L.G. McPherson “under the direction of” Napier Waller. Waller (1893-1972) was a prolific public artist, with multiple pieces in Melbourne, Canberra, and other cities. During World War I, fighting in France, he lost his right arm. So, he taught himself to paint with his left hand and took up the arts of mosaic and stained glass. For D, the mural represents the omnipotence of time and nature and the impermanence of the human race, since there are no human beings present in it. All that is shown is the Cross. Why, he wonders, would someone paint something like this for a Methodist church? Before his imprisonment, D. had visited some of Waller’s other public murals in Melbourne to see if they might shed some light on why the Cross disturbed him so much. He found them full of brilliantly drafted, classical figures, all of which struck him as utterly lifeless. He couldn’t detect any human feelings in them.
The moral of Mural, so to speak, is that it helps to feel fully human, to feel loved, in order to not become a murderer or a psychopath. That, in itself, is not a sufficiently inspiring recommendation to read a book. But in creating characters for D. to obsess over, Downes has cobbled together a collection of a half-dozen or so really intriguing and well-written stories—some of which, like the life story of Havelock Ellis, are true, some not. And these mini-stories are what made Mural a rewarding book for me. I will admit that I wasn’t completely enamored of D. as a character or of the nature of his obsession. He’s portrayed as a hyper-erudite guy who has developed an odd theory about obsessives over a long time, but he still feels compelled to annoyingly remind his doctor over and over that “You’re the mind man.” And at the very end, D. abruptly lapses into a juvenile, performing silly and obscene antics to taunt the hospital staff where he is incarcerated. (I briefly had visions of Jack Nicholson in the 1975 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.) But these are minor quibbles about a narrator who tells us such a unique collection of stories.
Throughout Mural, D. pulls photographs out of a “grubby C4 envelope” to ponder. We see them, too, printed on the pages of the book. All in all, there are more than thirty photographs of landscapes, people, signs, the pages of other books, drawings, paintings, and, of course, Waller’s murals. These images all illustrate the text D. is typing into the laptop, but sometimes images are more than just illustrations. Yes, in many novels, the images are often redundant, serving merely to show us visually what the author has already described better in words. But images that have been chosen with discernment or made by a photographer with a strong sense of vision can both show us the thing being discussed and add something words can’t manage, as occurs in the case below in the image of the home of the muralist Napier Waller. Happily, Stephen Downes succeeds with the other photographs in this very entertaining book.