Damian Smyth, Folly Lane (Templar Poetry)

In an article published on his Substack in May of this year, Will Self suggests that the novel is dead. This is in itself hardly an original declaration: numerous commentators have been mourning the death of the novel in English ever since its birth in the eighteenth century – but Self’s piece has a specific resonance in this moment and so caught my eye in a particular way. His essay is a follow-up to his celebrated declaration in 2014 that the novel had entered a care home; now, twelve years later, writes Self, the scene has narrowed still further, with developments in technology – most pertinently, of course, AI – responsible for administering the last rites to this prose form.

These death spasms are, Self suggests, mere elements in a wider cultural decline: ‘namely, the inability of the general culture any longer to produce organically the standard of literacy, concentration and philological depth required for serious literary production.’ The only possible antidote, he writes, is a sea-change, a revolution in attitude on the part of the reader and of the people: we must disentangle ourselves from the mirror worlds of the internet, and refocus our attentions on writings that cannot be replicated, that cannot be forced through a mesh of software: to concentrate on prose that is incontrovertibly and unmistakably human, that is unique, that is beyond any doubt distinctive and singular and individual, and that is at the same time responsive to the reflections, hopes, fears, and dreams that make us human. And, not least on this list, that is responsive also to style, which is, Self adds, ‘not decorative frosting applied to content after the fact; style is the mode through which consciousness experiences and orders reality itself.’

It was this note on style that came into my mind as I absorbed Folly Lane, Damian Smyth’s kaleidoscopic, glittering and – crucially, in this context – stylistically inimitable meditation on the imprints and influences left by time and space. A meditation, because Folly Lane is not a conventional novel – and it is surely not a novel that AI software could readily recognize and scrape for data. It is perhaps a novel of sorts; or, it is a novel spliced with poetry and drama; or, it is a shape-shifting or form-splicing text that challenges one’s expectations; or, it is a visually engrossing experience, the very typeset on its pages overturning what one imagines of the novel; or, it is a textual sponge, absorbing some of the cultural and political and historical energy out of which it has emerged – or, it is all of the above, and more.

Most significantly of all, perhaps, Folly Lane is a tale that grows in the reading. It calls for attention: and one is uncomfortably aware as a reader that this is no easy task in these attention-deprived late times – and is therefore all the more crucial a demand. Folly Lane is perhaps best described as a demonstration of faith, and an investment in a future the terms of which seem increasingly to be slipping from our grasp.

As its most straightforward, the book is a pell-mell stream of consciousness with its origins in the specific: in Downpatrick, today and at any number of points in the past – but whose consciousness is being accessed? This is the question one is trained as a reader to ask, and then one listens for a reply – but it is perhaps not the question to ask in this context, for the reply comes in a multitude of voices, drawn from a multitude of sources. The question to ask instead, as one embarks on Folly Lane, is: Am I listening? – at which point the intent of the narrative comes into focus. Am I listening to the manifold threads, influences, pulses, histories, personal testimonies that pulse through the surrounding ether, and am I receptive to them, or to some of them? Am I open to them, or to some of them? And it is at this point that we recognise what is perhaps the central interest of Smyth’s narrative, which is that the line between our individual selves and this surrounding pulsing ether is and ought to be blurred, and that we are continually absorbing its energy. It is part of ourselves, and it is what makes us human – and in a way that no sifting and scraping software can ever truly absorb or understand. This is a cheering notion: indeed, these days it is a revolutionary suggestion.

And so the reader embarks on a textual adventure, accessing a panoply of thoughts, references and influences both global and local, and in ways that will sometimes 'catch the heart off guard and blow it open'. It is arresting and shocking, for example, to find the murder of Lyra McKee described close to the beginning of the novel, in ways that manage to be simultaneously tender and violent. The manner of her death and its consequences are set out starkly, and this bitter history is interwoven with the details of another death in a place far away and in ages past, the loss of McKee blended stirringly with this loss of another young woman who was ‘much lovedher body was tended to with great care / after she died her hair neatly cut & / carefully curled / & / styled most / egyptians / shaved / their / heads.’ The details change according to place and time, but the personal and emotional reactions do not.

Elsewhere, we glimpse Roger Casement in 1903: the scene is the Congo, and the narrative offers not only a close physical description of the man, but also an insight into the complexity of his personality and his activities: his work in highlighting the horrors of Belgian colonialism are layered with a navigation of his homosexuality in both personal and political terms; and all of this is spliced with insights from the mind of an indigenous inhabitant, of Casement himself, and of others voices unknown and unnamed: ‘When / up / in / those / lonely / congo / forests where i found leopold / i / found / also / myself / the / incorrigible / irishman / looking at the tragedy with / the / eyes / of / another / race.’ These passages (and there are so many others) highlight the book’s fundamental insight: that our identities as individuals exist in a world of osmosis; that our skins absorb all that is around us, for good and for ill – and that our objective as readers and citizens ought, perhaps, to be more aware of this relationship between self and world.

Can reading save the world? The very question might seem a burlesque, mocking the dangers and griefs of the contexts within which we now live. But in fact it is a pressing question, and a serious challenge to us all. If we readers put our faith in our own abilities to dream and explore and imagine new worlds into being, then those worlds may indeed manifest. If we reject the hollowness of swirling, scrolled images, screens, videos, if we invest instead in the lived stuff of our lives and communities and histories, and in exploring the stories of communities and histories of which we might know little, then we might exchange vacuousness for the very stuff of life. In showing how style can remake consciousness and imagination, Folly Lane has made just such a momentous choice – and in doing so, it perhaps encourages us too to move forward into – to return to – a more human world.

Damian Smyth is Head of Literature and Drama at the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. He is also a writer.