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Anna Leach
posted 1 February 2007

In 'The Cast' - the story I liked most out of these twenty assorted tales - a goalkeeper playing for his local football team makes a perfect save and in a state of pure ecstasy freezes solid, ends up stuck to the goalpost, has to be carried back to the car by his girlfriend and taken to his house to 'thaw' out over several days. He gradually detaches himself from the outer layer of his position leaving a hollow shell of his body, one of the 'casts' of the title.

This sci-fi muscle-spasm-cum-plaster-cast is one of the many physical examples of hollowness that are scattered through Royle's collection of short stories. Some are pretty, a frozen rainbow, some are gruesome, a husband who kills his wife, fills her with expanding foam and stiches her skin back on to the Styrofoam cast, but there are lots of them: including the empty rooms of derelict buildings that fascinate a property developer, a successful writer eviscerated by his boyfriend, a sealed empty room where an artist commits suicide, the hard shell of a dormant volcano, and a preoccupation with cancer, a disease that eats away from the inside out.

It is telling that the stories keep returning to empty spaces and hollowed-out shells. They appear to hold a fascination for Royle. Here, I think, lies the problem with the collection: Royle's writing itself is strangely hollow and substance-less and unsatisfying to read. The pages fly by, Uncut magazine enthuses on the cover. Yes, they do, because there is so little substance to this prose that you consume the words like popcorn.

So what's missing from the stories? Well, what's missing from the goalkeeper's cast is obviously his living body, and I think that the living, life, is what is missing from Mortality. Writing owes more to solidity and reality than this: Royle doesn't have to describe it to us, but he could teach us something about it.

Obviously Royle cannot pack detailed landscape descriptions or Tolstoyian character analysis into fifteen pages of well-spaced Times New Roman. Obviously, things have to be missing from short stories if they are ever to fulfil the 'short' requirement. Powerful omission is one of the short story's most potent tools. One of the seminal twentieth century short stories is Kafka's Metamorphosis, where the central character wakes up one morning and discovers he has turned into a giant insect. This information is conveyed in the first sentence, the rest of the story details the day to day practical difficulties of life as a large insect. And then, near the end, the main character dies. Any reason, question or account of the broader social consequences of a man turning into an insect is completely omitted. The absence of explication leaves simply the painful progression of this creature's existence. And the result is oddly authentic.

But I can't help feeling that the omissions in Royle's work are not matters of loss to him, but that Royle rather likes cutting things out and enjoys the odd nothingness of the shells left behind. In the story 'Skin Deep' there is a brief discussion of taxidermy, between two characters :

'So the stuffed animal you see in a museum isn't an animal at all. It's just the skin with some kind of cast inside?'
'Exactly. He generally uses expanding foam. You could pick up a tiger with one hand, they're so light.'
'It's a bit disappointing, isn't it?'
'Not really. It depends where you think the essence of the animal really is: in the carcass or in the skin. Because once you've skinned an animal all you've got on the one hand is a lump of meat, and on the other you've got the skin, which was all you saw when it was alive, after all.'
'But it's only skin deep.'
'Aren't we all though?' (p.202-3)

Aren't we all though? No! Royle's stories are like those weightless tigers, offering a certain morbidly fascinating spectacle, but little else. And, as the first character points out, that is a bit disappointing. What I feel is missing from Royle's stories is just the 'lump of meat'. Not that they lack physicality or bodies, quite the opposite. But that they feel like clever structures, a gaudy surface of drugs, perversions and disease. Royle does not use these structures to explore the unbearable lack of a core; he seems actively to prefer a hollow interior.

Just as the property developer in 'The Space-Time Discontinuum' wanders into old gutted buildings, sympathises with the graffiti artists, and imagines the commercial potential of old spaces, so these stories are just spaces for fantasy projection. It is the empty building rather than the original content or the future content that really fascinate Nicholas Royle. On his website there are photo albums which notably feature shots of just this sort of abandoned room. In 'Skin-Deep' the woman is a more important presence as a piece of skin-coated foam, than she was when she was as a living human being. It is actually rather satisfying in the story to discover that she has been 'stuffed' by her clearly disturbed husband. Her lover shows quite as much interest in the various portions of her remains as he did in her living body. We don't get a sense of absence, so much as an interest in the fantasising possibilities offered by emptiness.

There is a stylistic emptiness as well as a metaphorical one. These short stories only advertise the shortcomings of the short story. It can be an odd bastardised genre. Not long enough or complex enough to be a novel, short stories lack the intensity and linguistic beauty of a poem, and unlike a good magazine article, are neither completely factual nor topical. To me, Royle's short stories suffer from these lacks as deficiencies, rather than using the generic limitations to explore or transcend limitation.

Where a novel would accumulate plot interest, weave in subtleties and build up complex interrelations, the short story tells one brief story, makes a startling connection and then ends. Shock is more important than interrelations. Royle is not making links, nor examining the absence of links but just chucking things together for the ooh-factor. So it is shocking rather than enlightening that the main character's uncle dies while strangling himself to jerk off better in 'The Comfort of Stranglers', it is shocking that a healthy man should finger through his own faeces for traces of blood in 'Dotted-Line', and shocking that a young female doctor should consent to being harnessed up in strait-jacket and suspended from the ceiling by her morgue-working lover, in 'Trussed'. If this was true, it would be one thing but shock numbs very quickly, and

Some of these short stories are surreal enough to be poetry, hinging on one image, or a strange juxtaposition, such as the first story perhaps, 'The Rainbow', with the dead lover and the frozen rainbow. But this is thin, juiceless prose. The density of a poem comes from a concentration of meaning in language. Again, the work just lacks solidity. The fine shading needed, say, to modulate the relationship between a volcano and the sex drive of an Italian woman in the story 'Flying into Naples' is not there in this prose and fails to lift the comparison out of the cliché. Not everyone can write like Virginia Woolf, but given the lifeless rendering of certain sentences: 'Six times her emotions reached bursting point and boiled over' (p.74), it is small wonder the man was nominated for the Guardian's Bad Sex Writing award.

In some ways a short story is analogous to a good magazine article or blog: very readable, current. Royle's stories have some of this charm, the references to contemporary culture are pleasing to spot, make a story alive and relevant in certain cases ('Oh, I've seen that film'). But, given that the stories principally bear on fictional events and on an elite world of fashionably existential city-dwellers, the relevance is hardly enough to sustain general interest.

The hollow body, the stuffed corpse, is death skilfully mocked-up to look like life. It is a duality that picks up on Royle's understanding of mortality, as he defines it in a pair of dictionary definitions affixed to the beginning of the collection. 'Mortal' means both subject to death and involving life. A duality that we tend gleefully to ignore these days. The stuffed corpse is one way of looking at the deadness of living. Another, subtler, take on mortality comes with the writer's preoccupation with disease, cancer in particular. Terminal illness combines life with a peculiarly acute awareness of being subject to death. It is an awareness that is very rarely found in modern living, where illness comes with a death sentence, but life doesn't. In two stories - 'Dotted Line' and 'The Churring' - the central character is actually healthy but surrounded by or obsessed by cancer. In 'Dotted Line' a psychotherapist says to the fixated narrator:

'It must seem like there's no escape from it. Like it's only a matter of time. Not a matter of if but when.' (p.9)

He could be describing a perfectly rational understanding of death, but he is actually discussing the narrator's supposedly irrational fear of cancer. Illness becomes a substitute for death. However sometimes the treatment of death is just shallowly eroticised: as in the auto-asphyxiation, the multilation-fantasist, or the brothel murder in 'Kingyo No Fun'. I think Royle would give us a better exploration of mortality by giving a more authentic account of living.

Sometimes Royle can work absence to eerie effect in his art of surfaces, and be masterfully inarticulate in a way that makes us conscious of the void within as well as the void without. But the idea of what is not there, has to come from the knowledge of what is there. And what is there in Mortality is the artistically-arranged rubble of fashionable urbanity that composes the content of these strangely content-less stories. It's just spectacle, and I don't think that's enough.