We were delighted to see John Arden’s latest short collection Gallows get this great write-up from Harry Browne in the Sunday Times on the 22nd of November. You can order John’s book here.

Conspiracy Theories in the Wink of an Eye

From: The Sunday Times, Sunday 22nd November
Author: Harry Browne

The great John Arden’s latest short-story collection is a sublime page-turner whose tall tales cry out for movie treatment. John Arden, 79, is one of the greatest writers living in Ireland, but you could be excused for not knowing that. While he has lived in Galway half his life, Arden is Yorkshire-born, yet he has dealt more pointedly with Irish issues than many an “Irish writer”. Moreover, his “greatness”, a critical consensus in his country of birth, refers largely to his work as a playwright dating back half-a-century. His fiction since the 1980s, though honoured (Booker nomination, Pen and Pritchett prizes), has never slammed into the zeitgeist with the brute force of his earlier stage-work, some of which has been revived lately to some acclaim.

Maybe the best idea for readers now is to forget the vagaries of reputation and just enjoy. Gallows, despite the title and its accurate suggestion of darkness and death lurking in this collection of short stories, is hilarious, entertaining page-turning, fascinating and almost any other quality you might fancy in a damned good read, with the possible exception of “simple”.

That’s because most of the dozen long-ish short stories here, set in Ireland and England across a span of five centuries, arc involved in what our age might call “conspiracy theories”. Someone, somewhere, is always plotting, but often Arden’s main characters, and we as readers, aren’t quite in the room when the dastardly plans are being hatched, and we can’t be entirely sure we have picked them up correctly. And, God knows, half of the plotters could be double-agents.

From the playwright Ben Jonson sneaking around the fringes of the Gunpowder Plot, to a failed Anglican cleric conspiring with a Fenian prostitute for revenge against an English admiral, to a shower of pretentious film-makers whispering murder against an ageing novelist at a film festival, Arden’s “plots” are both sublime and ridiculous, deadly serious and com pletely antic, of dubious but not quite dismissible historic accuracy.

In Yorkshire Sport, for example, a small-town mayor in the 1820s calls an abrupt halt to a centuries-old traditional football match because he has been given reason to believe it may, somehow, be used to set the stage for a coup d’etat against the government. With typical daring, Arden begins that story by quoting an exchange between two RTE pundits during the 2006 World Cup, then writes: “Impossible to imagine a political personage of the 21st century who’d dare assert his civic probity by abolishing football. Yet there was such a hero, during the late 1820s, in the ancient Yorkshire borough of Kirk Deerwood. He was Dr Alcuin Fouracre…”

Arden lets the lessons of his historically-set stories speak for themselves, though the disconcerting title tale concerns a Galway child-abuse scandal from the early 18th century that echoes into the present day. Several stories, the final and best sequence in this won derful book, involve that fictitious Yorkshire town of Kirk Deerwood and the centuries-long saga of the Fouracre family; and the ways these interact with and illuminate each other, jumping back and forth through history, is occasionally breathtaking.

Arden is not afraid to get his hands dirty. If his reputation is as a radical, the stories’ political sympa thies, such as they are, resist sim plification, and all sides find themselves immersed in blood and filth. Several stories cry out for a movie adaptation, but their untidiness, their pure sodden nastiness, not to mention their often-unhappy endings, might prove Hollywood resistant, despite all the violence.

Mind you, Arden provides something of an answer to that concern on the book’s accompanying DVD. Among the reasons, apparently, that Arden has self-published this volume is so that his paintings of scenes from the stories can be seen by readers. They are revelatory, naive-style dramatic scene-stapes; bright, colourful and sexy. They assure us, in case we missed it on the page, that Arden presents this material with a showman’s wink; that inasmuch as we are all headed for the gallows by a more or less circuitous route, we should enjoy ourselves in the meantime.