3:AM Magazine

If Beckett weren’t pushing up daisies he’d be reading The Sound of Drowning, writes Darran Anderson.

Paul O’Connell, The Sound of Drowning

“Tramp burning ain’t no joke Vincent, I’ll tell you that for nothing.”

Dreams: ahhh all fluffy clouds and serenity and plump benevolent moons shining down on floating Chagall figures. Except, of course, nobody’s dreams are like this. No, the land of dreams is a terrifying one, full of imbeciles and grotesques, a terrifying mix of the everyday and the insane, where all logic is left at the border. It’s a wonder that every night when you settle down, to face the film directed by some lunatic and projected onto the backs of your eyelids, you get to sleep at all.

With The Sound of Drowning Paul O’Connell steps forth and kicks a hole through the edge into this parallel world, setting free a devastatingly funny, misanthropic and strangely beautiful carnival of delights. In the process he emerges as the finest young auteur to detonate into British comics, if not writing, in a decade.

What sets him apart from the likes of Michel Gondry and Jean-Pierre Jeunet (and these seem the nearest precedents for his off-beat, cinematic strips) is that O’Connell is an iconoclast. Where their mix of the commonplace and the otherworldly is charmingly whimsical, his is edgy and exhilarating, focusing on scorn and lunacy as much as flights of fancy. His vision is just a few degrees askew from reality, just enough to show up the cracks in the here and now. It’s the rousing sight of a trail being blazed before your eyes; subversive, daring, poignant and infused with comedy that’s as black as pitch. If Beckett weren’t pushing up daisies he’d be reading this.

The latest issue of The Sound of Drowning (No 9) feels like a series of short films, each a brief introduction to a major talent. Revelling in the absurdities of existence, they deal with painful truths, embodying that old Kerouac quote about the naked lunch, everyone suddenly realising in a frozen moment what’s at the end of every fork. Like discovering some hideous, squirming monstrosity on your plate during a dinner party but choosing, out of embarrassment, to go on eating as if nothing were amiss. That is the human condition as laid out here.

A tale of obsessive love, ‘Kissing Kate Winslet’ sparkles with prose as vivid and inventive as the artwork; “the last trains of the night sending semaphore through the tracks” and the giddy feeling of attraction where “blue sparks ignite”. Yet even at their most apparently innocent the tales are rarely as they seem.

Featuring a psychotic Vincent Gallo and a sentimental old Morgan Freeman, ‘Wouldn’t A Wonderful Thing Be Good’ is a sound demolition of Hollywood platitudes. O’Connell appears a cynic in the true sense of the word, engaging not in cynicism for its own sake but using it in a Holden Caulfield-esque crusade against phoniness and bullshit. Ridiculing all those schmaltzfest movies from Forrest Gump to The Shawshank Redemption, the deep and meaningless Freeman character rambles on, “I’m just an old thigh-master salesman chasing his dreams”, dreams specifically of teaching “tramps how to salsa“.

“Nothing beats that feeling of seeing some greasy mess of a man finding a boogaloo beat deep down in his bones”, he goes on ’til he’s choking back tears, “I…I…I’m sorry son…it’s just the beauty gets to me sometimes…so pure”. Needless to say, it’s fucking hilarious.

Just when you have him pegged as a misanthropist he flips, fires out a freewheeling barrel through the life of John Coltrane in ‘Bird’, captured with style by artist Lawrence Elwick. Then there’s the deeply moving childhood reminiscence ‘The Day Spock Died’, a heart-rending piece possessing the real nerve it takes to be absolutely honest and open and vulnerable. The kind of tale that stays with you.

For entirely different reasons the images of ‘The Vegetable Patch’ stay with you. The macabre follow-up to the gleefully twisted ‘Baby’, it’s a portrait of ’50’s suburban America and the dark chasm where its soul should be. The sheer twisted genius is summed up in the deadpan lines uttered by the debonair husband after his wife asks him to plant a vegetable patch; “Dig up the garden? I suddenly remembered the baby…As innocent as it was, how to explain the corpse of a six month old child buried beneath the begonias in a bin liner?” You laugh out loud whilst silently weeping inside.

On his site, O’Connell showcases the diversity and sheer damned beauty of his work: a discomforting encounter with Frank Black, the exquisite space-age wonder of the ‘So Long Major Tom’ strips, the silent film noir of ‘Big Black Car’, the supremely sick ‘One Last Nazi Cumshot for the Road’, the dark poetry of ‘Stars’ and ‘Mr Fixit’ and the all-out delirium of ‘My Funeral.’. Don’t take my word for it, drop by. Introduce yourself to the world of The Sound of Drowning. Child killers, criminally insane film directors, the casual incineration of the homeless. Ideal bedtime reading. Sweet dreams…

ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Darran Anderson is an Irish writer based in Edinburgh. He is poet-in-residence of Dogmatika, editor of Laika Poetry review and has completed his first collection of verse entitled Tesla’s Ghost. He is currently working on a novel entitled Junk.

First published in 3:AM Magazine: Monday, April 9th, 2007.