The Teachers Union

So this is a thing I put together in response to a series of prompts I myself created, which were based around character archetypes, one of which was "the mentor." So this happened in my brain.

WARNING: Some very mild spoilers abound for Game of Thrones (up to Season 6, Episode 3), A Song of Ice and Fire (up to the already released material from The Winds of Winter), and Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

Gandalf banged his staff against the floor, inadvertently releasing several small fireworks from it in the process. “I hereby call this meeting of the Mentors’ Association to order.”

He had been hoping for a reverent silence, but what he got was a rather glum one. Dumbledore coughed. Yoda shuffled slightly atop the pile of cushions on which he’d propped himself. Giles adjusted his glasses as noisily as possible. Professor Xavier polished his shiny, shiny head.

Gandalf sighed, almost inaudibly. “So… who would like to start?”

Even before he had finished the sentence, Bloodraven was attempting to work his hand free from the series of knotted tree roots in which it was trapped. Gandalf decided to take pity on him. “Yes, Brynden?”

“It’s those bloody showrunners again,” said Bloodraven. “Not only did they cut me out for a whole season, now they’ve changed my entire backstory! A thousand years… I swear to the gods, do I look a thousand years old?”

Heavy silence reigned for several interminable moments. Finally, Yoda broke it: “When nine hundred years old you reach-”

“Not the time, Yoda,” Gandalf cut across. “Look, Brynden, we’ve all got a century or two behind us here-”

“I beg your pardon?” said Giles.

“Oh, sorry Rupert. OK, most of us are ancient beings-”

“That’s hardly the point,” sniffed Bloodraven. “I know I’m not exactly in my prime, but I’ve got a rich backstory. Rebellion! Betrayal! Intrigue! And they cut it all just for the sake of a single line.” He shook his head. “And I’m not even the worst served. You should hear how Doran Martell talks about them.”

“Don’t talk to me about adaptations,” said Dumbledore morosely. “I mean, really. What was all that ‘HARRYDIDYOUPUTYOURNAMEINTHEGOBLETOFFIYAH’ nonsense about? Bloody Gambon.”

Xavier shrugged. “I can’t complain. I got to be played by Patrick Stewart and James McAvoy. It’s quite flattering.”

Gandalf felt the meeting getting away from him. “I don’t think we have a full complement. Wasn’t Morpheus supposed to be here?”

“Took him away, did they,” intoned Yoda sadly.

Giles nodded agreement. “Just before you arrived, some fellow with winged sandals came by. Seems he’d mistaken Morpheus for Orpheus, and so he dragged him off to Classical Archetypes down the hall. I tried to follow, but when I got there the only person in the room was some man screaming blue murder about how much his heel hurt. I just thought it was a lost cause.”

Gandalf shook his head. There was no point appealing to the Muses; they had always been overly fond of the classics, presumably because that was where they most often got namechecked. He turned away from the group, took out his notebook and scribbled down “Rescue Morpheus from underworld.” He paused, and added “Don’t look back on return journey – will lead to complications.”

Giles cleared his throat. “Speaking of our membership, I should like to raise a point. I, er, don’t know to put this, but don’t you think we’re a bit, erm…”

“A sausagefest are we,” said Yoda.

“Well, yes. Quite.”

Dumbledore nodded agreement. “I did ask Minerva to come along, but she just sniffed and offered me a biscuit.”

“Probably just as well,” said Xavier. “The Classical people might have gotten their hands on her too, and then we’d have had no end of complications.”

Gandalf nodded. “I think we can agree that the whole Hero’s Journey thing has historically been a bit… weighted in terms of gender. I think the best we can do is just wait for another generation of writers to come up with more female mentors.”

That platitudinous sentiment seemed to placate the others, and Gandalf turned his attention back to the rough schedule he had carved out on a stone, there being no other writing implements available to him at the time.

“Let’s see… we’ve done ‘bitch over adaptations’… I think we can leave aside ‘complain about antagonists’ for a bit.”

“I’d like to know exactly who mine is first,” said Bloodraven.

Yoda nodded sagely. “Hurry up, should George RR Martin.”

“I think we can move on to the progress report on our young charges,” said Gandalf testily. “Er… Bloodraven, why don’t you start?”

Bloodraven shrugged, a difficult gesture when you’re largely encased in a tree. “You tell me. He hasn’t released any Winds of Winter sample chapters for Bran yet.”

Xavier leaned forward, pleased. “Well, mine are-”

“Oh, don’t let Xavier get started,” said Giles.

Yoda nodded agreement. “Go on all day, he will.”

Gandalf turned to his fellow Merlin-wannabe. “Albus, how’s young Harry getting on?”

Dumbledore smiled. “He’s taking on absurd amounts of responsibility, in the unwavering belief that he always knows best. I’ve never been prouder of him.”

“Rupert? How is Buffy doing with her, er, vampire slaying?”

Giles nodded contentedly. “Her kung fu moves are getting ever more needlessly elaborate. It’s quite spectacular.”

“Yoda?”

“Standing on a rock, young Skywalker is. Like Oliver Reed he now looks.”

Gandalf crossed off an entry on his list, and surveyed the room, pleased.

“All right. Let’s move on to ‘aphoristic but meaningless wisdom’.”

---

Down the hall, the Protagonists’ Association meeting was in full swing.

“…So you see,” Matt Murdock was saying, “between the verbal abuse and the occasional unexpected impositions on my life, I haven’t had the best relationship with my mentor.”

There was an outbreak of muttered agreement. Half of the X-Men, who took up most of the room, nodded darkly. Heads turned to look at Harry Potter, next in the circle, who shrugged.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I feel like I had a pretty good relationship with mine. I even named my son after him!”

“Did you, though?” said Bruce Wayne, who had refused to take off his Batman regalia and now looked uncomfortably warm. “I mean, he did totally manipulate you, and withhold some pretty crucial information from you.”

Harry shrugged. “Yeah, but I get it. It was all for the greater good.”

“The greater good,” echoed a chorus of muffled voices from the next room. Frodo winced.

“That’s just the cult from Hot Fuzz,” he explained. “They always do that.”

“Try not to use the phrase ‘the greater good’,” added Buffy.

“The greater good.”

“Shut up!”

Keeping Up with Mr. Johnson

I wrote this yesterday, for a prompt to do with people trying to overcome a language barrier. The fact that this was the first thing to come into my head speaks volumes. Not very good volumes.

“ENGLISH! DO YOU SPEAK IT?”

“No,” replied the terrified receptionist, thereby exhausting her entire supply of English words.

Boris sighed loudly, and ran a hand through his bright blonde mop of hair, the mop that had twice appealed so to the voting populace of London. “All right then. Is there ANYONE” – he made an expansive gesture with his hands – “in this ESTABLISHMENT” – he attempted to indicate the hotel as a whole – “who speaks BLOODY ENGLISH?!”

The receptionist shrugged helplessly. To think, she had been so pleased when the big man who always appeared in photos on the Internet looking silly had come to stay! She had been hanging around the hotel even in her off hours, trying to get a picture of him puffing out his cheeks while playing tennis or sliding down a zipline or something. The fact that the hotel had neither a tennis court nor a convenient zipline hadn’t struck her as an obstacle particularly. A good funnyman always found an opportunity.

Now he was on the phone, pacing up and down in front of her and getting increasingly red-faced. “Yes, David, it’s Boris. Yes, I know. Yes, it’s this bloody backwater you’ve stuck me in. Nobody here seems to speak a single word of a civilised tongue. What can you… No, I don’t care what… No, I don’t want to talk to George! Why would I want to talk to… Yes, get William on it. Or Theresa, I don’t know. Someone. Iain, maybe- no, not him, actually…All right, yes, fine. I don’t what you think it’ll accomplish, but…” He turned back to the receptionist. “Look, I’m going to put the Prime Minister on speakerphone.” He attempted, poorly, to mime sound coming out of the phone. “He’ll sort this out. He’s got experience dealing with foreigners.”

He placed the phone carefully on the desk, and pressed the speakerphone icon with the air of a surgeon making an incision. A voice came from it: “Hello? Receptionist? Can you hear me?”

The receptionist looked from the phone to Boris helplessly.

“She doesn’t speak English, David.”

“Oh, yes, shit, you did say that. Erm, how does Hollande do it… Bonjour, mademoiselle. Er, je m’appelle David… or should that be Davide?”

“Tried that. She doesn’t speak French either.”

“Oh, all right. Er, Merkel, Merkel… Guten Tag. Ich heisse David-“

“Or German.”

“Oh, hell. Erm, ave-“

“Or Latin.”

“Well bloody hell, Boris, what languge does she speak? Where are you again?”

“I don’t know! Wherever it was the party sent me after that… incident. With… the woman. Surely you should know.”

“Surely you should know! You’re there!”

“I don’t know. It’s hot. There’s… trees outside. There’s a pool.”

“Did you catch a trace of any language you understood?”

“No. Why would I be listening to other people talk?”

“Look, Boris, I’ve got to go. I’ve just switched on BBC Parliament and Corbyn isn’t wearing a tie; I’ve got to go talk to the media about it. You take care of yourself.”

The line went dead. Boris’s eyes widened.

“You can’t leave me like this, David! Does Bullingdon status mean nothing anymore?”

The phone stubbornly refused to respond. Boris exhaled loudly and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.

“So,” he said finally, turning back to the receptionist. “Have we tried Ancient Greek yet?”

From Where Dreams Are Woven

So here's something strange. Just under three months ago, someone whose work has had an immeasurable impact on the way I write, not to mention the way I think, died, and I haven't mentioned it at all on this blog. My Twitter and Facebook, on the other hands, have been awash in tributes to the man I insist on referring to, thanks to Adam Buxton, as Zavid. Rest assured, though, he's shown up again and again in my writing since the 11th of January. Here's but one example among many. The prompt in this case was one fictional character writing to another about a date with a third. So, naturally, I went with Bowie personae. 

Note: It might be advisable to familiarise yourself with Station to Station before reading the following. Actually, I think it's just generally advisable to familiarise yourself with Station to Station.

From the desk of the Thin White Duke

Dear Jareth,

Salutations to you. I hope that all is in order in your kingdom, as it is in my dukedom. I fondly remember wandering your labyrinth and mistreating your subjects with you, and look forward to your official state visit to Malkuth next month. I drink to the men who protect you and I.

My search to find who will connect me with love continues apace. The latest applicant is a so-called “starman” by the name of Ziggy Stardust, with a distressingly unruly haircut and a face showing some kind of glow. Not the most promising start, true, but stranger things have happened, as well you and I know. On which note, I enclose the latest surveillance of Sarah.

Together, we undertook a trip to a restaurant at the end of the universe; perhaps you have been? I daresay it would appeal to your sensibilities. The journey there was pleasant enough, as we soared with sunbirds and drove like a demon from station to station. The fare, too, was pleasant enough. The milk was fresh and the red peppers spicy. Sadly, they had no cocaine, but I had brought my own supply, as is my wont.

Our meal was disturbed briefly by a tableful of tall Venusians, but I was able to deal with them in short order, thanks to the European cannon, which I had brought with me. Rather, the sticking point was Mr. Stardust, who turned out to be most tiresome. He would talk only about his dreams of stardom, and some kind of spiders who were apparently going to help him. Some nonsense about how the end was five years away, which was patently codswallop given that the universe was in fact ending before his eyes.

No, my dear Jareth, I fear that in this case it was in fact the side effects of the cocaine. Got to keep searching and searching.

Yours,

The Duke.

Incidentally, here is the greatest picture I have ever seen.

The Year of the Diamond Dogs

Diamond Dogs occupies a strange place in the Bowie canon (the European canon, if you will). It hasn’t quite got a space to itself; Zavid was still sporting aspects of the Ziggy look, and before the accompanying tour was quite finished he’d moved on to his Young Americans look and sound. Chronologically, it sits awkwardly between the rock-and-roll megastardom of Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane, and the still-astonishing roll of musical changes that took up the ’75 to ’77 period – from Young Americans into Station to Station and then to the Berlin albums. And yet, it’s an album that’s very fondly thought of. According to an anonymous source who got in touch with Chris O’Leary of the brilliant Pushing Ahead of the Dame, it may even have been Bowie’s own favourite. And for good reason: it’s not my favourite album of his, but on some level I’ve always thought of it as the quintessential Bowie album, the one that most captures his unique appeal.

Maybe this is partly because of that hybrid identity I mentioned, which is, of course, so very Bowie. Despite being in part an adaptation of a failed musical project, the album lacks personae or characters of its own; the closest it comes is the rather nebulous Halloween Jack, whom Bowie never seems to have had much interest in developing. Yet it’s full of voices; (presumably) Winston Smith in ‘We Are the Dead’, the imperious narrator of ‘Future Legend’, the strangely removed warning of ‘1984’. Even other Bowies come in and out; ‘Rebel Rebel’ is such a quintessentially Ziggy song that it seems fundamentally out of place here, while the fanfare and paranoia of ‘Big Brother’ are like omens of the Thin White Duke’s coming.

Notice the Aladdin Sane-coloured mask.

Perhaps more than any other Bowie album, Diamond Dogs synthesises his disparate influences to create a strange postmodern fusion of elements. Take the title track; a melding of Orwell, Burroughs, Ballard and the Rolling Stones, with a reference to Tarzan and opening audience noise taken from a Faces live show. Despite its dystopian setting, Baz Luhrmann was able to appropriate it quite successfully for Moulin Rouge! Even more remarkably, despite being arguably the only song on the album (unless you count ‘Future Legend’) to deal directly with the album’s overarching concept*, it works perfectly well out of context as one of the most straightforward rock songs Bowie ever wrote. Once again, his gift for taking high concepts and bringing them to the widest possible audience is on show.

All of this without even approaching the album’s high point: the ‘Sweet Thing’/‘Candidate’/‘Sweet Thing (Reprise)’ triptych. Mashing half-finished songs together to create a greater whole is a trick Bowie nicked off the Beatles, but nothing from Abbey Road stands up to this, as the ever-reliable Mike Garson thunders away at the piano and Bowie displays his remarkable vocal range more spectacularly than ever before. For all the darkness of the rest of the album, the high note he hits at the end of the song is one of the most beautiful, transcendent moments of his career. And isn’t that so very Bowie, to hide such a human moment in something so removed and intellectual? Just like how the austere Low ends with the emotional transport of ‘Subterraneans’, just like how an album written and to an extent set amid a divided Berlin contains arguably his most enduring and moving vocal performance, just like how his extended and cynical album-long meditation on the nature of rock stardom ends with a cry of “You’re not alone! Give me your hands!”

There are so many other triumphs. To my mind, ‘We Are the Dead’, with its strands of sinister nonsense (“It’s the theatre of financiers, count them, fifteen ‘round the table”) is the pinnacle of Bowie’s use of cut-up technique. The inclusion of an “intro” (‘Future Legend’) and “outro” for the album (‘Chant of the Ever-Circling Skeletal Family’) helps it to feel like an enclosed, coherent world. And, of course, ‘Chant of the Ever-Circling Skeletal Family’ is one of the finest names for a song (if it qualifies as such) ever devised.

I don’t think Diamond Dogs is destined to have the kind of wider cultural significance attached to Ziggy Stardust, Low or (perhaps) Blackstar. But I do think that every Bowie fan probably has a soft spot for it, at the very least. It’s a concept album with a less-than-coherent concept, a staging post between extraordinary transformations, the residual home for a few songs written for a project never allowed to get off the ground. And yet it’s also the home of some of Bowie’s finest music of the period. More than that, its high-minded brilliance, poised on the edge of absurdity, sums up precisely why we love him so much.

Plus the cover is a painting of him as a dog. It’s hard not to admire that.

* - While the 1984 songs obviously have a distinctly dystopian element to them, they very much belong to another world; ‘1984’ and ‘Big Brother’ in particular are too blatantly Orwellian to apply to another setting.

Spotted on a Noticeboard Recently

Applications welcome for entry-level position in dynamic new company. Candidates should:

- Be professional and polite – should be able to quote verbatim from at least one handbook of etiquette

- Be aged between 23 years, 6 months and 14 days, and 23 years, 6 months and 16 days

- Have at least 15 years’ experience in the field, at all levels up to and including senior management

- Have demonstrable knowledge of at least seven languages, one from each continent, including Antarctica

- Bear the Ring of Khazza’hocknei, which sleeps in the Temple of Infinite Solace, guarded by devious traps and fiendish guardians

- Have impressive IT skills – ability to break through the Pentagon’s firewalls would be a good start

- Have perfectly symmetrical eyebrows

Successful candidates will be invited to interview between 2.50 am and 3.10 am tomorrow. Failure to attend will result in us being very disappointed. And you won’t like that. You won’t like that at all.

Freedom of the Presses

This one didn't really come from a specific prompt, but it is the result of me expanding at length on a joke which took The Simpsons roughly ten seconds to do. The word "overextension" does not appear in my lexicon.

“Stop the presses!” he called, his voice echoing through the cavernous room. Pandemonium ensued- a chaos of levers being pulled, buttons being frantically pushed and, in at least one instance that he could see, crowbars being jammed into expensive machinery in flagrant disregard for life, limb and insurance policies. Within a minute or so, the presses had indeed stopped, grinding to a halt with a pathetic squeal of tortured gears as a roomful of printers and journalists turned to look at him.

“Oh,” he began weakly. “I didn’t mean to actually… I just, I was speaking metaphorically. Like, I have a big scoop. But… I mean… it can wait for tomorrow’s edition. Really, it’s fine. Just, er, carry on.”

For a moment, he thought his prayers had been answered, and the ground was indeed opening up to swallow him. But it was just the sound of the presses laboriously clanking back into life, the beginning of a process that would take at least an hour. On reflection, he supposed, the opening of the earth would probably not have been accompanied by quite so much abusive swearing. Unless the mole people were thoroughly irritated by the whole affair.

He glanced down, mainly to avoid the sharp gazes being directed his way, at the barely legible scrawls that covered his notebook. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and assured himself that the self-flagellation could wait. He had a story to write.

***

“Do you have any idea how much your poorly thought-out use of cliché cost us?”

“Er… not as much as might be expected?” It was a vain hope, given the rage writ large across the editor’s face, but he could always dream.

“If only,” she breathed, somewhere between a sigh and a snort. “It was… well, I won’t give you a figure. I find you do better work without your brain dribbling out your ears. Suffice to say: lots. Lots and lots, if you want to be technical.”

“But not lots and lots and lots?” Despite his slightly sardonic tone, he was relieved. The comment about “better work” suggested he wasn’t about to be hounded from the office.

“Very nearly. We were this close to that third ‘lots.’” The editor held up her thumb and forefinger, so close together that they were almost… no, in fact they were touching. She looked at the gesture, furrowed her brow, and shrugged. “I’m not much better with usage of metaphor and analogy than you are. I’m a journalist. Which might be why I’m minded to actually listen to your story before deciding whether or not to fire you. And before you celebrate, by ‘fire’, I do potentially mean setting you alight.”

By way of answer, he placed his open notebook down on the table, turned it around to face her and stepped back, grinning. She bent over it, then looked up at him after a moment looking puzzled.

“‘Butter… bread… cigarettes… AA batteries.’ Maybe I just don’t have your keen investigative mind, but I really don’t see how this-”

He snatched back the notebook, flipped over a few pages, away from the shopping list, and handed it back, red-faced.

As she read, the editor’s brow furrowed further, but her eyes simultaneously lit up, creating a deeply odd and confusing effect. After a couple of minutes, she looked up again, her eyes hard.

“You’re sure of this?”

He nodded confidently, glad to be back on relatively safe ground. “I trust the source. And I’ve seen the records myself.”

She nodded absently. He supposed she was picturing the next day’s front page, if it got printed in time.

“You’ve got an hour to write it up. Make it good. Arresting. So to speak. Don’t use any metaphors, I don’t trust you with them. And don’t go near the printers again for a few weeks. I’m fairly certain I saw them constructing an effigy of you on my way up here.”

He smiled, and nodded. “I won’t let you down, chief!” He was halfway out the door when her exasperated call made him turn around.

She held up the notebook. “You might want this.”

Sad Stories of the Death of Kings

The second piece I have to offer here was written to a prompt which fairly teems with possibilities. The session in which it was written took place on the 5th of November, and hence the idea was to write an alternative history of what might have happened had the Gunpowder Plot succeeded. Now, around the time of the plot, Shakespeare was at the peak of his powers. He was also, from what we can tell, someone who was acutely aware of the opportunities available to someone who catered to royalty; he certainly went out of his way to please James I. So how might he deal with the upheaval of a sudden, violent succession, and the installation of a new Catholic order? Well, perhaps by delving into his back catalogue.

[A letter to Robert Catesby, Lord Protector and regent to Queen Elizabeth II, thought to date from circa 1607.]

Sir,

I am a playwright of some small repute, and have been fortunate enough in my career to meet with the favour of many prominent patrons. At present, it is the wish of myself and my fellows in my company, known hitherto as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, to present a series of plays which, it is our earnest hope, will delight, entertain and, if I may be so bold, instruct Her Majesty the Queen.

The first of these which we intend to present is the true account of one of Her Majesty’s royal predecessors, Richard II, and his ignominious end. Our play will show how Richard, brutal tyrant that he was and hated by his lords and people, was justly overthrown and killed, and how his killers were rewarded and celebrated for their just and selfless actions. I have recently rewritten portions of this play, and hope that it will meet with the court’s approval.

Following on from this, we will present the successor, if’t please you, to this play – namely, the history of Henry IV. This play, in two parts, which I have also recently rewritten tells of how Richard’s successor enjoyed a happy and bountiful reign, for God Almighty smiled on the brutal despot’s dethroning. It is my hope that Her Majesty will find much of instruction in this play in particular.

After this, with my lord’s permission, we will present a more recent play of mine, namely the tragedy of Hamlet, the prince of Denmark. In contrast to Henry, Hamlet’s failure to enact justice leads to death and destruction, owing at root to his privileging of his own thoughts and fears over the will of God Almighty.

Finally, I beg permission to put before the court and Her Majesty a new play of mine, on which the ink has hardly dried. This is the tragedy of Macbeth, a play dealing with some of Her Majesty’s Scottish ancestors, and the overthrowing of a bloody tyrant. Indeed, I am sure Her Majesty will be pleased to find that she herself makes an appearance of sorts in this play, when cruel Macbeth sees in a vision the glorious issue of his enemy Banquo, a line stretching out to eternity in which Macbeth glimpses a beautiful young queen who wears two illustrious crowns.

If these meagre offerings should please Her Majesty, we have many other plays, penned by myself and others, to offer. Indeed, if I may be so bold, we would be honoured to name ourselves the Queen’s Men, and devote our art and entertainment entirely to Her Majesty. I anxiously await your reply,

Yours,

Will Shakspear.

Bang Goes the Prompt

With a mere week to go before Christmas, I find myself sunk into a lethargic haze, incapable of any kind of higher creative or rational faculties. With this in mind, I'm going to spend the next little while posting a few short pieces that I've written in the last few months in response to writing prompts. All were written in fairly short order; between 15 and 30 minutes for the most part, and I haven't edited much in transcribing. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

For this first piece, the prompt was simply to write about an explosion. After pondering and rejecting the idea of writing about a population explosion, this is what leaked out of my brain.

With hindsight, the mountain was doomed from the moment we decided to store all the TNT together in the same cavernous warehouse, especially given the frankly ludicrous amount of it we had. I think someone misplaced a decimal place on the order form. OK, OK, I’m not trying to evade responsibility. I understand now that I should really have fixed the slanting shelf before I stacked up all those vials of nitroglycerine on it. What can I say? It was the end of the day, I was tired, I thought, “It’ll still be here in the morning, right?”

Wrong.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a large geographical feature explode. I recommend it, if you can find a safe distance. If there is a safe distance. Thousands of tons of rock and soil were not meant to fly, which makes it all the more impressive when they do. Though I do feel sorry for the flock of sparrows which was completely obliterated by a particularly large fragment of mountain sailing through the air. I found myself applauding, as if it was all a carefully organised show, even as pebbles rained down around me. Moments later, as an uprooted tree sailed past me, I decided it was probably time to turn and run. Pity, really. That meant I never saw the second tree coming straight for me.

So here I stand, or float, with nothing to do but take account of my life and all the ways I went wrong. But it wasn’t entirely my fault. Was it?

Ciarán Has Come Online

The nostalgia is already potent.

Yesterday, I played through a game by the name of Emily is Away. You may wish to play it before proceeding with this post; a playthrough only takes about 40 minutes, and it’s free. More importantly, it’s one of the more moving experiences I’ve had playing a game in recent memory. I’m someone who tends to have a fondness for low budget, narrative-driven indie titles (To the Moon, Analogue: A Hate Story – and yes, I will play Undertale at some point), so I guessed that EiA would be right up my alley – and how right I was. I’ve spent a lot of time yesterday evening and today thinking about it, and puzzling over why it affected me so deeply.

Several weeks ago, I had some words to say on this blog on the topic of immersion, and how I believe it’s something games can do better than any other medium. Immersion is, as it happens, an area in which EiA excels. It places you in precisely the same role as the game’s protagonist – sitting at a computer, watching messages appear on a screen. It even forces you to type out responses (admittedly, bashing the keyboard is just as effective as attempting to type the actual words, but the latter is more fun). You pick a name for yourself (I would recommend using your own name), by which the titular Emily will address you throughout, as well as a screenname (for added realism, pick an embarrassing old screenname). The game goes so far as to recreate a Windows XP desktop and an old-style pre-Skype IM service, complete with authentic sounds.

The use of the IM service is something I find deeply fascinating. It’s a potent form of modern communication, potentially used for hours at a time by young people, and yet it’s rarely depicted in any other medium. One of the reasons I fell in love with Homestuck was because of the way it used the language of IM so naturally – and make no mistake, it is a language unto itself. Not only in terms of abbreviations and emoticons, but, for instance, the ways in which people use line breaks – do you type everything you want to say at once into a single message, or spread it out over several? The effect is entirely different. It’s also a communication service that comes with its own codes and signals – the game is brilliantly adept at replacing “emerly35 is typing” with “emerly35 is deleting” for a couple of seconds, just to make you wonder: “What was she going to say?” Not only that, but the protagonist themselves regularly rephrases messages as they type. Like any good analysis of human communication, the game is as much about what’s not said as what is.

As you may have gathered by now, I have a good deal of experience in the things which the game depicts. The final chapter of the game is set in 2006, which coincidentally was the year I started using MSN Messenger in earnest. For the next three years or so, I would spend an inordinate amount of time on there, staying up all night in conversation at least once (indeed, MSN was where WAKE UP was conceived and put together in its original magazine form). I had MSN friends; people I knew in real life, but communicated with almost exclusively online. I don’t recall often having the kinds of heart-to-hearts which Emily and the protagonist have in the game, certainly not in such short conversations, but it does require some artistic licence; the same way people in films never say “hello” or “goodbye” on the phone. That said, I was a teenager; there was quite a bit of “I really like ______, but I don’t know what she thinks of me”. Some of my MSN friends became confidantes, people I would talk about these kinds of emotional matters which I would never discuss in person, being a deeply repressed shell of a person and all.

-SPOILERS AHEAD – PLEASE DON’T READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU HAVEN’T PLAYED THE GAME THROUGH AT LEAST ONCE-

From glancing over the (very positive) Steam reviews, I knew in advance that the game was going to break my heart. I even guessed more or less how it would do so. And yet I was in no way prepared. The game awoke a lot of memories, some of which had been dormant for a long time – potential relationships that never went anywhere, close friendships that fizzled out, awkward conversations in which any kind of real communication seems to elude you. It’s at once universal and very deeply personal in the way it examines relationships that stray between arbitrary boundaries. I’m someone who has a high opinion of the value of friendship, to the point that I dislike phrases like “just friends” for the way they privilege romantic love above all else. But I’ve fallen in love with friends before. I know what it’s like to weigh up imagined romantic bliss against potential alienation from someone you adore. And, like any apparently functioning adult, I’m suffused with regrets.

As soon as Emily brought up concepts of “having feelings” and “making a move” in chapter 3, I knew we were on shaky ground. And by the middle of chapter 4, I knew precisely where things were going. Chapter 5 just felt like being punched repeatedly. It was awful; I felt like on some level I had failed Emily, that I had done everything wrong. So I did something I’ve only allowed myself to do one other time* – I went back and remade some choices. “To hell with living with the consequences,” I thought, “this is something I’ve wished I could do over and over in real life.” And it didn’t work. Things just went wrong differently. I couldn’t even bring myself to sit through chapter 5’s painfully stilted conversation again. Because even before I got to that point, I’d begun to suspect what the game was really doing. Things were always outside of my control. Emily and I were always going to drift apart. It’s a strange, depressing kind of determinism, a study of entropy as a close relationship breaks down.

The whole premise of Emily is Away is extremely mundane – and that’s what makes it so brutal. The degree of immersion encourages you to take the whole thing very personally, and so I most certainly did. You may have noticed how I started using the first-person instead of “the protagonist” halfway through this post. I didn’t, until a couple of lines ago. That’s how far the game got under my skin – I started viewing it as something that had actually happened to me – which, of course, it was; a microcosm of a tiny tragedy. For the rest of the evening, I was viewing every IM conversation I’ve ever had as a labyrinth of missed possibilities. As silly as it sounds, I still feel as though I actually lost someone close to me; a relationship played out over the course of 40 minutes**. Any piece of media that can have such an effect has to be respected.

* - Chapter 3 of Telltale’s The Walking Dead, if you’re interested, and that was to try to avoid a character’s death.

** - I’m reminded of Nick Cave’s extraordinary ‘Far From Me’, which manages to capture a sense of a whole relationship and its inevitable decline in only four fairly short verses.

The Man on the Tatty Banner

Brian Friel died this morning. I knew this was coming, of course, as we all did. The man was 86, and his public appearances had gone from rare to nonexistent in the last few years. Still, though, I imagined him as a constant presence, ensconced in a armchair in Donegal. Even if the work had dried up, it was enough to know that the great mind that produced it was out there somewhere. Perhaps it's enough that it ever was.

Self-important as I am, after a series of heartfelt tribute tweets, I thought I should write a post reflecting on Friel's achievements, on what he meant to me. I even made a point of looking up where in the university library his works were, for reference material and judicious quotation. It was only a few minutes ago that I realised how futile it would be to pour out words over a man who understood, better than anyone since Beckett, how slippery language is, how unreliable. Perhaps that's why he moved from writing short stories to writing for the stage, and why his voice truly came alive at that point: because the only way to free his stories and his ideas from the graveyard of language was to have them embodied.

But enough of that. Tributes continue to pour in from all quarters as I write this, literary, critical and political. Rather than contribute my own droplets to the flood, I think the most appropriate thing to do is to leave the final word to Friel himself, in one of my favourite passages in all of literature, as he, through his greatest creation Frank Hardy, confronts the final certainty of death.

And as I walked I became possessed of a strange and trembling intimation: that the whole corporeal world - the cobbles, the trees, the sky, those four malign implements - somehow they had shed their physical reality and had become mere imaginings, and that in all existence there was only myself and the wedding guests. And that intimation in turn gave way to a stronger sense: that even we had ceased to be physical and existed only in spirit, only in the need we had for each other.

(He takes off his hat as if he were entering a church and holds it at his chest. He is both awed and elated. As he speaks the remaining lines he moves very slowly down stage.)

And as I moved across that yard towards them and offered myself to them, then for the first time I had a simple and genuine sense of home-coming. Then for the first time there was no atrophying terror; and the maddening questions were silent.

At long last I was renouncing chance.