In The Madness Of Time
I am reading Ian Macpherson's new novel, In The Madness Of Time, and I am thinking of the existential and semantic confusion usual to the Macpherson novel, and of the time of madness and the meaningless madness of a title for all time, and I am thinking perhaps Ian is right to call his novel this, or perhpas I am thinking now that this is a timely title, one of a mix of word salad notions to evoke the pretentious-moi character Ian Macpherson has often evoked in his fiction and in his comedy.
This Ian Macpherson novel I talk of is a staged minutiae of obersvation, smiled away into a reader-as-audience experience in a sardonic delivery that paces the reading to a leisurely and relished experience. We are not able to speed read Macpherson, as to read his novel is also to hear him speak.
The story of In The Madness Of Time concerns a quite familiar anti-hero, an anti-art anti-hero with his foot stuck in the door of success, whatever defintion he might have of that. dropping surreality for the realness of the observed, here told as a satire of literary types and literary mouers by someone who has never entered the full desperation of the grassroots literary scene and so relies often on class as the signifier of who is good and bad in this milieu, the name 'Torquil' and a Scottish literary magazine called 'Sewer'.
The amiable situational humour is Macherson through and through and with a lack of peril, makes for a pleasing ramble, a book of weighed up humourous options, placed at the pace of a slow joke building to a relaxed pause and a change of direction, as opposed to hitting the page running and flying into a desperate brand of story telling. In The Madness Of Time is also an anti-murder story, making an indignity of that genre too.
In The Madness Of Time might however aspire to be a desperate story, because it is at one slightly removed level about the madness of our time, being the gender madness of our time as perceived, and although this is suggested at, this is not a culture war novel, although at times it tips its hat in that direction. Funny and affable it is a novel of the Edinburgh Festival, and repeats itself on a set of Air BNB starirs in the city's Grassmarket, the former home of Ian Macpherson's own publisher - - - and mine - - and up and down Victoria Street whcih both Ian and I might tell you, was done drunkly before and was a lot of fun.
A further tension is here apparenty but not comic. The Festival was fun once, and that was not just because we were drinking and falling over and enjoying uncensored comedy. The Edinburgh Festival described in Ian Macpherson's novel is gone and will not be back, and so it doesn't suprirse me that the book retakes the same memory loops once or twice - - up and down the famous stairs - - up and down the famous street - - the people of the novel do seem to come and go but are also of long ago - - Senga Mingin, real name: Agnes Boake.
Is the discontent of Macpherson mad, like the shape he takes against all of society, new and old alike? Sanity and some measure of content in the face of other people's madnesses are the themes of this book, and the vigorous refinment of comedy performed by a master has much to feed on in the luxurious corruption of the arts.
In The Madness Of Time however might be the last time that corruption is funny, and this is where the book becomes a very good symptom of the times. It becomes apparent that Ian's own wife and her friend are the characters of the book, and what that leads to we cannot know, not until another novel surfaces. You can and may yourself define who Chuck Weill might be, lately of Sewer magazine, although it is the blow by blow humour that is the best, and makes me think Macpherson could well handle poetry, as the comedy here seems pointed and sharp, paragraph by paragraph rather than situational - - which is fitting for a scene that satirises itself, these days.
In The Madness Of Time
Ian Macpherson
Gnarled Tree Press
£9.99