Cameo, by Rob Doyle Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 279 pp. £12, ISBN: ‎978-1399631075

Rob Doyle’s debut, Here Are the Young Men (2014), was – according to its author – ‘a classical first novel in that it’s semi-autobiographical in some sense, but it was characters with made-up names … interacting in this plot’. With an architecture resembling a scaled-down version of Martin Amis’s London Fields, and close third-person narration (with occasional intrusions), it was assuredly what Doyle would term a ‘novelly novel’. A collection of stories, This is the Ritual, followed in 2016, with the author heavily under the influence, seeking his bearings via the likes of WG Sebald, Thomas Bernhard, Roberto Bolaño and Geoff Dyer. And it was, it seems to me, Dyer’s enabling impetus that diverted Doyle onto his own path in the narrative essay as story, ‘On Nietzsche’. All the jittery angst and yearning of his debut came now as direct first-person address, anxious and intimate, seething with (thwarted) lust and literary ambition, staving off nihilism with humorous perceptive acuity and mental drift: ‘Reading, in fact, is a fundamentally boring activity – which is not to say it isn’t the most satisfying thing you can do with your time. In truth, all I did was read, and it’s all I’d ever done.’ Riffing on his themes over a page or so, our narrator works himself up to aphoristic assertion: ‘All activities are boring, I thought then, because being conscious is boring, and although reading is boring too, it is less boring than all other activities. Consciousness, that was the real problem.’ Blending – and the list could go on – criticism, travelogue, essayistic contemplation and something akin to confession, this was the voice – fluent, impious, and for all it obsessed over transgression, exceedingly personable – of not only the essays reworked into the novel Threshold (2019) but of book reviews, and the columns and reflective inter-sections collected in Autobibliography (2021). This voice, it seemed, could turn its figurative tongue to anything that caught its maker’s restless attention.

But no. Reviewing some of his literary idols’ more mature work, Doyle found models of what not to do: ‘Geoff Dyer straining after a certain effect, namely the effect of sounding like Geoff Dyer’; Michel Houellebecq ‘degraded into mannerism and the repetition of formulae’. It is, as a writer says in the opening pages of Doyle’s new novel, Cameo, ‘a question of mutate, grow or face annihilation’. So, into what has that voice morphed to avoid wipe-out? Or has it? The answer is that it has not just morphed, it has morphed and multiplied and morphed again – it has proliferated.

Cameo takes its two epigraphs from The Bhagavad Ghita and Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘Borges and I’, then begins with a prologue – an extract from The Last Interview, which a footnote informs us was given to Li Wei and published in the South China Morning Post, August 2032 (Note place and date). Between the prologue and a final epilogue, also from The Last Interview, come nine numbered sections, each taking us briefly through a period in the writing – by someone referred to as ‘the author’ – of a cycle of popular novels about an Irish-born novelist, Ren Duka, and through the novel cycle itself, through Ren Duka’s restive existence. Between these come successive ‘Excerpts’ from two further narratives: the Duka author’s memoir, A Cool, Dry Place, and Night Taxi, a series of novels written by Ren Duka about a Dublin taxi-driver named Henry K. Dillon. And after or instead of the ‘Excerpts’ come sections titled for personages with a range of connections to Duka, the author and Henry K. Dillon. All this is to say that Doyle has devised not a new form, but a form of forms, a mode we might term accelerationist.

In the Duka sections, both ‘the author’ and Ren Duka are referred to in the third person, and the novels are summarised in a swift, flat present tense, allowing the writer tear through ideas, guises and enthusiasms, contemporary and imagined (or divined) future worlds, locations, literary techniques and genres. It allows also for the continual inclusion of alternatives. No section much exceeds twenty pages. This is a form for readers – in Doyle’s phrase – ‘partial to the distractions of the age’. In the words of Xu Chen, who attempts to co-opt Ren Duka for the Chinese government: ‘Next generation fiction … Non-linear novels. Fractal autobiography. Quantum realism. The kind of work that disregards obsolete formal conventions and exhausted modes of expression. The literary meta-modernism of the twenty-first century.’

In such fiction (and the world of avatars it evokes), selves too proliferate. ‘Ren Duka is my child,’ says the author. ‘He’s my survival, my surrogate self.’ Someone speaks of a ‘bifurcation of destiny … a second self, a metaphysical double … shadow self’. Waking from a dream, Henry ‘was not who he was.’ Selves multiply and selves dissolve, or transition.

‘Rob Doyle’ is taken ‘to a realm beyond language or reason wherein there was no self’. This self-doubt, so to speak, may be inferred perhaps even in the book’s making, with ‘Rob Doyle’ unsure as to whether he is dreaming or being dreamt by a middle-aged Dublin taxi-driver. We are approaching here what Doyle has called ‘the subject that fascinates’ – and Doyle esteems nothing above what fascinates – ‘where all others merely interest’. Mysticism. The mystic, he has written, ‘is one who gets out of his own way and becomes the nothing that is all.’

Not that we don’t get what Doyle termed in that Houellebecq review ‘signature gestures’. Rivalrous males, artistic envy, depression, love, addiction, and the not unrelated obsession with the sacred, with extreme states and a craving for ecstasy, the Absolute. Writing is ‘a … raid on the temple’. Duka visits mosques, narrates horse races ‘with the precision and solemnity of an old monk chanting his prayers’. There is a ‘devotion, zeal and … hushed, ceremonial wonderment’ to drug-taking, and ‘zeal’ also in the football fan. A character ‘loves heroin the way Theresa of Ávila loves Jesus’. ‘Addiction,’ we are told, ‘is a fetishism, an idolatry. The drive is towards a primal oneness that is deathly and amniotic, annihilatory, ecstatic.’ Apparent opposites arrive in tandem. There is no time for millennial Manichaeism in this book trembling with complex feelings, with ambivalence. Several stories in This is the Ritual centred on fictional writers, the most elaborate being ‘Exiled in the Infinite – Killian Turner, Ireland’s Vanished Literary Outlaw’, which Doyle further elaborated into In This Skull Hotel Where I Never Sleep: A Killian Turner Sampler (2019), expressing in his preface the hope that, by way of the exhibition occasioning the book’s publication, ‘a portal might be opened onto what Turner called “All-Time-Now” – an imaginative, abyssal zone that exists beyond time and space, where good and evil are one, are nothing.’ There, he referred to such a zone. With Cameo, we are in it.

Akira Nishikido, who has transposed the Night Taxi novels into manga, admires Henry K. Dillon’s ‘conviction that reality is coming apart … that a disintegrating cosmos is no longer the preserve of psychotics and visionaries, but is now a widespread intuition whose societal symptoms include depression, addiction, mistrust of authority and the awakening of dangerous, atavistic political forces. The night-driver believes that a new mode of fiction is called for that can mirror this widespread sense that reality is dissolving before our eyes.’ Such narrative involution – written by ‘the author’, through Ren Duka, through the internal voice of Henry K. Dillon, read and paraphrased by Akira – mimics how information today comes at us not from source – who or whatever that might be in this case – but passed on, repurposed, interpreted and reshared. We get now, in the now-est of forms. Summaries, interviews, excerpts, references to, quotes and extracts from podcasts and academic papers, writer’s talks, adaptations, films based on, and ghost writers. Influences are declared and listed, writers explain what they think they’re at. Traumas and wounds are traced. TV appearances, public contrition and performative victimhood, take-downs and “vigilante-stans”. The appurtenances of contemporary life and the life of a contemporary writer.

Palpable from Doyle’s debut on has been an empathy unconstrained by moralising or any craving for peer approval. His is an imagination hell-bent on getting inside the most feared and despised of contemporary consciousnesses. Doyle on the page is not content to merely rend garments, but skin and bone and psychic veiling too must be flayed, cracked or shredded to see what might be revealed. This is what separates him from a writer like, say Mark O’Connell. It is the difference between Gore Vidal or Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer, between Emilie Pine and Cathy Sweeney or Mary Gaitskill. The former are assured, they write with refinement and precision, and we take pleasure and learn from them, but the satire or scrutiny is so rarely self; the latter, thin-skinned and strained, in a confusion of contradictory urges, report from regions the others (perhaps most of us) fear to approach. They give us is, not ought – more humanity, more life.