Warwick Newnham, Contributing Editor for Experimental Discourse
A Review of Dinner with Father Dwyer,
an Experimental Novel by Jim Meirose
One of the great privileges of being the ‘experimental discourse‘ Contributing Editor for O:JA&L is the opportunity to read experimental fiction, poetry, non-fiction from all over the world as artists everywhere strive to throw off the surly bounds of literary convention with the intention of punching god and the damn world in the face screaming what are you doing.
One of the authors that has afforded me the very great privilege of trusting me with the Production of one of his brutal short stories is Jim Meirose: Jersey Jim!
we started exchanging emails with tips and suggestions on publication; talking if you will: Jim in New Jersey USA, me in Brisbane, Australia. Our letters flew through the air like deconstructed kites on the winds of the internet and I wondered how writers once waited for days if not years for snail mail.
The short story you say:
- Jim and I agreed to exchange reviews
- Jim’s book is Sunday Dinner with Father Dwyer
- My initial reaction:
On September 13, 2019 at 6:53 AM Warwick Newnham wrote:
Hey Jim
That loud boom you just heard was my head exploding from reading your book [just finished it].
Bravo. Seriously.
Going to have to cogitate on the review for a little….
Do you have an idea of how many words you were looking for?
Also
- How did you know of the claustrophobia of ocean going vessels- I have spent half my life at sea and the accuracies as to the banality of ship chores and the enforce intimacy, the fear of land and need to spend such sojourns senseless in the grand tradition of seamen. I too wish I had been born a thousand years ago
- I hear the cadences of literary tradition- Father Dwyer echo’s Millers Pharaohs in cruelty and aptitude for all human lust- the Borroughian Western Lands are nought for never ending stream of pollution has choked the Duad….I taste the existential despair of Camus as if he knew the perils of warming world as Father Dwyer evokes the faithless rapacious consumerism of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian where even the Judge blushes as the sweetmeats burn and drip fat on coals where children shriek in horror.
- The curtain is rent asunder and like the wizard of oz there is no one at the wheel as vertically integrated profit motives dictate that to get ahead ones soul is exchanged for a poisoned crap shoot of a world inhabited by the casually and deliberately cruel rule with violence and women glitter like fugazis and are hated for the mystery of birth by men dying from the white picket fence dreams that are generated by the AI observers as they milk the last drops of human kindness like tears from a dying sun
- How is your faith
- Cosmo Jarvis you don’t know how much I love this?
- Etc
Get back to you I a couple of days
Thanks
Regards
warwick
Jim’s response was as enigmatic[1] as ever so sans influence or favour[2] here goes the review:
Jim Meirose’s novel, Sunday Dinner with Father Dwyer, is a tour de force of existential parallelism and intersectionality where disparate worlds and characters rub up against each other in death spasms lubricated by industrial waste. It is a stark science fiction piece of a very near world where man is a mere functionary to and for the amusement AI beings as shipping crosses the effluent ridden seas driven by the integrated profit motifs of greed, where women glitter sharp and treacherous as a fugazi as they fear the mis-shaped heads and congenital deformities of the profit polluted gene pool. As Humanity bleeds out or suffocates slowly for their crimes onboard the last ship to nowhere there is search for, in extremis, meaning and faith and logic to find only the cold black emptiness of space.
Jersey Jim writes noir characters depicted by the words of their mouth and portrays neural divergence with a shifting, hallucinogenic swirl where the focus shifts through the paper thin layers of reality as Father Dwyer, the unholiest of defrocked priest, prepares degustation delights more depraved as he circles the seven seas of hell cooking up a feast fit for the denizens of the underworld as the ship sails on.
Camus stranger bleeds to death surrounded by the container towers of commerce in the all too real science fiction world of the future. Like Ballard and Burroughs, Meirose works in the realm of literature as pure consciousness: a tour de force of post-modernist philosophy as writing.
Bravo!
[1]Hi Warwick. Number of words is up to you. I’ll look around at various book reviews and let you know if I find a magic number. Have your reviews back in around 3-4 days.
Best,
Jim
[2] Our reviews are an honest exchange as [if I may be as bold] peers
About Warwick Newnham:
W.J.P. Newnham hitchhiked around Australia working as barman, bum and waiter, slaughter hand, deckhand and master, spending 25 years working in the Northern Prawn Fishery. He has travelled extensively in Southeast Asia, the Americas, and Japan and speaks marketplace Indonesian with some fluency. He is the winner of the 2016 The Lifted Brow’s Experimental Non-fiction Prize. His numerous short stories have been published in Nocturnal Submissions, Overland, The Lifted Brow, Meanjin, Westerly and Horror Sleaze Trash [to name but a few]. Newnham is Contributing Editor for Experimental Discourse at O:JA&L.
Image: The Black Table by Ruizanglada (1929-2001). Oil on canvas. 137 x 105 cm. 1989. By free license.
