Tom's Version - Robert Irwin

If it were any other writer, you would consider Tom’s Version a follow up to the author's last book, The Runes Have Been Cast, but Robert Irwin is an unusual case. His books, from The Arabian Nightmare onward, are intrigued with the idea of life as a story: as the book before the last made explicit in its title, My Life is like a Fairy Tale. Seen in that light, The Runes Have Been Cast, which was by no means straightforward itself (although less convoluted than some of Irwin's work) almost becomes enfolded within Tom's Version, a story within a story. Or maybe I'm just over-thinking it.

Nonetheless the clues and references are scattered throughout Tom's Version. Now in 1970, following the late 1960s' story of the two Oxford academics in The Runes Have Been Cast, at the end of chapter one here, the narrator observes that "London was so full of stories" and the encounter group that Tom joins sounds promising of new experiences “in the City of Adventures”. Quite what Tom is looking for isn't obvious, or obviously achievable anyway, but when he is paired up for co-counselling with a certain Molly, a beautiful young woman who believes she is bad news for every man she becomes involved with to the extent that she feels cursed  (see The Runes Have Been Cast for compelling evidence of that), he might be getting more than he bargained for. Not that he hasn't set himself a high challenge. In awe of W.B. Yeats, he has left Ireland after studying law to become a poet and impress a wild Irish lass Maeve, only to end up working as a warehouse manager.

Plain speaking Molly is having none of that nonsense. Having confessed that what she describes as her curse is really just being bad at choosing the men she sleeps with, a co-counselling meeting Tom at Le Macabre reveals - in true Irwin story within story “hall of mirrors” fashion - that Tom is just attending the group looking for material for a verse drama, while Molly is also looking for material to turn into her next novel, the two of them possibly ending up writing about each other. Tom thinks as a poet that he is looking for the truth, while Molly's fiction is just "artificially constructed lies". There is a belief for both of them nonetheless in the power of storytelling not so much as a way of imposing order on the randomness of life, as much as seeking to give it higher meaning. Both of them of course are far too clever for the encounter group (and for their own good) and end up getting kicked out.

Molly being Molly of course (you can see why Irwin felt the need to give her more room to expand, if not quite as far as giving us 'Molly's Version'), there are plenty of adventures to be had, much of it sexual adventures, but inevitably they get drawn back to the events of the past and the characters who first appeared in The Runes have been Cast. We are never quite sure what Tom has done to deserve to be drawn into this mad world, but he seems quite resigned to the prospect that "he was going to die holding the hand of a beautiful but silly woman". Or at least, that's the narrator's version of Tom's version, and such things are never straightforward in Irwin. Who is not too clever for his own good, I would nonetheless maintain.

Tom reflects now and again that Molly is leading him on a series of "very small adventures", and as far as Irwin is concerned, in comparison to Arabian nightmares, Algerian insurrectionists, satanists, surrealists, sultans and their harems, medieval knights and German silent movie stars (what a collection!), this and the previous book may seem like very small adventures (which I confess might answer the question I posed in my Reading Notes to the previous book about why it has taken me a while to get to these two books) but you could arguably find that true of Prayer-Cushions of the Flesh and certainly The Limits of Vision, while the truth is that it's just further evidence that Robert Irwin's talent was in finding the magical in the mundane, in inviting us all to find out own way to transform the everyday into something more adventurous, or even mystical.

"Yet, though dead, I acquired an afterlife of a sort by being present in your stories", Raven, the Oxford tutor of Bernard and Lancelyn, returns from the dead (in a way) here and even there, in the light of the fact that this proves to be sadly the final complete novel written by Robert Irwin, it's hard not to see many of Irwin's ideas about the strength of stories as life coming to a similar summation in Tom’s Version. You could see it perhaps as a meta-fictional game or as Irwin considering and evaluating his academic and fictional works in terms of its lasting contribution to the world. I can't offer any views on his academic works, but certainly in his fiction he places enormous value on the power of storytelling and I would imagine that The Arabian Nights is an important marker there. Personally, I would consider his body of work in the fiction category as having similar riches and deeper levels of meaning. The case is made for it here by Molly and Tom (with some debt to W. B. Yeats) that the writer creates themselves in the creation of their characters. Irwin lives on in his wonderful characters, their lives a fairy tale as part of a wider collection of stories, where there are many marvels yet to be discovered. Those wonders will never cease to enthrall, entertain and provoke thought on the meaning of stories and their importance to our lives.

Reading notes: Tom's Version by Robert Irwin was first published in 2023. I read the Dedalus paperback edition. I mentioned in the notes of The Runes Have Been Cast that coincidences often happen when I read Robert Irwin. This time, one morning I took to singing out loud the chorus of 'Ain't Necessarily So'. Not the kind of thing I normally do, but the previous day I had been listening to a radio recording of a concert that I had actually been present at. The same evening I picked up Tom's Version and there were the lines I had been singing sung by Raven at his own funeral. A small coincidence that perhaps doesn't mean anything, but it just felt strange, particularly as it came from a dead man, which the words of Irwin had suddenly become for me as a reader. Stories within stories. We are all part of someone else's story or perhaps Irwin has found his way into the stories of his readers. That's not at all weird.

I have followed Robert Irwin's books since The Arabian Nightmare was published (I still have a signed first edition hardcover), which I must go back and read again. Somehow he has never had the acclaim I think he deserves for a rich and wonderful body of work in fiction, but seems to have remained a cult writer (and sometimes an occult writer, of sorts). Having only recently learned of his death in June 2024, I look forward at least to seeing what he had planned for us next in the unfinished Rapture of the Deep, completed by Andrew Crumey and published by Dedalus later this year.