Perhaps we live too much in the realm of the predictable. The morning routines of getting up and ready for whatever occupation, the evening meal and what follows – they hold us in a comfortable embrace. We cheerfully acknowledge geopolitical and environmental threats, woven into our lives as are our deaths. We predict that our illnesses will be treated, our misfortunes somehow recompensed. We need not expect the best from strangers, or even from those we know well, but as citizens they will accord to some accepted pattern of human behaviour. Out of which arises the aberrant behaviour of the voyeur photographer as he secretly captures the park’s daily users, harmless in his way until…the images turn into a means of surveillance and the oddball park regular a potential victim. Caught.
The eccentric professor is a familiar archetype. But what if his arcane researches reward with all the powers of the occult? A well-worn theme. In RM Francis’ hands though, it is the Law of Unpredictable Consequence that is played out. A more-terrible fate awaits the revenge-taking professor, one for which he could never have bargained. Kybalion.
This writer is of course familiar with escaped-lunatic as a shaper of narrative. There are ghastly outcomes in Lottie. We watch the progress of a teenage party with dread. The writing here is coolly graphic. The backstory, featured at the end, provides an awful rationale for the horrors that have taken place. It is not so much a twist as a sudden epiphany, a perception that has been lurking at the edges of our minds all along.
The dystopian world is in each case masked by a recognisable external façade. Indicative Date shows a couple up against it, she with her meticulous historian’s work unrecognised by publishers, and he on a downward spiral of ill-health and redundancy. ‘Bad luck’ is played out, as rejections pile up, and urgent hospital appointments are repeatedly cancelled. The phrase, ‘We always do our utmost to provide the highest possible service level,’ is in some form known to all of us, spoken when the proffered service is unaccountably withdrawn. It is a Waiting for Godot world that devoted partners Jaye and Gen inhabit. In the background two sinister figures, Mr Cameron and Mr Brown operate a machine that randomly sorts out the various fates of individuals, a metaphor for capitalism and the inequality conferred in the distribution of life-chances.
For Gen, the world he faces is inexplicable, Kafkaesque, with obstacles at every turn. Yet for all the macabre nature of these horror-genre worlds there is a suggestion of a humanity that persists, that is able to survive in the face of it. By the end of Indicative Date we realise a grim and never-changing reality that surrounds these powerless individuals: there is nothing but winter cold and the inevitability of illness and unemployment. Yet the couple stand firm, and this alone seems to provide some redemption, as they continue to struggle in a hard-hearted society, made the more reductive by an Orwellian corruption of language.
They lay in, resting with each other, hoping the day would be good or be quick. Gen was calm and breathed easily, his stomach was cool for a while. Jaye lay easily, with a long steady breath and an unflinching look of contentment on her face.
For all that it is compelling, this collection of eighteen short stories, some lengthy, others monographs of a single page, is a tough read. As the title suggests, ‘Unmindfulness’ is a state where the reader may be subject to currents that sweep away from what is presumed known because habitual, currents that draw down to the depths of the psyche. Francis’ spare, bright description and economical dialogue convey us there, as our presumptions slip away.
