Britain: Just Add Absurdium

Humorist Tom Cox reveals the absurdity of the everyday, often while afoot.

As happens when I am ruminating about writing but not actually getting the writing done, serendipity rears its heads and snarls. Or trips me up. Always for the good, I tell myself. In January, while selecting images for photo portfolios of our with-the-parents whirlwind journey through Great Britain, I stumbled across author Tom Cox on BlueSky. In doing so, I’ve received an modern education in silly.

Granted, I’ve always enjoyed wry British humor. I sat rapt at reruns of Monty Python before I was old enough to understand many of the jokes, let alone the entire context of the show against a backdrop of foreign-to-me mannerisms, mores, and politics. I loved Faulty Towers. I devoured Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in every format made available: books, radio, television, movie, and even the goofy early text adventure 1980s computer game where you played Arthur Dent and barely could make it through a scene before dying from something. It may have taken me two years and a few cheat codes to wade through to the end of that one.

As I learned by following the links to his stories on his website, Tom’s writing takes the pedestrian and the mundane and twists it inside out. He snagged my attention with a topic near and dear to my heart: Recommended Walks.

In its first paragraph:

Your route takes you down a sunken path where the assorted rubble underfoot feels as untrustworthy as a plumber’s diary.

We’d taken a few hikes, far too few, during that package tour of Great Britain in 2014

Now that’s writing about hiking. Not that my publishers would let me, but that’s what having your own website is for! And in fact, Tom returns to ambles in the countryside and musings about residents of the natural world as a matter of course.

• Things About The Countryside That Make Me Angry, And Some Photographs I Have Taken Of Them

• Photographs Of Scarecrows I’ve Met On Walks And Some Important Biographical Information About Them

• My Crowdependency Problem

• The Box of Frogs

And so on. So of course I had to order his new novel.

For those of us unfamiliar with the countryside of Great Britain except in broad sweeps, minor glimpses, the rush of it past the windows of a coach, and the words of other writers, Everything Will Swallow You does just that. I could not put it down. It is the poignant tale of Eric and Carl, at its heart an epistle on how navigating those rocks and slippery slopes of the footpath of life is so much easier if a loving companion is walking beside you. Even if one is furry, with long floppy ears and a tail.

Life isn’t a delusional, doting admirer. It doesn’t sit around on its backside, waiting for you to change your mind or come to your senses. It ploughs relentlessly on, ripping up the playing field as it does, dragging the goalposts along with it.

Is Carl a dog? Most of Eric’s friends and casual observers think so. Yet Carl knits. He reads. He carries on deep conversations with Eric. When he thinks no one is looking, he prefers to walk upright on those paths between the hedgerows. He tends a garden. He helps Eric sell records online. He makes phone calls and lurks in chat groups.

Carl’s bright enough to pull it off without being caught at it, so hooray for us to see part of the story from his point of view. Eric is content to think Carl is what he is, and appreciates him for it, even if he has to come up with an unusual breed name to describe him. In their twenty one years together, Eric simply assumes that Carl can do whatever he has a mind to.

Years ago, Eric had attempted to teach Carl to play guitar. Carl hadn’t pursued it and concluded that was probably for the best. If he wrote songs, they’d no doubt be terribly dispiriting: wretched ballads of little lost lives, cracked howls of protest, laments for the better carless planet that never happened. By comparison, the bleakest Townes Van Zandt lyricism would be a family picnic, the late life recordings of Johnny Cash a high-energy megamix of spring-break beach anthems.

A typical landscape in the southerly part of Wales

Landscape looms large in this story, as insinuated by its lovely cover. The hillsides of this region are known for collapse, the beaches for their wild nature. Nature threads through the story as strongly as classic LPs and Eric’s failed music career morphing into dealing in vintage vinyl.

He watched, on bright windy summer and autumn days when no meteorological event seemed fully off-limits, shadows sweep across the land like gargantuan cinema curtains.

It was hard to hurt a record made in 1967 but that hadn’t stopped a lot of people giving it a damn good go. Looking at the state of a lot of those that passed through his hands, Eric wondered if he’d been going to the right parties in his youth.

Always bemusing, sometimes befuddling, and buoyant enough in its humor to float you through Eric and Carl’s frustrations and troubles in comfort, Everything Will Swallow You is a charming piece of modern folklore, one of the finest I’ve read in recent memory. Some of its chapter names sing its weirdness:

• All the Heavy Unlikeliness of an Intricately Frosted Potato

• Some Older, Even More Tasteful Wallpaper

• Rats Will Run Up Your Leg But Nothing Will Matter

I had to pause now and again to look up towns and idioms I hadn’t already absorbed from past experience. Nevertheless, the turns of phrase had me snickering, giggling, howling, and yes, reading particular passages out loud to John in awe, interrupting his own quiet evening reads. Like this:

A man of indeterminate age with a face like a crumpled invoice staggered out of the bookies and up the hill ahead of them, discarding a beer can in a front garden with the special insouciance that comes with hallucinating an everyday non-explosive object as a hand grenade.

Or items revealed by the die-off of vegetation along the a footpath in winter:

The front left hubcap of the oft-anthropomorphised Peugeot that once carried four teenagers through a summer which throbbed with misdemeanour. A pair of pillar taps from a twice-remodelled bathroom. Drink bottles long-drained of fizzy childish liquid the colour of fluey discharge. A rusted can of I990s engine oil, its blackened top congealed shut, leaving the contents jailed for eternity. A stained, saturated cushion from a two-seat sofa half-interred in swampy ground, alone, rather than beside its partner, as had been subconsciously anticipated by all who’d farted on it.

Or this lovely bit that so fits so many places we’ve visited:

Town was different: organic, cleverly stuffed into a steep river valley, a place with a debonair, unabashedly striking amount of higgle to its piggle. Everything thoroughly pleasant about it - its arty pubs, its ethically orientated independent shops, community litter picks and nature trails - was counterbalanced by something equivalently sanctimonious and grating.

Tom plays with language to illuminate the absurd in the everyday, often reinforcing the joy of run-on-sentences that decades of ne’er-do-wells have attempted to quash with red pens.

Go buy this book. It was the only one of Tom’s novels available on Bookshop.

This and a half-dozen or more of his books, novels and memoirs, can be ordered from Blackwell’s in the UK with free shipping to the US. Links to his books are at the bottom of his website.

And please, read his essays while you are there. Especially if you love to hike, or love cats. Just don’t sip your coffee (or tea, or liquids, for that matter) as you read.

Thank me later.