On Reflection (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781874400912)

Brian Marley is best known for his absurdist novel Apropos Jimmy Inkling in which a notorious celebrity is tried and sentenced in absentia in a kangaroo court hastily convened in a London coffee shop; and for his riotous collection of short fictions The Shenanigans, a collision of Kafka and comicbook hyperrealism. On Reflection is something different. In his other guise as a photographer, Marley presents a sequence of images, mainly shot through glass (typically shop windows), in Newcastle upon Tyne, Southsea, the Italian town of Bergamo, and various locations throughout Sussex. But our attention is distracted from the ostensible content of each photo by the reflected presence of a man, often wearing a hat, sometimes barely visible, always disruptive. That's the photographer himself, normally the one element absent from photographs (selfies aside), caught in the act of taking the picture we're looking at. And associated with each image is a text: a micro-story. The first begins: "Catching sight of himself makes him feel physically ill, so he takes pains to avoid mirrors. But despite his best efforts he sees himself everywhere he looks." From which point the absurdities multiply, to tragicomic effect.