Spectral Lives (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781739327347)

Mick was my line manager at a West London tax office in the late 1990's and a drinking partner in the local bars. By the sort of coincidence that is only credible in real life, we were both gaeilgeoiri and so Mick, a great raconteur with a taste for the fantastical and ludicrous, could freely riff without attracting censorious attention. I really think he had it in him to be a great comedian, if it weren't for the fact that he had a superb mathematical brain, unlike his superiors. And, unlike his superiors, he was assiduously wooed by headhunters. In the end a firm of tax advisors won him over with a salary and fringe benefits that no civil servant outside Whitehall could hope to enjoy. About then, I myself found another job, gaining a precarious foothold in publishing (intra-business magazines) on a wage a shade worse than the one I was already on.

The big city, if anywhere, is where friends most easily slip into and out of one's life. Mick was the exception. He made a great point of keeping up with me, despite his ferocious work hours and many business-related sojourns in Birmingham and Manchester. The brilliant tax-avoidance advisor was surely satisfied with his lot, but the comic fabulist craved an audience not to be found in the financial sector. On these occasions we drank too much. Or I did, for he never had the sign of it upon him. Nevertheless, no less ardently than the financial industry, the spirits had always wooed him and, all too soon, succeeded in headhunting him in turn.

About a year later, Julia, his wife, contacted me. Mick, as it turned out, had left behind a bundle of manuscripts and she wanted me, as a freelance editor, to take look at them. I never before had any intimation that he wrote, but if I had, apart from technical articles on tax law, I would have banked on some light-hearted tales in Irish. What I met with were deeply morbid stories, novellas in length, written, perhaps appropriately, in English. I inferred from our conversation that day that Mick sometimes suffered bouts of depression (a thing I never had an intimation of) and he wrote through his darkest nights. Some material he threw away, perhaps the most of it.

Julia's hope was that I could place his work with a publishing firm. First and foremost she wanted to do so as a testament to his memory, but testaments to memory, of course, are scarcely of interest to publishing conglomerates. I have elected to use the rather less commercial imprint I am involved in to put them out, although I would have much preferred his public-bar stories. I can only hope those, like the author himself, live on in the next dimension.

As to the text, I judge that Mick must have written at great speed. He frequently employed ellipsis, some of it severe enough to almost defy conjecture. There are also numerous idiosyncrasies, lack of paragraphing and no visible division into chapters being the least of them. At any rate, he made no effort to make his intrinsically simple style accessible to the casual reader. Obviously he was not writing with any reader at all in mind. On the other hand, the very simplicity of the style provided a sound guide for editing awkward passages and filling in hiatuses with reasonable confidence. I will add that since none of the stories were given titles I have these added at my own discretion.

Ronan Flatherty, associate editor.