There was a curious cocking of heads when Adrian Duncan’s work first appeared on the literary scene. A love-story-come-compendium-of-building-site-terms-in-German (Love Notes from a German Building Site, 2019); a grieving engineer listening to Schubert, visiting an art installation, and envisioning collapse and disaster (A Sabbatical in Leipzig, 2020); a short story collection laid out in a football formation (Midfield Dynamo, 2021); a Soviet mathematician aiding Bord na Móna with a land survey (The Geometer Lobachevsky, 2022) – what on Earth were we reading?
Whatever it was, it was magnificent. It was as if, as a headline in these pages suggested, Duncan had engineered a new kind of fiction.
“I realise now, looking back, that [my books] are a bit odd relative to other contemporary fiction,” says the Longford-born author, on a video call from his home in Berlin. “But I didn’t write them thinking that at all. I actually thought A Sabbatical in Leipzig was really conventional.”
When he first started publishing, much was made of the fact that Duncan had previously held a career in engineering. A deep fascination with systems and structures seemed to define his work. He wrote of oil rigs, train stations, electricity networks. One novel even presented a Leaving Cert technical drawing exam question as an epigraph. But as he prepares for the release of his sixth book, The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth, he suggests that visual art has become the more dominant influence on his fiction.
His leer was so filthy it would have you reaching for hand sanitiser. A man over 40. A man who knew so, so much better
Irishman in Singapore: I wondered if I was foolish to emigrate in my 50s. But I feel more alive than ever
‘My sister’s boyfriend never left us alone at Christmas. Should I confront her?’
“I move between three streams: writing a lot, making films […] and then being in the studio and trying to make objects, drawings, whatever it might be.”
Duncan’s writing first began as a side interest alongside a degree in fine art. He took a course in the Irish Writers Centre with Texan writer Greg Baxter, where he would develop what remains his approach to this day – plan nothing, write by instinct. (He would also meet the then unpublished Cathy Sweeney, who will launch his novel this month.)
‘I was working on this idea of hesitancy towards a love of someone that you like, and the idea of moving statues in Ireland in the 1980s started making itself known’
The separate art forms, having emerged simultaneously, were, and continue to be, more like a singular practice. The works of film Duncan directs, for example, have themes and ideas that recur in his writing, and vice versa. (Among these films, many of which are co-projects with Feargal Ward, are 2016′s Bungalow Bliss, whose subject matter he would later reprise in his 2022 work of non-fiction, Little Republics: The Story of Bungalow Bliss; 2022′s Lowland, which won best director in the Irish Short Film category at Cork International Film Festival; and the forthcoming feature-length hybrid documentary on fascist-era architecture in Italy, Latina, Latina). Duncan also has an art studio in Berlin, where he makes and draws things. But rather than exhibit this work, he uses the act of making as a sort of preparatory exercise for his literary output.
[ Design No. 108, a short story by Adrian DuncanOpens in new window ]
“I make stuff because it helps to produce thoughts I wouldn’t have if I was just sitting at my desk writing,” he says. “If you’re trying to make some sort of object, or doing a large drawing, or whatever it might be, you’re just thinking differently about the world.”
The latest product of this “thinking differently”, The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth, is a story of love and loss set across two distinct periods in the life of restorative sculptor John Molloy.
The starting point, Duncan says, was the idea of shyness.
“Hesitancy, let’s say. That was definitely a big feeling. I remember when I was a young lad, and certainly through my teens and adolescence, being unbelievably shy around girls. And I’m sure most people feel that. But I find it really, really interesting, that feeling. And for some people it continues way into their adult lives. I thought there was something really interesting in that idea of hesitancy and sculpture.”
The book opens in a remote alpine city, where John is working with Italian sociologist, Bernadette, on a project that involves “drawing, measuring, photographing and studying” a sculpture of Romantic-era poets Bettina and Achim von Arnim.
In real life, this sculpture is one which Duncan often passes, in Arnimplatz, in his adopted city of Berlin. For the purposes of his story, he supplanted it into a fictional town.
“I’ve been obsessed by it for the last 10 years,” he says. “It’s just a nice piece of public sculpture. I’ve photographed it, done drawings of it, all manner of stuff. And then about two years ago, I made a short film about it.”
Für Bettina is a silent-film love story told through the sculpture, and a sort of companion piece to The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth.
In the book, love slowly blooms between John and Bernadette. But as John surrenders to his feelings, he becomes haunted by memories from his childhood, when his mother encountered a moving Virgin Mary statue.
[ Adrian Duncan: engineering a new type of fictionOpens in new window ]
“I was working on this idea of hesitancy towards a love of someone that you like, and the idea of moving statues in Ireland in the 1980s started making itself known,” says Duncan. “I ended up watching lots of videos and archive footage on YouTube. I would have been six when the moving statues were happening in Ballinspittle. And I remember, at the time, praying for a statue not to move because I didn’t want my world to be destroyed.”
John’s mother’s encounter with the moving statues occurs in 1972, “long before such things were in vogue”. As such, she is not celebrated but asked by the local priest to check herself into a psychiatric hospital. Thereafter, John carries with him the idea that prayer and mental deterioration are linked. It is an idea he must later reckon with when, having moved to Italy to be with Bernadette, he receives a letter telling him to pray for the speedy death of a dear old friend.
‘The idea that prayer would somehow dismantle or loosen that rind, to me seemed very plausible to this character. It would produce a sense of fear of him’
“I think there is something very Catholic about [the book],” Duncan says, when asked about the religious aspect. “There’s a lot of talk of guilt. And there are different types of Italian and Irish forms of decoration and excess.”
A book he used as a reference point was William James’s 1902 collection of lectures on the psychological study of individual private religious experiences, The Varieties of Religious Experience.
“There’s a term he uses in that book – and I think I use it in this book as well – the ‘rind of consciousness’. I thought that that was a really interesting idea: the rind of consciousness being a thing that protects – almost like a medieval wall. And the idea that prayer would somehow dismantle or loosen that rind, to me seemed very plausible to this character. It would produce a sense of fear of him, [the idea that] if I pray, I am somehow relenting from a worldview that allows me to stay quite rational and within the actualities of the world. […] He doesn’t fully appreciate the bravery that’s required to pray and open yourself up to the Lord or whatever it is.”
The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth, like much of Duncan’s work, brings together disparate images and ideas to produce a mysterious harmony. Objects and materials are a central focus – their substance a means of teasing out ideas around absence, death, faith. At intervals, types of rock, and their properties, are listed, like a collection laid out across a worktop. Figurative sculptures recur. “When did we stop believing in the life in motionless things?” Bernadette asks. Negative space is important, too. John’s work considers “the negative space of what remain[s]” in ruined edifices. He describes sitting for an age looking at the Greek sculpture, Kritios Boy, “trying to complete the shape of his long-gone arms”.
“I think that idea of negative space is extremely interesting,” says Duncan. “You are actively completing the object when you are looking at it. I would have had this experience first when looking at ruins of old buildings. And I think there’s something ruinous about this book. It’s like coming upon a ruin and you’re like: is that just a stack of stones or is there some intention in that load of stones?”
The pages themselves also have a lot of negative space between blocks of text.
“These gaps in the text are like: there’s a […] massive cut here, and there’s something missing […] It’s a negative space that invites the reader to take part in completing the thing.”
[ A Sabbatical in Leipzig: Slow, affecting and beautifulOpens in new window ]
The book took four years to write, during which Duncan spent a long time grappling with material he had produced, and what it meant.
“The first draft of it came out of the back of my head, and it produced this series of objects, of which the ones in the [finished] book are just some,” he says. “It took me ages to understand: why are they even here, never mind what’s the story here. And after about two years I was starting to get – I wouldn’t say frustrated, but I was like: this is not making a huge amount of sense to me.”
He considered throwing the project away and conceding it hadn’t worked.
“But I actually think that’s the least interesting thing to do, even though it’s easier to do psychologically and for lots of different reasons. Because I think if you stick at it, and you keep chiselling at it, to use a useful metaphor, then these things that appear [like the sculptures and moving statues] start sort of turning towards you and telling you why they are there. This sounds really strange that they turn to you, but that’s what happened with this one. They kind of told me how to write the book.”
The Gorgeous Inertia of the Earth is published by Tuskar Rock on January 30th
