Lovely Metronome Press recently sent STML some books and the latest issue of Metronome magazine, which comprises a sheaf of ‘teaser’ magazines in the style of Maurice Girodias’ promotional jazzmags for the Olympia Press. These feature extracts from the Metronome Press titles, as well as specially commissioned texts and images, which form an impressively varied, if expensive, collection.

Far more affordable at a mere £6.99, their paperbacks continue to astound. Tom Gidley’s Stunning Lofts tells two tales in alternate chapters (and, rather helpfully, alternate typefaces): the slow descent and disengagement from society of an urban planner, and the tribulations of a homeless man on the streets of London. What makes the form particularly intriguing is that although the conclusion is quite predictable half-way through the book, this does not lessen its impact or make the story any less compelling. The tension is maintained by a structure of numerous short chapters, each containing some minor revelation, altercation or imaginative event (a pile of office papers billows from the architect’s balcony across a run-down, East End square; the vagrant wakes in Finsbury Park, surrounded by beer cans poking through the newly fallen snow). The accompanying mental disintegration, the ease of dropping out of society and out of mind, is brilliantly evoked and sustained.

Stunning Lofts is in fact extremely close in style to another Metronome title, Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, much lauded in these parts. The exact dimensions of this style are hard to define, but it is characterised by a couple of strong narrative tics. Firstly, there sounds a strong tone of detachment exemplified by a refusal to name narrators and a seeming intention to provide as few details as possible about their personal histories, and only the most perfunctory and scientific about their present lives (in Stunning Lofts occasional references are made to a disastrous old relationship, but when the narrator spies his former lover in the street, he flees in panic, and no more information is provided). This is echoed in the deadpan descriptions of rooms and streets, the bland recitation of street names and locales, if such things are mentioned at all.

Secondly, there is a focus on process which is typical of conceptual as opposed to narrative or descriptive art. The latter is hardly surprising. Gidley and McCarthy are both artists and curators who deal regularly in the conceptual (McCarthy’s International Necronautical Society claimed in its first manifesto “That death is a type of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonise and, eventually, inhabit” – a claim we missed in our original review of Remainder but which suggests a possible rereading of that book as an exploration of limbo, a Jacob’s Ladder-style approach to the afterlife). While turning away from the more lurid excesses of so-called ‘experimental’ fiction (see Steve Mitchelmore’s recent post for arguments on this), both artists are clearly engaged in radical work, both attempting in the tradition of conceptual art to make the book more artifact that object – a piece to be viewed from more than one angle and with the viewer’s full interaction – and striving to outstep traditional narrative while still retaining the recognisable form of a novel.

That both are successful speaks volumes about the way in which the currents of contemporary literary taste are in thrall to the same reactionary, middle-brow knee-jerkery that greets each new evolution of the conceptual in the visual arts. Is it to be hoped that Metronome represents a new kind of publisher, one more equivalent to a curator, who will guard, support and exhibit such work in the face of market indifference? We will have to wait and see.

We’ll return to these themes, perhaps, in a forthcoming review of the fourth and final of Metronome’s current list, Phyllis Kiehl’s Fat Mountain Scenes.