Author: Stephen Hargadon

Enjoy Your Trip?

/ Stephen Hargadon

Here’s a few comments made by travellers on The Bury Line:

Stephen Hargadon’s The Bury Line takes the soul-crushing frustrations of being lost amongst the office-dwelling number-people of the modern age, and condenses them into a tale that will make anyone who often feels despondent about their existential place or workplace rut need to look away for the occasional moment to let what rises pass. Narrator Martin is rapidly reaching critical mass with regards to disdain for his big city office job, observing the high-fliers and the barely-competent managers fight to sink or swim, either burning themselves out or being taken out by the more ruthless amongst them.

Things change when he comes across an ex-colleague working as a ticket inspector on the tram – a life which appears to have lightened much of the weight he always seemed to have on his shoulders; a changed man. Similarly changed is another ex-colleague who simply doesn’t recognise Martin after an encounter on the street, and soon after winds up committing suicide-by-train. Except it would appear not, when self said-terminator shows up alongside Martin’s other colleague checking tickets on the trams. This mystery is much more appealing to Martin than the day-to-day drudgery of his actual job, and soon he’s skipping work entirely to ride the trams and attempt to reconnect with something he feels to have lost inside. Noticing his new habits, his ex-colleagues invite him to try out for their new employer… but, as always, there’s a price to be paid for escaping the rat race.

The Bury Line is a brilliant piece of work that will likely resonate with a great many folk out there. Be warned, though – this is pure existential horror for the modern age, and it doesn’t have a kind word to say for your chances. Hargadon makes great use of his ruling metaphor and, depending on how you take it, dishes up a story that can be absolutely crushing, or profoundly liberating.

Gareth Jones at www.dreadcentral.com

 

 

Stephen Hargadon’s The Bury Line brings new and terrible meaning to the networking skills required in the modern workplace. Though it displays a sure, light touch in tone, the humour is black throughout, in the manner of Gogol. In grand fact, the story is highly reminiscent of recurrent themes in much 19th century Russian literature, particular those of soul-destroying time-serving in the Imperial Civil Service. And if you think of Dostoyevsky’s Notes From Underground as a sort of tube tale, then The Bury Line is the surface equivalent. Add to this Hargadon’s marked talent for writing sympathetic characters and the story gains a good deal of its power to affect by way of shared disillusion. The characters are not laconic: they are laconics; a manifestation of progress reports and performance related pay. As they appear and disappear the reader becomes almost a nine-to-five familiar; and the story exists as a consultant meta-narrative to the daily grind.

Martin goes through a succession of line managers. Watching them come and go at the discretion of upper management, he notes each one’s foibles, and how these prove to be fatal to much-fabled efficiencies. Martin understands that another job is often another life, an afterlife perhaps. At first he watches his colleagues despatched to this afterlife; then he begins to experience them in other incarnations, on other networks; perhaps as symptoms of his own burgeoning disillusionment. In turn this affects his own performance and his work begins to suffer. It does not go unnoticed…

And this perhaps is how the story most startled me – it is not that the work suffers: it is that the worker suffers it.

The Bury Line is published in Black Static Issue 42. Well worth reading.

numinousbookofreview.blogspot.co.uk

 

“…he was either preparing for a sneeze or recovering from a sneeze. He had a disordered, ill-prepared face, a face that went best with pyjamas.”
This story extrapolates into the most frightening absurdist nightmare….one that had me laughing out loud, almost sobbing, too. I don’t need sleeping pills, only dosages of Hargadon … A text full of neatly cruel philosophicals, homilies, originalities, mind-opening sayings …

DF Lewis at dflewisreviews.wordpress.com

Black Static 42

/ Stephen Hargadon

Issue 42 of Black Static is nearly with us. Demand it from your local newsagent. As well as the The Bury Line, the September-October edition contains new fiction by Sara Saab, Alyssa Wong, Noah Wareness, Matthew Cheney, David D. Levine and Kristi DeMeester. The cover art is by Dave Senecal, and interior illustrations are by Richard Wagner, Vincent Sammy, and Ben Baldwin.

I’m particularly pleased with the artwork that accompanies The Bury Line. The tramline graphic is a neat touch.

You can read more about the stories and art in issue 42 here.

Phase IV – Saul Bass

/ Stephen Hargadon

What did I remember?

Sun and dust, a baked and blistered landscape. A dome in the desert. Two scientists: a gruff bearded veteran with messianic tendencies and a cool numbers man in denim shirt and flares, talking about algorithms and game theory. The click and whirr of analogue technology, computers as big as filing cabinets, the scratch of a needle as it jitters across paper. Heat, sweat, paranoia. The glare, the isolation. A bemused and pretty girl. The ants.

The hyper-intelligent ants: I remembered them, of course. I first watched Phase IV  (directed by Saul Bass, 1974) many years ago, late at night (perhaps as part of BBC2’s Moviedrome strand). Plot, character, dialogue: I soon forgot most of that stuff. What was left was far more vivid and vital – a sensation, a pool of colours, a stain spreading through the mind. I remembered the parched and earthy palette: orange, yellow, ochre. Over the years, as my memory of Phase IV  faded, I knew that I had witnessed some kind of odd, slow, hazy nightmare, but I could not tell you the precise dimensions of that that nightmare. One image, however, did stay with me: a human hand, palm side up, a neat hole in the centre (as if made with a drill), out of which crawls an ant, followed by others.

I watched the film for only the second time a few nights ago, on DVD. I’d forgotten the set-up. An event (mercifully unspecified) has led to a change in the behaviour of desert ants. The red ants no longer fight the black ants, and so on. (Political implications are not stressed.) These ants have started communicating, collaborating, working towards some higher purpose. Rather than give us the B movie rigmarole of maverick scientists issuing apocalyptic warnings and obtuse politicians banging tables and the general public screaming in the streets, Bass wisely concentrates on the ants, on their industry and otherness. The effect is poetic, alienating: we are in a strange world. It takes some time before the plodding humans actually appear. I’d forgotten about the local oldsters who die when spayed with yellow insecticide (it looks like a custard blizzard). Their granddaughter – played by Lynne Frederick – survives and spends the rest of the film looking demure. The scientists speak a dry, expository lingo, all vectors and synapses: but this works rather well as a counterpoint to the imaginative, otherworldly ant scenes. The film has a curious, detached feel – part dream, part documentary. The real action (and beauty) always comes when Bass shifts his gaze to the ants. Their world is one of bizarre resilience. They create crop circles and build magnificently eerie pillars, blue in the desert dusk, sinister totems. The film is full of beguiling sequences, unsettling images.

The premise of Phase IV is not particularly original – nature runs amok – it’s pulpy: but Bass goes beyond genre, he takes us into abstraction. (In parts, it made me think of Glazer’s  Under the Skin  or Clouzot’s experiments with light and colour in his unfinished  Inferno). We have ghostly electronic noises, crawling synths, noodling computers. Humans are seen through the eyes of the ants – distorted, insignificant, blurred: we are shadowy and inconsequential natterers. As viewers, we enter the ant word, journey into their tunnels. The ants dominate the screen, yet they remain tiny. No need for giant monsters here. In a stop-motion passage, we see them strip a rodent down to its grey bones.

Unfortunately, my cheap DVD turned out to contain the neutered version. It was missing the original ending, an extended and idiosyncratic montage depicting the last and final phase of the insects’ plan. (Is there an unbutchered version available?) I was reduced to watching the climax on YouTube; it is only during this end sequence (hypnotic, creepy, surprising – a visual symphony) that the name of the film – Phase IV – finally appears on screen. A suave and jaunty touch from the man responsible for many of Hitchcock’s  opening titles. It’s an impressive, if curious, work.