Jeremy Thomas Gilmer
Mark Anthony Jarman, CZECH TECHNO: Stories of Music.
Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2020. $18.00.
Mark Anthony Jarman’s new story collection, Czech Techno, is presented as a collection of stories of music, but that only opens the door into the world these tales inhabit. The five stories rendered here run the gamut of travel writing, dark prose, poetry, and something between all of these. We are rattled, amused, terrified, and finally moved by these broken angels and addicted saints.
We follow a musician dancing through the rubble of a disintegrating relationship, and band, while trying to identify what city is crumbling around him.
We are front and centre while another wandering soul witnesses River’s final moments on the L.A. sidewalk in front of the Viper Room, not from a spectator’s gaze, but from the imagined interior of the hearts of those who lost him, and the dealers who provided the end.
The Jarman paragraph is a spinning, lyrical, and striking gathering of language that grabs us and is unrelenting in its grip. Some of these stories are collections of such paragraphs, hitting us like buckshot from a sawed-off shotgun. From an early part of the story “Pine Slopes, Sweet Apple Slopes,” we read:
At The Elephant Hotel petty cash is kept in the oak and tin icebox and men in bowler hats and starched shirts are already shunting in for a quick shot at the gin-mill bar, cock-eyed men flapping gums, green Dutch door swinging, yellow bottles clunking on wood, wide jaws flapping and teeth clacking, avid palaver parsed at The Elephant, accelerando bartender muttering and moving quickly, picking up dead soldiers from bar or table top while Irish Molly sells dead partridges, partridges offered to gentlemen at fifty cents a dozen.
This is pure Jarman, as if Hunter S. Thompson were narrating a walk-through shot from a Wes Anderson film. The fierce and beautiful attention to detail sung in his language. We could pull the book open to any page and find these treasures lying there, as common as beer bottles on a dirty floor.
The music is another part. In the hands of many writers, it would be a backdrop, something to gracefully tie us into a scene or a time. Here, music is the engine, the canon shooting his characters through space and past dimming stars and drug-soaked meteors. Victoria harbour is the sound of Algerian music on the wind, even dawn is described as an accordion of caterwauling street cats.
These characters are full and alive and have moments of quiet beauty as well. A young musician remembers an aunt in North London, who, after receiving a fatal sting from a bee, speaks her last words to her husband instead of rushing for a shot she knew would not save her. I’ve been stung. This one simple passage stayed with me for days after—that is what great stories do.
In the end, a reader could be left with just this warning: “Please don’t fall in love with her, she’s not really Irish and too rough for tender you.”
JEREMY THOMAS GILMER
is a writer of short fiction and nonfiction. He has been longlisted for the CBC Canada Writes Short Story Prize, won the inaugural Short Story Day Africa Flash Fiction Prize, and was selected as the writer-in-residence at the KiRA residency in 2018. He is the Art and Literature editor-at-large for The East magazine. Born in New Brunswick, Gilmer grew up in Nigeria, Northern Ireland, and Canada, and has lived and worked in over forty countries. He splits his time between Eastern Canada and Brazil.