Dead pets, black sheep and worlds in collision

Published on Wednesday 21 January 2004 00:00

Colloquies, Radio 4, Sunday

The Goalie, Radio Scotland, Monday

The Moving and the Still, Radio 3, Sunday

Thomas Lynch just didn’t get it. The Michigan undertaker and award-winning writer sent his sister a letter of condolence on the death of her dog, Baxter. "She was not bright," he wrote of the mutt, "not lovely, less communicative than most chrysanthemums, and drugged into a stupor for most of her life. But here is the mystery, the glorious mystery, that a woman as bright and lovely, articulate and sober as you, loved her."

The family was outraged. How could he be so cruel? But Thomas was just stating the obvious. Baxter had snarled at the children. She’d bitten her owner, and had only avoided being put down thanks to a regime of pills for a variety of illnesses, physical and mental.

Thomas believed truth was central to condolence. They were in the funerary business, so they should have understood.

In the first of three Colloquies, he related, in a voice best described as everyday sinister, how he didn’t get on with his neighbour over the road either.

She walked her poodles, Champagne and Chardonnay, too near his funeral parlour. "To give her and her poodles their due, she always comes armed with a plastic bag and a rubber glove," he noted.

"She is, in keeping with the local custom, fastidious about the faecal matters. But for some reason I cannot shake the sense that I and my real estate have been shat upon, and that there is a kind of message hidden in the act, some intelligence she intends for me to get by the witness of it." He didn’t get it.

It was not that he was anti-dog. His own Heidi had died old and happy, and was still remembered with reverence after two decades. He doubted if that would happen to him, and he didn’t get that either, just as he didn’t get how a court spared his divorced wife from contributing to the children’s upkeep in case it hampered her career.

In the end, he sends his family a card with a chrysanthemum on the front and the word "sorry" inside. "I hope they get it," he says.

Jim Crumley didn’t get it. His grandfather, Bob, was a goalkeeper with Dundee, but no-one in the family spoke of him; or, if they did, it was in confusing untruths, such as saying he’d been buried in a pauper’s grave when he’d been cremated.

Jim is a wonderful writer about islands and nature but, in The Goalie (first broadcast at New Year), this search for the truth about his grandfather took him up a different byway.

He followed Bob from the tenements of Lochee to the countryside where he would have walked, noting the skylark "on its airy stair", but not getting very far. He learned about his grandad’s role in Dundee’s famous cup victory of 1910, and of his grandmother’s early death from Spanish flu.

But he never learned why his family despised the grand old goalie. So, he didn’t get it. And, frankly, neither did I.

Howard Barker’s The Moving and the Still, set in 1450, explored the creative and destructive impact of new technology on human relations.

Hoik, the unpleasant main character (indeed, they’re all unpleasant), is a perfectionist. He believes himself top calligrapher in the monastery while his colleague, Slee, believes this perfectionism is a sickness and a slight on God.

Hoik is patronised by a local squire, who desires that he copies his poems (The Pitiful Reflections of a Solitary Man). He also appears to desire Hoik, forcing kisses and worse from him, mainly as an exercise in power. A nasty bit of work, one day he introduces something that will change the nature of killing for ever: a gun.

He also introduces Hoik to something that will change the written word for ever: a printed book. Hoik is distressed, detesting the artless product. When Slee returns from Germany with a printing machine, Hoik retires to the lavatory’s smelly quietude and, resentfully, continues his calligraphy.

While hating the printed book, he is fascinated by the gun, and uses it to kill Slee. The brutal squire deserts him, saying: "Beauty moves. It is not stationary. To be out of date, what is that but death?"

I should say that, at several points, a rough character had popped up from the undergrowth, mysteriously telling Hoik: "I prefer you!"

As Hoik is taken to be burned at the stake, the voice shouts this again. Hoik tells the oik: "And I you!" Clearly, this was an intelligent play that worked on many levels. But, as a simple, one-level sort of fellow, in some respects - yup, you’ve guessed - I just didn’t get it.