Sam Thompson (1) (1978–)

Sam Thompson’s debut novel, Communion Town, was long-listed for the Booker Prize in 2012. It consists of ten tales, mostly unrelated, and not all equally enjoyable. The town, itself is a nightmarish place where the vast majority of its inhabitants lead sad and desperate lives in dingy apartments and the nights are populated by creepers, serial killers, and other things that bump up against you in the middle of the night and whisper the worst kind of horror into your ear.

Each of the ten show more stories is told by a different narrator in a different voice and genre, everything from the creepy narrator in the opening tale who seems to be stalking a young woman, to the hard-boiled ‘40s era detective in Gallathea, to the worker in an Abattoir who is convinced that his boss is a serial killer known as Le Flaneur who is terrorizing the city.

Communion Town offers little in the way of community for its inhabitants. Many of the characters have come to the city seeking a better life like the young musician in The Song of Serelight only to have their dreams completely shattered by the town. Death and disappointment seem to be the only things able to survive well in Communion Town.

The stories are supposed to be linked but, with the exception of a couple of the tales (notably about the Abattoir), the link seems to be mainly in their almost unrelenting darkness. Although, at times, the stories seemed overly clever (as in, for example, Le Flaneur has one heck of a literary pedigree which I only learned because my rusty high school French wasn’t up to a translation and I had to look it up) and not all of the tales were equally well drawn. However, author Sam Thompson’s prose is absolutely stunning and his ability to create a completely chilling atmosphere is outstanding. This is the kind of book which requires more than one read and perhaps a handy Norton’s Anthology to be fully appreciated but it is well worth the effort. show less

This city is Epidamnus while this story is being told: when another one is told it will become another town. — Platus

Have you noticed how each of us conjures up our own city? You have your secret haunts and private landmarks and favourite short cuts and I have mine, so as we navigate the streets each of us walks through a world of our own invention.

This strange and uneven but fascinating "novel" (using the term loosely) is set in Communion Town, a fictional modern city which is show more recognizable yet sinister and inscrutable. Its places and neighborhoods have strange names, such as Shambles Heath, Strangers' Market and Gorgonstown. Its streets are often filled with days old rubbish, and most homes and shops are decrepit and unkempt. On its sidewalks, tourists and workers frequently encounter packs of wild youths, the Cynics who are a constant threat to public safety, and shabbily dressed figures who lie motionless on the ground but suddenly come to life and demand attention whenever anyone gazes upon them. The nights are filled with even more dangers, as malevolent flâneurs and ghost-like figures prey upon unwary passersby.

The book consists of ten stories, in which the characters within each chapter view and describe the city from different vantage points, in the manner of individuals who describe an elephant from different angles. Unlike the stories in books such as Other Lives by André Brink and Scenes from Village Life by Amos Oz, which are also set in one city, the main characters in the different chapters of Communion Town do not interact with each other, although rarely a figure who seems familiar makes an appearance at the periphery, then disappears once you gaze in his direction. Several of the chapters are hauntingly brilliant, particularly "Communion Town", which opens the book, in which a voyeuristic narrator speaks to a recent young female immigrant who he fancies, whose partner has mysteriously disappeared within the city; "Good Slaughter", based on a slaughterhouse worker who holds a deep resentment and suspicion of his new supervisor; and "The Significant City of Lazarus Glass", based on a murder mystery involving the city's most respected private investigator and his arch nemesis, who was a dear friend and trusted colleague before he became the city's most feared and elusive criminal. Other stories were well written but less captivating, and a few were trivial and overly clever.

As a whole, the stories in Communion Town had a dreamlike but dark quality to them, with an ever present sense of fear, uncertainty and menace. The book is best read as a collection of beautifully written but unrelated stories about a mysterious city the first time around, and those who wish to give it a second try can look for the apparent connections between the chapters and their characters.

I was prepared to dislike this book, after I read several lukewarm reviews in the British newspapers and negative comments by private readers. However, I was captivated by it, despite its unevenness, and unlike many I do think it deserved its inclusion in last year's Booker Prize longlist. It is a unique and unsettling debut work by a talented author who is willing to take risks and succeeds more often than he fails. show less

This was like reading a particularly dark, twisted, and magical Jim Jarmusch film.

Presented in a series of ten vignettes all set in the same weird city, in a plane of existence quite like ours, but not all the way. Communion Town bridges a space between novel and short story collection, and this murky intermingling of forms suits the similarly murky intermingling of the grounded and fantastic, real and incorporeal, that permeates every narrative with the stubbornness of a slow flood of water show more snaking under your door.

The chronology of the chapters is mind-bending. I've got no idea where in the story of this city these stories slot in, but I've got an idea what the first one (the oldest, time-wise) is. Like any good piece of prose, but especially short stories (like these kinda are), Communion Town drops you into each narrative as late as the piece as possible. Just as important is the impression that while the stories presented are lean and narrow in scope and duration, the world in which they exist is fully realised in the author's mind. The city, it's inhabitants, it's politics, and particularly its mythology exists outside the little windows we're peaking in through.

The spectre of the flâneur and how its mythology shifts and changes between time period and social class is utterly fascinating. It's like there's this whole story being told in the space outside and in between the stories that are actually being told. Trying to discern its presence when it's not explicitly mentioned, catching hints of its mythological origins in off-hand pieces of conversation, trying to figure out if characters in earlier chapters were its manifestation or not, it functioned almost like a macguffin for me as the reader.

This thing's real good, and I could go on spoiling shit, but I won't. It's not clear to me why this isn't worthy of 5 out of 5, but there was just something a little awry that saw it stop short of being truly incredible.

Weird, mind-bendy, cerebral, and a bit rough around the edges. It's a good time. show less

I do have such wonderful taste in Booker Prize predictions – I finished this one the day it was dropped from the list.

Communion Town is a “city in ten chapters,” which is a fancy way of saying that it’s a bunch of short stories with a few mild links, all taking place inside the same constantly shifting, everywhere-but-nowhere metropolis. I’m quite partial to stories that explore and celebrate the concept of the city – see Brandon Graham, China Mieville, Jeff Vandermeer, and, I show more suppose, Philip Reeve. Communion Town may well be the book that breaks that spell for me. I found myself not only disliking its obsession with the the city, but disliking even the fact that Thompson thought anyone might be interested in it.

The city of Communion Town is unnamed, many of the characters in the stories are unnamed, and even the more interesting parts of the book – the nameless horrors which lurk in the night-time alleyways, desperately accosting people to “tell them a story” – go unnamed and unexplained. Thompson usually deals more in thought and introspection and summary than he does in concrete things like dialogue and scene and, well, plot. The city is meant to be every city, any city, no city – which works less as a celebration of urbanity and more as an irritating conceit which prevents the book from ever achieving any sense of place. Thompson’s preference for generalisations over specifics, for summary over scene, quickly becomes tiresome. Example:

Every pleasure palls. In a short time Stephen had learnt to drink deep of experimental delights that would have frightened most of us if we understood them, but the richer the meal, the sooner the appetite wanes, and the epicurean longs for more exotic flavours. He never saw himself as a sybarite; he thought of his explorations as light-hearted, even a kind of joke. But anyone can drift away from themselves when nothing is forbidden. Before he realised it the mask wouldn’t come off: he was corrupt with luxury, famished with feasting. The society knew how to watch for its moment. His mind and body were precise instruments for their own indulgence, but his imagination was sickly with exhaustion. He had fallen into the lassitude of one who has gone too far in the secret regions of experience, achieved too much in the sphere of private ambitions; now the tawdriness of the world was making him ill. His exquisite appetites troubled him more than ever but there was nothing, it seemed, that could answer anymore to his needs. He was bored.

So was I. How can you expend so many words and yet say so little? The result of passages like this – strung into stories, strung into a “novel” – is that I never connected with a single character, never connected with the city, never really cared about what was going on. It was one of those books I had to force myself to finish.

I saw nothing of the “genre pastiche” that had reviewers comparing this to the far superior David Mitchell. I only noticed two stories rendered in a deliberate genre style, that of Sam Spade and then Sherlock Holmes. Both of these were awkwardly written, with imitation prose interrupted by Thompson’s own flights of philosophical fancy – so that, for example, a gumshoe getting roughed up by thugs in a dirty alleyway pauses to notice a black and gold lizard watching him from a trash can, and reflects that he’d “never seen one like it in the city.” (So much beauty in the world!) The stories, for the most part, lap over onto each other like waves of tedious melodrama, and I barely noticed when shifting from one to another except to mark my relief that the book was drawing closer to its conclusion.

Last year’s Booker longlist, for all its scandal about “readability,” featured a number of very interesting novels that took the trouble to tell a story. This year’s has shoved the gearstick back up to highbrow, and I’m sure Sam Thompson’s Communion Town isn’t the only nominee that sacrifices function for form; I’ve heard nightmarish things about Will Self’s Umbrella, and an article Ned Beauman wrote about himself in The Awl was marinated in arrogance and put me off ever reading any of his books. The Booker committee is welcome to their summer of difficult, tedious novels that are more pre-occupied with self-absorbed experimentation than they are with telling stories or saying something worthwhile.

I could end the review there, but I feel like I’ve been a bit too vitriolic for a first novel, so I’ll mention a couple of redeeming factors. Thompson is certainly skilled with the written word, and there are sentences or passages of description in Communion Town which paint a vivid picture and genuinely stand out. (He just needs to learn to restrain himself when delving into his characters’ mental geography.) The book is an experiment in what can be accepted as a novel, and originality should always be encouraged. (He just needs to realise that experimentation must be tempered, and that not everyone will be as interested in his conceits as he is.) And, finally, I’m in the minority- most people seem to have liked Communion Town. So there you go, make your own decision. show less