Ian Duhig ~ The Speed of Dark ~ Reviewed

Ian Duhig: 'The Speed of Dark' (Picador, 2007)Review by Katy Evans-Bush

As the notes at the back of Ian Duhig's new collection tell us, Umberto Eco has said that 'all the problems of the Western world emerged in the middle ages'. This statement looks compelling, post-9/11: the problems of the Middle Ages have indeed come back to haunt our post-Enlightenment dream. It is time to reconnect.

Ever since his first collection Duhig has had an ear to the keyhole of the middle ages, listening to its echoes of meaning in our language, our symbols. The Speed of Dark takes this on as a whole collection — a collection which does not in any way feel dry, or learned (though it is very learned).

This book is funny, dark, brutal and sophisticated, adopting the often dialectical religious world-view, the transgressive satire, the modernness of the medievals — and by extension the medievalness of us — via two 14th-century French manuscripts.


The book revolves around the character of Fauvel, the transgressive, anti-heroic mocker and sneerer, half-man, half-horse, from a medieval satire called Le Roman de Fauvel. Fauvel can say what other characters can't: he is above the notion of goodness; his name echoes 'false veil', is an acrostic for 'avarice' and 'vilanie' among other things, and is closely related to the colour fawn, 'a colour of evil narcissism'. Fauvel exposes the hypocrisies and falsenesses behind other veils.
Duhig sets the stage with a three-page tour de force in satirical rhyming couplets:
Seigneurs et dames, you're welcome all!I'm just flown in from Charles de Gaulle, your man-stroke-horse-stroke-King-Fauvel — your interlocutor as wellwith hopes my new verse may enhancethis show from medieval France…


… Europe's seen enough of schism:two Popes, you prods; its left and righttook turns to reign as day with nightto chase some ism with a wasm.

'Fauvel's Prologue' also pillories…

… politicians, literati,businessmen, the arty-farty,churchmen, coppers, dons and judges,civil servants — none begrudges:all stroke and comb me just the same,as 'fawn's one meaning of my name,they fawn upon my rough fawn coat…

In the Roman de Fauvel, Fauvel wants to marry La Dame Fortuna — Lady Luck — so she won't cast him down again as her wheel turns. She, however, as Duhig writes, instead palms him off with Vainglory: 'my delinquent daughter:/ if you're a rip, then she's a snorter./ And since you'll argue black is white/ then marry her in widow's silk…'. This turning of fortune's wheel — first up, then down — represents another prominent dualism in the book. In the notes (which are interesting, and add much to one's understanding, but are certainly not necessary to enjoy the poems) Duhig explains that Fauvel attacks 'hybridity, distinctions dissolved, things becoming what they should not'. The whole book has a distinctly Manichean flavour, with everything contained in, or expressed by, its opposite. Even Duhig's image (borrowed, of course, from Barbara Tuchman) of the Middle Ages being a mirror results in a reversed view of ourselves. It's a dark view, and fierce, but none the less joyous for that.

What we see in this reversed view is a world today in which we are once again caught between the warring orthodoxies of the three religions ('people of the book' is an apt appellation, here).

This is not a new subject for Duhig any more than the middle ages are — I suspect he gets a kick out of schism — though it takes on a fuller shape here than previously. All three religions get a look-in in this book — epigraphs from the Qu'ran underline the contemporaneous message — and, placed in this medieval proximity, their centuries-old rivalry feels more and more like the sibling variety.

The 'one-eyed king' referred to several times is Islam's anti-Christ figure, the one-eyed Dajjal. The poem 'Eye Service' ends:
The die is cast in Caesar's Palace;slot-jockeys, we're on Fauvel's string,our silks all spun by Saadi's spider,our race the sport of a one-eyed king.
(The double-entendre there doesn't hurt.)

The poem 'Et de Man Sale', with its epigraph from Paul de Man ('Nowadays we are less than ever capable of philosophical generality rooted in genuine self-insight'), begins 'The fascist regime grants/ complete freedom to the poet' (italics original), and finishes its description of a suitable crest with the line: 'his sinister eye, just plucked out'.
This one-word suggestion of the 'I' of self-insight as the thing that is missing from the eye of Dajjal encapsulates one of Duhig's major themes: the meanings of words themselves, and how many meanings can be expressed through one word. (Back in 'Eye Service': 'No motets praise the Trinity'/ our choirs just babble monologues,/ each lyric 'Je' sans frontiers…') Words in this book, not surprisingly, seem to melt into their meanings through etymology, sound, suggestion, placement against their opposites. This book is about not only meaning but the significance of meaning in a world where everything's upside-down. And meaning can be twisted.
'Laisse II' of the gruelling 'Chanson de Charlemagne' puts this into practice with the lines 'Wounds made a dovecote of our Saviour's flesh,/ so those who give wounds are the Dove's true friends'. (This reprises the selfsame image of 'the dovecote of Christ's body' from Duhig's earlier poem, 'Margery Kempe's' —Margery Kempe having been a 14th-century mystic.) Thus is characterised the hero of France, the supposed king of Peace. The poem also describes the ingeniousness of Charlemagne's cruelty.

Poems set closer to home show that these concerns are not cosily tucked-up in the past: film noir 'turned film blanc', Chinatown with its 'private eye' and Faye Dunaway's character who dies, shot through her bad eye. 'Walk the Line' describes Johnny Cash's wearing of black to represent the poor, while the very funny 'Communion' describes a gruesome Vatican film called 'The White Suit' — about a boy happy to suffer mutilation if it means he can wear a white suit to his first communion — shown by a nun to a catechism class:

Most of the class had weeks of nightmares. Parents complained. One day, without a word, the nun was gone. To me she'd never beenquite there, less real than Giacomo's moustache,my phantom limb itching in its flesh imposteror my grasp of sacramental transubstantiation.
Transubstantiation is the subject of the wonderful 'Mencken sonnet', about the mystery of the perfect martini, '…its French vermouth/ dying out like harmonics of the lost chord:// Dean Martin just had waiters mention it nearby;/ Churchill merely bowed in the direction of France.' This poem's poised elegance acts as its own vehicle of transubstantiation.

This is a poem that could almost, in its metaphysical and formal perfection, been written by the late poet Michael Donaghy. And indeed, Donaghy is a presiding spirit of the book: 'But I felt in his work's shadow, brilliant, with epigraphs in the original French — ', Duhig writes. The first poem in the collection is a play on Donaghy's book on poetics, Wallflowers, and the second — 'Moshibboleth' — on his poem 'Shibboleth.' Later in the book, the prose poem 'Midriver' alludes to Donaghy's own 'Midriver'; the word echoes 'midstream', a place in which, in another poem, Duhig can't change horses — i.e., midway through this life. (It's worth noting, in this context, that Donaghy died at 50.)

Duhig shares with Donaghy an apprehension of poetic form as a vehicle for wit - as well as enough wit to require a vehicle. This book contains much rhyme: full, slant and off; quatrains, couplets, a sonnet, accentual trimeter quatrains, accentual blank verse, nonce forms. In 'Coda' the rhyme disintegrates just as the fishing nets he's describing do. 'Use Complete Sentences' is made of five beautifully-rhymed couplets in iambic pentameter. But, like Donaghy, Duhig is not a Formalist-with-capital-F. The use of form is not at all dogmatic or 'textbook', but flows as naturally (note, this does not mean effortlessly!) as playing music.

Some sections of the book seem a little slow — for this reviewer, maybe the several-poem-long riff on black and white could have been eked out with more reflection on other forms of being/not-being, seeming/not-seeming. The book is idea-heavy and Duhig has a job on his hands keeping the specifics straight in the reader's mind from poem to poem — most of us being slightly less versed in medieval heresies than he is.

One strength of the book, though, to my mind, is the absence of trite reference to the twin towers or any similar angle; a sentence in the notes connecting George Bush to both the Knights Templar and Dajjal, '(though these sites change quickly and are subject to security monitoring)', tells us all we need to know there.

What Duhig shares with Donaghy is an absolute, saturation-level engagement with this world, the one we live in every day, held in robust balance with a very living awareness of history. We, this book says, are definitely part of history, but no more than that — and no less than that. History is a dance in which we are a step. This book feels the perfect point for Duhig to have arrived at, a fusion of these two elements and culmination of something he's been approaching for years. He needn't fear the 'felt mute' of the bodhran: this book is like a song of complexity, wit and verve.