Father of Lies

"I first heard Brian Evenson speak on the Tin House podcast Between the Covers . I was really drawn to the book, because in the interview it was presented as being based on, or adjacent to, the Mormon faith. There’s a biographical element here: Evenson wrote a book of short stories called Altmann’s Tongue , which came out in 1994, when he was teaching at Brigham Young University in Utah—which is sponsored by the Church of Latter Day Saints—and one of the students complained about the contents of this short story collection. Altmann’s Tongue is quite sexual and graphic, and very violent. Brian Evenson was let know that he had to stop writing in this way if he wanted to continue teaching, and I think it was heavily suggested he would be excommunicated. In any case, he went into voluntary excommunication. Then he wrote this book, Father of Lies , which touches on institutional abuse and personal evil—and the personal evils that are upheld by institutions. Samuel Delaney has an amazing introduction in the Coffee House Press edition of the book, in which he describes it as “patriarchal horror fiction”—so, this idea of horror growing out of gendered power, or the horror that occurs when men are given power simply because they’re men. As you know, here in Ireland, we have a very particular history with institutional abuse where religion is concerned. So I was interested in the idea of this writer delving so deeply and unapologetically into scenarios in which children, women, are being abused in this horrific way. As is often the way, while the events depicted are often unbearable for many of us to even consider, there’s a release that comes when something that has been systematically concealed is given representative space. I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘catharsis’, but maybe something more ontological that can reverberate emotionally. “Can any piece of fiction live up to the quality of what you dreamed up to fill the voids?” Evenson is such a gentle, eloquent speaker. Not that we should all be embodying our work. God forbid. But I was so struck by how unapologetically horrific some of the content is, and how spare the language is as well. There’s a lyric quality too, which made it stand out to me. Again, there’s this sense of intellectual pursuit underpinning it, and a kind of refutation—a pushing back through fiction. I’ve read quite a bit by Evenson, but Father of Lies stands out to me because it also has a blurring of the horrific. It risks pornography, in some ways, to get to the heart of what’s happening. Fernanda Melchor has talked about that in relation to Hurricane Season . That book takes on huge, systemic misogyny and femicide, and she took the risk of being gratuitous and pornographic in her depictions of sexual violence in order to get across the heart. This is something else I’m drawn to as a writer: how do you work with material that’s so volatile it challenges your expectations of the form, and you can’t always tell you when you’ve gone too far. There’s so much at risk, and so much to be gained. In interviews, he’s spoken about Joycean modernism versus Kafka-esque modernism; with Joyce the experimentation is very verbose, it’s right there on the page and wants to show itself. Whereas with Kafka it’s about bareness, sparseness, and what gets left out, what you’re not seeing. So, yes, reading it for the first time it does strike you as a page turner in many ways. It’s almost like a slow car crash—you can’t look away. The ending feels so inevitable, and you’re complicit by looking, by partaking in this gaze. But then on the second pass you see various traits that accumulate into an experimental flavour, like arriving late and leaving early in every scene, a narrative composed of offstage moments as well as what we actually see. I love that. And deflection as well—things that are peripherally gathered. The investment we have in scenarios that we’ve imagined, irrespective of whether or not they’re accurate. Can any piece of fiction live up to the quality of what you dreamed up to fill the voids? Fiction that calls on the reader in this way really lingers."