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Mother of Darkness is published by Quartet Books. On it’s website, Quartet Books says:

Quartet Books is a leading independent publisher with a fine tradition of pursuing an alternative to mainstream.

This is a book rooted in Greek mythology. This meant it required some background research on my part and the limited nature of that research almost certainly means I have missed things in the novel. In fact, I listened to an interview with the author in which a very talkative interviewer, who clearly does know her classics, draws out some more of the parallels (see here for the full interview: Interview). There are many chapter headings that are quotes from The Bacchae or The Oresteia and many parallels in the story with events that are typical of Greek myth and tragedy.

Mother of Darkness tells the story of a lost soul, Matty Corani. Very quickly, we learn that Matty has lost everything and has turned to drugs in cycle of self-destruction. His inner mental state is mirrored by his location (Soho, London) which he sees as being destroyed by the property developers who are ripping the heart out of the area. Reluctantly, Matty agrees to see a psychotherapist. This gives rise to four distinct narrative voices in the book:

1. A third-person narrative telling us Matty’s story “now”. This is grounded in the real world and actual terror events from recent history are referenced as part of the story.
2. Copies of the notes taken by his psychotherapist during their sessions. In one of these she encourages him to write…
3. Matty’s life story in which he recounts what he remembers (or, at least, thinks he remembers, or, perhaps, would like to remember) of his life so far. “Unreliable narrator” does not come close!
4. Transcriptions of words spoken by Feracor, a god-like being Matty sees when under the influence of the drugs he increasingly relies on.

In the interview I listened to, Venetia Welby explained that her original motivation for the book came from a desire to explore what it is that pushes people to start cults, what it is that makes people come to believe they are special (a Messiah of some kind). In this context, we see Matty gradually descend into darkness. In Bacchanalian style, his one friend, Fix, says to him ”Why wouldn’t you want to try everything there is to try?” and it seems for a long time that this is what Matty wants: he wants to throw himself away in order to not have to deal with the present.

Things it is probably worth knowing a bit about to get the most from this book:

1. The Bacchae and The Oresteia
2. Puer Aeturnus
3. Messiah complexes (linked to Puer Aeturnus)
4. Dissociative Identity Disorder

I make it sound like this is a dark, depressing, difficult read. It certainly is dark, but is is strangely not depressing and it is certainly not difficult (apart from the references to things I didn’t know much about). The variety from the different narrative voices and styles keeps it fresh all the way through. There’s a twist at the end where you find yourself saying “Of course!” but probably didn’t think about it while reading the book.

Despite the darkness, the drugs, the damaged people, I found this a strangely enjoyable book to read. It is one I need to process a bit more to get to grips with it and any book that makes you want to do that deserves a bonus star, I think. 

Review by Neil George

There was a time when Soho never slept. It was a haven for insomniacs, or those who could sleep but would sooner avoid the terrors that their dreams threw up. That party’s over now, Soho’s suited and booted: Matty is the last man stand¬ing from an age he never knew.

Quartet Books is part of the UK’s wonderful small independent publisher scene, but a publisher with a longer and more esoteric history than most. Founded in 1972 “on socialist ideals and a strong emphasis on co-operative spirit”, in 1973 it published the iconic Joy of Sex, and, having undergone several evolutions, now has as its mission statement:

A commitment to find an alternative to the mainstream provides the key to our fine tradition of leftfield publishing. The aim at Quartet will always be to publish titles that larger houses are wary of and to do it with success. Our publishing continues to be risk-taking, but with a sharp eye towards the zeitgeist.

Our main strength is an ability to offer something different, without losing sight of the commercial realities, with a constant endeavour to rebuild on a firmly founded [back-]list.

This debut novel from Venetia Welby fits that well – taking what seems a reasonably conventional if tragic story, and presenting it in an innovative format that mixes in Greek mythology, apocalyptic and messianic visions and Jungian psychology.

Matty Corani, aged 22, comes from an ostensibly highly privileged background: the elder son of a globe-trotting senior diplomat, who was, at different times, the British Ambassador to Cuba, China and Russia.

Matty’s mother died giving birth to him; he was brought up by his father’s second wife who he met and married in Havana, and with whom he had Matty’s half-brother Ben. But when his father was posted away from Cuba, he left his wife behind, sent the boys to a UK boarding schools and took up with another woman in Russia, before dying, shortly after retiring:

My father was the British ambassador in Moscow until he died a couple of years ago. I’ve got a vile Russian stepmother to prove it and everything.

Matty had been living in his father’s grace-and-favour flat near Marble Arch (if he had had to pay rent on that, he would never have survived) and studying at UCL, although he had dropped out of his course just before his father died, after being caught selling drugs to his fellow students. But nevertheless he was apparently happy, with a strong, if not always entirely smooth, relationship with both his half-brother Ben and his partner Tera.

But, as the novel opens, his world has fallen apart, with Tera killed and Ben left comatose after a car accident, one which also revealed they had been having an affair:

Time and time again, he is forced to replay the story of his mother’s death, his own birth in Egypt. The dream inevitably turns to Tera’s death in Ben’s car, what he imagines happened in that fatal accident last year. First his mother morphs into Tera, and then he sees his brother, Ben. Ben at the wheel, Tera in the passenger seat, Tera’s face in Ben’s lap. His face, her face, obscene sculpture cut from the car wreckage, sex¬ual gargoyles—he imagines the paramedics grimacing, one vomiting, saying, ‘Shit, we’re going to have to cut him out of her.’ Had he seen photographs of the scene, or had the police described it to him? He simply can’t remember. The horror shut down his faculties.

He sells the flat, needing the cash to pay both for Ben’s care at the private Princess Grace hospital and his own growing drug habits, and moves to a seedy Soho bedsit, his only friend his dealer Fix:

It was largely under Fix’s roof that Matty’s unconscious time had played itself out, punctuated by brief visits to the police station. Fix always picked him up, though he feared ‘the pigs’ as he did conformity and salad. Matty had tried to spend as much time away from reality as he could, lost in a trance harnessed and honed by a steady stream of uppers and downers. Fix was the gatekeeper; he could open or close the portal to that dream life.

Fix was the only friend he had time for then. And now, actually. He was the reason Matty had sold his father’s flat and was renting the ‘micro-studio’—a bedsit—on the corner of Meard Street and Wardour Street. It was just down the road from Fix’s rent-capped den on the other side of Tottenham Court Road. Matty’s old family flat was crawling with corrupted memories and fake loyalties anyway.

The drug-addled parts of the novel were the least interesting for me. Fix seems to be channeling Neil from the Young Ones: at one point he announces:

We can’t begin to conceive of infinity, man, mortal minds are too limited to entertain the concept. The universe you do acknowledge is hard enough to get your head around. It’s just one of a limitless number of spheres, universes, domains, planes.

I was half expecting him to write a letter to his darling fascist bully boy bank manager that finished Boomshanka: (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0752255/q...)

And so far so (reasonably) conventional, but Welby goes on to tell us Matty’s story in a very different and innovative format, and one which elevates this above the usual fare.

With an upcoming trial for selling skunk as a student, his stepmother sends him, on their lawyer’s advice. to a psychologist, Dr Sykes (pun presumably intended) and the first sign of a different narrative forms is the inclusion, on page 14-15, of Dr Sykes case notes from her first interview with Matty, cleverly typeset in a different handwriting-like font and in memo format.

And psychology plays a key role in the novel as does the Philosophy and Greek that Matty was studying at University.

From Greek mythology the book draws heavily on the story of Orestes in Eumenides, with its echoes of Matty’s guilt over his own matricide through the act of his birth:

I should have been writing a paper on the role of the Furies in Aeschylus’ Eumenides. It’s a pretty cool story: boy (Orestes) has no choice but to kill mother; Furies (bit like crack whores) punish him by driving him mad; and then the poor fucker still has to stand trial for matricide because not even Apollo can save him from the ancient hell hags.

But also, and more to his own personal self-image, Euripides’ Bacchae and the story of the God Dionysius:

And they say that some foreigner, some wizard sorcerer, has come here from the land of Lydia, his fragrant hair falling in golden locks, his complexion wine-coloured.

Psychologically, Dr Sykes soon diagnoses him as having Puer Aetermus complex (aka Peter Pan syndrome), which itself draws form antiquity:

Marie-Louise von Franz, The Problem of the Puer Aeternus: ‘Puer aeternus is the name of a god of antiquity. The words themselves come from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and are there applied to the child-god in the Eleusinian mysteries. Ovid speaks of the child-god Iacchus, addressing him as puer aeternus and praising him in his role in these mysteries. In later times, the child-god was identified with Dionysus and the god Eros. He is the divine youth who is born in the night in this typical mother-cult mystery of Eleusis and who is a kind of redeemer… The title puer aeternus therefore means eternal youth, but we also use it sometimes to indicate a certain type of young man who has an outstanding mother complex and who therefore behaves in certain typical ways.(p7)

She also identifies him as suffering from Dysnarrativia, individuals who have lost the ability to construct narratives have lost themselves and urges him, as a key part of his therapy, to literally write his own story, an aim with which he concurs, as a way to take back control:

He wishes he could figure out how it has come to this. Have some sort of clarity or control over his life. He’d like a written world in which he can lose himself more completely. He’d like to write a parallel but happier universe into existence, one so comprehensive, so credible that he will be able to trick himself into knowing it as his true reality. And in writing his own path through it, he will find the thread of his own role, a scattered self linking all these episodes and emotions.

The inclusion of so much psychology and mythology requires some familiarity and work on the reader’s behalf, and Welby takes a different stance for each on how much work the reader is expected to do. She assumes some (perhaps acquired in parallel) familiarity with the myths, but on the psychology a lot of it is, rather artificially, explained in the text: the above quote was taken from Dr Sykes reproduced case notes but I’m dubious if psychologists really copy tracts of theory into their own notes.

The story from then on alternates between different forms of narration:

1. A conventional third-person limited narration of Matty’s life from his perspective. This includes in his (increasingly infrequent) sober moments, his own – albeit unreliable - reflections on what actually happened in his past, but also his increasingly drug-induced fantasies.

One of Welby’s themes is the gentrification of London – a topic on which I suspect we have different views (to me replacing an all-night bar by an all-day coffee shop is a good thing!). But she neatly and wittily ties this with Matty’s increasingly apocalyptic nightmare, a ghastly London where the Thames was blood and the east had overcome the west in some phenomenal world war., for example when a girlfriend persuades him to go out to talk:

They walk through the atomic fug and at some point start to hold hands. The pub is shut but survivors, he finds, have gathered in a twenty-four hour coffee bar which sells liquor to the shocked.

‘Funny isn’t it,’ he says to Sylvie, ‘that we’re still doing the same old things. Never adapt, never move forward, though the human race is dying around you. Just carry on.’

‘I know Soho’s not what it was,’ she replies, ‘but I think you’re being a little extreme.’

He also finds that his psyche fragments into different voices, which he references to The Book of Disquiet:

The Jitterer, fortunately, is easily calmed by the Barrister. The Mental Master respects the Barrister. Matty respects the Master. He creates mental harmony by harnessing the other two. And as Fernando Pessoa says, ‘In the vast colony of our being there are many different kinds of people, all thinking and feeling differently.’† The trick is divide and rule… it’s a martial art.

2. The ‘novel’ he agrees to write and send to Dr Sykes explaining his life story: one which takes fictional liberties e.g. his father becomes a king, King Darius, and he is Maxi. And at a more detailed level, a real-life story of his first kiss is reproduced but in the novel it is the girl who is obsessed, to an almost stalker level, with him afterwards, whereas in the narrative he admits it was the other way round.

But in practice, despite his attempt to control his story, it doesn’t work:

He is beginning to realise that this is not a position of power either. Yes, he gives life to his characters; technically he should be able to control what happens to them. He wants to have them all at his beck and call, jumping when he says jump—exactly, in fact, as they never did in life. But he can’t make them behave in ways that make no sense, which are out of character. In that sense, he is a slave to his own creation. He can’t reduce Tera to a puppet, forced to do his bidding, by writing about the behaviour of a fictional girl with a similar name. He is gaining no psychological insight into any of it, except perhaps a hideous realisation that it might have been his own behaviour that pushed Ben and Tera together. And what use is that knowledge? It’s too late to change now. If anything, he has become more firmly himself as time and tragedy have progressed.

3. Dr Sykes growing body of case notes, as mentioned above, and, in some cases, transcripts of their interviews, and also her footnoted psychological commentary on the stories.

4. A biblical-style prophecy – presented in columnar format – dictated to him, in visions, by the god Feracor (whose real-life manifestation appears to be Fix), and in which Matty is the chosen-one Mandrax, a messiah who is to drugs as Dionysius/Bacchus was to wine, called on to usher in a new age [the fourth age being the flawed age of Christ]:

I, Feracor, have come to take you forward, Mandrax, with your fellow humans into the Fifth Age.

As the novel progresses Matty falls increasingly prone to these visions, and one of Welby’s themes is how messianic complexes and cults actually starts: although here Matty is a messiah for the narcissistic 21st century social media age, his worshippers are his Facebook followers.

And just when I was wondering how Welby would end the book, she brings it to a disturbing and shocking conclusion.

Recommended. And thanks to Quartet Books for the review copy.

Helpful sources:

Excellent reviews:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
https://shinynewbooks.co.uk/mother-of...

Author interview:
https://www.mixcloud.com/radiogorgeou... (less)

Review by Paul Fulcher