In the morning when I awoke, my mother was downstairs, cooking breakfast. I could smell coffee and frying bacon. A bird was chirping outside the window and beams of filtered sunlight warmed the room. I got up from the floor and went downstairs. My mother was sipping tea. She handed me a small, round cup, the one with a delicate Japanese sketch of a bird on the side. I could tell by her eyes that she had been crying and had slept badly, if at all, but she made an effort to smile. I smiled back. I put a hand on her shoulder. ‘I’m goin to talk to them at the college,’ I said. ‘I’m goin to see if they’ll take me back after Christmas. Ye never know, it might be worth a try.’
Peering at me with widened eyes over the curve of her teacup, my mother nodded faintly. She hesitated, fearful of crushed hopes. Then she said, ‘I knew ye would. I never stopped prayin for ye.’ Tears welled up, her voice was cracking. ‘I never will stop prayin for ye. I mean it. I never will.’
Exiled in the Infinite — Killian Turner, Ireland’s Vanished Literary Outlaw
It is impossible today to read either the work or the life of the novelist, essayist, epigrammatist and pornographer Killian Turner, without seeking in it clues to the mystery of his disappearance, or attempting to locate the genesis of the strange obsessions that would eventually consume him.
There is little beyond what Turner called ‘the crash-landing site of my birthplace’ by which he could meaningfully be called an ‘Irish writer’. In fact, his body of work, taken as a whole, might be seen as Turner’s lifelong project of effacing all marks of nationhood from his authorial voice and literary being. It is clear from comments made by Turner in his letters to other writers and artists (the majority of them obscure), and certain remarks in his essays,1 that, like such pointedly un-Irish compatriot-predecessors as Beckett and Joyce, Turner wished to be considered first and foremost a European author.2
Born into an upper-middle-class family in Dalkey, County Dublin, in 1948, Turner only began writing with any seriousness in his early twenties.3 It may be that Turner was prevented from writing as a younger man by the unhappiness of his home life. Maureen Turner, Killian’s mother, died after complications resulting from the birth of her only child. Killian’s father, Henry, was a history teacher in a private secondary school in Dalkey, and a man of trenchantly melancholy disposition. In the smog-choked winter evenings of Killian’s boyhood and adolescence, Henry would call his son into his study. There, as Killian stood silently by his side, the father would issue sweeping utterances about the destruction inherent in the very cells of civilisation, the transience of mankind, and the utter folly of all our humanistic dreams of progress, peace and salvation. The cold gaze of scientific comprehension, declared father to son, betrays the appalling truth of our place in the universe as an accidental and fear-crazed species, rubbing its bleary eyes to find itself perched aboard a rock that hurtles through black infinities, whose only destiny is to be swallowed up once more in the great darkness. Religion, morality, truth, human solidarity — these are nothing, proclaimed the father, but the consoling fictions bred by our proximity to the abyss and the panic it engenders.
It can only be imagined what impression these dark lessons had on the sensitive young Killian. What we can be sure of, however, is that the great, seismic event of Turner’s youth was the suicide by poisoning of Henry Turner at the age of fifty-three, when Killian was eighteen. This event, reappearing in various guises, is the black hole, the vortex of destructive fury around which Turner’s writing orbits, drawing ever closer, inviting — and this is what gives the experience of reading Turner what has been called its ‘vertiginous’, ‘abyssal’ quality — a kind of cosmic-orgasmic catastrophe in the psyche of both reader and writer.
Until the death of his father, Turner seems to have been a rather normal child and young man. He enjoyed hurling, soccer and Gaelic football. His schoolmates and friends remembered him as being quiet, but devastatingly witty when called upon to use his wit as a weapon, and gently hilarious when among friendlier company. He was something of a loner by disposition, yet not unpopular. Beginning in early childhood, Turner read voraciously. In his teens he had a colossal appetite for science fiction and so-called ‘weird’ fiction (his fascination with the work of H. P. Lovecraft bordered on the religious: the young Turner would spend whole weekends in his room, drawing wildly imaginative pictures of the Old Ones of Lovecraftian mythology. Not infrequently, his father and any visitors to the household would be startled by sudden, bellowed recitals, issuing from Killian’s bedroom, of the incantations of savage tribes to their hellish gods familiar to readers of Lovecraft’s stories: Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!).
In his late teens and early twenties, Turner lived on the inheritance he had received upon his father’s death. He did not pursue third-level studies, though he did continue to read as much, and more widely than ever, nourishing keen interests in mythology, anthropology and avant-garde physics. It was during this period that Turner began to imagine he could become a writer. At the age of twenty-five, having published two short stories and several reviews in various Irish journals and newspapers, he set to work on his first novel. Edge of Voices took four years to complete, and a further two to find a publisher, finally seeing print when its author was thirty-one. Regarded from its first appearance as one of the true oddities of Irish literature (a literature hardly scarce of oddities), the novel is equal parts semi-autobiographical portrayal of an unremarkable Dublin adolescence, and fantastical, eerie missive from the furthermost extremes of human experience. The story, such as it is, tells of a boy, Michael Kavanagh, similar in most ways to Turner, who, on the day of his Catholic confirmation, begins to receive, or believe he is receiving, telepathic messages from a hyper-intelligent presence, perhaps extraterrestrial or inter-dimensional in origin, which may once have inhabited the earth in corporeal form, but now exists only as an imperceptible atmospheric layer. Michael is deeply troubled by the messages, often doubting his own sanity. Yet he continues to live his outward life more or less as usual, enduring the timeless trials of adolescence and winning local renown as a full-back on the under-17 Gaelic football team. Then, after Michael reaches his eighteenth birthday, loses his virginity (in what must rank as one of the most hilarious love scenes in Irish fiction) and applies to study European History at Trinity College, all in the same bittersweet week, the transmissions abruptly cease, never to resume. The final sixty pages of the book are given over to an exegesis, supposedly set down in the fourth millennium AD, of the messages received by Michael over a three-year period during his adolescence. The implication seems to be that Michael has become some sort of messiah, or the founder of a new religion or civilisation.