Edge of Voices was first published not in Ireland but in France, and then in New York, by small independent presses committed to the literary heterodox. Turner gave several readings in Paris, where he gained minor cult status. Then, when he was thirty-three, he received an Irish Arts Council bursary, which he used to fund a trip around Europe. He travelled for three months, filling several notebooks with reflections on post-war Europe that were to inform his work for years to come. Instead of returning to Ireland after his travels, Turner settled in West Berlin, where he was to remain for the final three years prior to his disappearance.
Throughout the early eighties, from the anarchist and bohemian neighbourhood of Friedrichshain he had made his home, Turner continued to send stories, essays and other, increasingly uncategorisable writings almost exclusively to Irish journals, as if still engaged in a dialogue with a land he had otherwise repudiated. (By no means were all of these pieces accepted for publication.) Turner rented a small apartment in a block largely occupied by political radicals and artists, and seemed to thrive in this environment. The poet Sarah Flanagan, who also lived in Berlin around this time and befriended Turner, later remarked that his apartment had something of the monk’s cell to it. ‘There was a stove, a pot, a pan, a few cups and plates, a desk, and a bed. Apart from that, the only things he had were books,’ she said. Asked about Turner’s social and romantic life in this period, she replied: ‘I don’t know what to say about that. I mean, for sure he was handsome, and he had a certain charisma. But there was a. . a kind of privacy to him that went beyond simple introspectiveness. Like he would only let you come so far, and then he’d step out into the grounds of the castle to meet with you. He was never unfriendly, never cold. But there was a boundary. I used to wonder about his love life. He never told me about it, and when I asked he was always wittily evasive. Later, of course, there were all the rumours, but I didn’t know him any more by that stage. . I used to tell him he looked like Michel Foucault, with the bald head, the intense eyes, the glasses. He liked that. He rarely laughed, but he had a lively, faint kind of smile. I remember that.’
Living within sight of the Berlin Wall, steeped in the atmosphere of what he called ‘the city on earth that has come closest to the core of the darkness, hearing the very beat of the devil’s wing’, Turner’s lifelong fascination with Nazi Germany, the Holocaust and the Second World War found endless stimulation. He took long, aimless walks through the city, at all times of day or night, overcome with visions of the enormity that had been perpetrated there mere decades ago. Reading deeply from the literature of the war, Turner developed what he described as a ‘merciless obsession’ with Hitler’s plan, devised during the height of the Third Reich’s reach and ambition, to convert the island of Ireland into the ‘granary of Europe’ following the final triumph of Nazism. Turner’s second book, The Garden, was the controversial fruit of this obsession.
Coining the term ‘Nazi-pastoral’ to describe an almost aggressively uncategorisable work, critics were not quite sure how seriously to take its plotless, meticulously realised, deadpan portrait of an alternative, Nazified Ireland in which Hitler’s plan has come to pass. Written in a documentary style recalling sociological surveys and governmental reports, The Garden was, according to one critic, ‘either a joke in questionable taste, or the nostalgic, vindictive fantasy of a confused and lonely man, whose bitterness has bred a disingenuous sympathy for the Nazis and for Hitler’. Indeed, defenders of the book, who insisted it was an extended exercise in cautionary irony, foundered when they tried to explain away the all-too-convincing sincerity in Turner’s depictions of a bucolic Ireland run by communities of agrarian fascists, where cheery colleens Irish-dance around swastikas, and boys in the Hitler Youth of Ireland (whose honorary president is W. B. Yeats) are taught to hunt, cook and swim, whilst having their imaginations fed by Celtic and Nordic mythology, and receiving lessons in the rudiments of Darwinism and race theory.
Thus far, sexuality had had a somewhat muted presence in Turner’s work. Turner himself appears to have always been at ease with his own homosexuality (or strong homosexual tendencies), even if he was reluctant to publicise it in the conservatively Catholic Ireland where he had come of age. In Berlin, however, Turner took full advantage of the city’s fierce permissiveness to explore this sexuality in a deeper way than had been possible hitherto. The discoveries he made in the course of these explorations, based on his writings subsequent to The Garden, were strange and disturbing, hinting at the darkest recesses of the Sadean imagination. ‘It was as if’, writes one of Turner’s most perceptive and sympathetic critics, ‘[he] came to view his sexuality, and beyond that, the broader configuration of his instinctual drives, as a kind of map or diagram in which he could discern, in microcosm, all the horrors and psychopathology — political, social, personal — of thetraumatic century into which he had been born.’4
Abandoning the last vestiges of conventional narrative fiction, and taking as his new literary models Bataille,5 Sade and Burroughs, Turner ventured into murky, often questionable artistic territories. At the same time, and with equal conviction, he conducted countless nocturnal forays into Berlin’s transgressive, erotic underworld. His most grotesque or bizarre adventures found their way into the writings of this period — writings which convey the unholy, anarchic allure of the Berlin night, in pages crowded with masochistic dog-men, dungeon-crawling ‘spiritual abortions’, bald women draped in chains ‘with vaginas in their armpits and armpits in their vaginas’, weeping teenage prostitutes from the Soviet hinterlands, and mute rent-boys with pure and sorrowful visages.
By this time, Turner had learned German well enough to hold a series of unglamorous jobs in Berlin (he was not making nearly enough from his writing to live on). He worked for a spell as a night-watchman on building sites on the fringes of the city. Then he got a job as a caterer on trains connecting West Berlin to various cities to the north. In one of his most difficult passages, Turner writes of the strange happiness he experienced in this job, peering out the windows at ‘the silent dream of passing German landscape, a sublimely dreary post-industrial idyll whose every inch sang of holocaust — of the holocaust already passed and the holocausts to come, for all infinity, an eternal recurrence of this most perfect human exaltation and nightmare, the ecstatic vision of an engineered hell. . And then I would interrupt my window-gazing reveries and, suffused with a world-embracing love like that described by the mystics, serve Coca-Cola, orange juice and ham sandwiches to beautiful German children and their waddling parents.’6
It is at this point that a heavier fog descends on the biographical trail; fact, fiction and hallucination become impossible to separate. Most of what follows cannot be verified as factual truth, having been pieced together from Turner’s perilous later writings and the sparse accounts of those who knew him at the time. It is entirely possible that most of what is here recounted bears no relation to events that took place in external reality. However, it is the author’s belief that what follows is, at least, an approximation of the reality that pertained within the troubled psyche of Killian Turner in the period leading to the autumn of 1985. The only events which undoubtedly did take place are those of Turner’s disappearance and the subsequent investigation; the rest must be considered either metaphor or speculation.