Formal Transcendence: Rob Doyle's 'Threshold'
Read the opening pages of this innovative, influential masterwork
In advance of his impassioned and provocative masterclass on prose style, we present the opening section of Rob Doyle’s novel ‘Threshold’.
In 1961 Wayne C. Booth published The Rhetoric of Fiction, arguing against the show-don’t-tell school that dominated 20th-century fiction, and demonstrating brilliantly all that’s been lost as a result. That school has if anything been even more dominant this century, and many writers and teachers seem unaware that it’s not compulsory to write that way.
Irish writer Rob Doyle has never been interested in dumping on us yet more show-don’t-tell Replicant literary fiction. He’s as far from a Replicant as exists in contemporary literature, and is therefore to be cherished. We didn’t pick his novel Threshold from recent releases or a prizelist — it was published four years ago — but simply because we rate it highly. We hope you do too.
Mushroom
Some time ago I lived for a year in Stoneybatter, the pleasantly self-contained neighbourhood of brick terraces just north of the Liffey. My back garden, as I soon came to think of it, was the Phoenix Park – its seven hundred hectares began just a five-minute walk from my door. A couple of weeks after I moved in, I arranged with my friend Fran to go picking magic mushrooms in the park. It was mid-October, the height of the season.
Even if we hadn’t found any mushrooms, it would have been a well-spent evening. Phoenix Park is resplendent at that time of year, ablaze with golds, mauves, browns and greens under vast skies. I’d been going out there a lot since moving to the area, to wander in the open spaces and the cold invigorating air. Fran is in his forties and has been taking magic mushrooms since his teens. He has been coming to the park during picking season for several years now, after chancing upon a batch during a walk with a friend. I had only ever been out foraging for mushrooms a couple of times in my life, with moderate success – once at the Sugar Loaf, in County Wicklow, and later on the hills along Dublin’s southern coast. While I might be liable to confuse the ‘magic’, psilocybin-containing mushroom with similar but non-hallucinogenic varieties, Fran knows exactly what to pick. The target variety – Psilocybe semilanceata, commonly known as the liberty cap – is quite small, and smooth, with brownish-white stems; Fran advised me to look for ‘the little nipple on top’. We found about fifty liberty caps that evening, most of them near the trail of the herd of deer that roams through the park: magic mushrooms tend to grow in fields fertilised by the faeces of certain herbivores, such as deer, cattle and sheep.
We split the mushrooms evenly, and dried them out in our respective homes, pressed between sheets of newspaper. When they were dried, the mushrooms shrivelled into stringy, dark-brown, faintly sinister-looking versions of their handsome former selves. A week later, Fran and I made an infusion by boiling them up in a pot at my house. Some users of Irish magic mushrooms prefer to bake them into a cake, or spread them on a pizza. The mushrooms can also be eaten directly: for a nice hit, you roll about twenty of them into a ball and gobble it down. The only drawback to the direct method is the possibility of stomach cramps caused by bacteria that the boiling process kills off.
It was a Wednesday afternoon: Fran had got off work early for the occasion. We drank the mushroom tea, hung around the house till the effects began to be felt, and then wrapped up in scarves and beanie hats and walked out to the park. It was a mild trip and, for me, undercut with anxiety. We had not taken a strong enough dose to have full-on hallucinations, only an intensification of the visual field, with heightened colours and vivid, shifting surfaces, together with a quickening of the intellect, a capacity to reflect on memories, ideas and phenomena from novel perspectives. I later wondered if the anxiety the excursion brought out in me had been triggered by a few stray mushrooms of a malign variety we had inadvertently cooked up in our brew. Likelier, though, it was a manifestation of the latent anxiety I carry around with me at all times, a free-floating dread that seizes on to whatever object presents itself.
After a couple of hours, the anxiety passed. It was another beautiful, slow-burning autumn evening, another limitless sky. We came upon the herd of deer. As the sun set, we watched them retreat into a copse at the end of the elevated plains, the antlered males stationed around the perimeter as sentries, the does and fawns calmly blinking at us as they ambled among the foliage. By the time night had fallen, the only other people in the park were joggers, mostly in clusters, with flashlights fixed to their heads. Without having to make much of an effort, we picked another small batch of mushrooms as we wandered. One more heavy rainfall, said Fran, and the park would be full of them.
It rained the next day. The day after that, a Friday, while most of the city was at work, I set out alone on my bike with an empty salt-and-vinegar Pringles tube. I cycled past the Wellington Monument, that towering imperialistic monolith proclaiming battles won and enemies vanquished, with the listed names of faraway cities up each side – a phallic Ozymandias declaring the grandeur of a dissolved empire as children played and students strummed guitars around its base. Fran had told me that the metal used in the engravings that adorned the monument had been stripped from captured enemy cannons. I recorded in my notebook the vainglorious paean etched on one of the monument’s sides, presumably to the Duke of Wellington:
ASIA AND EUROPE, SAVED BY THEE, PROCLAIM INVINCIBLE IN WAR THY DEATHLESS NAME, NOW ROUND THY BROW THE CIVIC OAK WE TWINE, THAT EVERY EARTHLY GLORY MAY BE THINE
I too had played at the foot of the monument as a child, with no understanding of its significance, nor its curious poignancy, its sense of having been left behind, an erratic, far from home.
I cycled up the hill, from where there are views over the quaint, tree-lined village of Chapelizod and the Liffey valley, the city, and the mountains in the distance. I passed the old arsenal, now a well-fortified concrete shell, from where the British used to keep watch over the city, poised to quell any insurrection and enforce the ominous motto emblazoned on the city’s coat of arms: An obedient populace is a happy populace. Then I was out on to the plains, with the looming white cross on the far side, erected in 1979 to commemorate the papal visit. More than a million people attended that visit, one of whom was a seven-year-old Fran, despite his parents being determinedly secular. The papal visit took place in late September, so it is likely that a great many magic mushrooms were trampled under the feet of the multitudes. A series of well-tended football pitches stretched along the length of this raised section of the park, ending with the copse where we had watched the deer, fringed by a road dropping into a valley.
I stayed out there for three or four hours, and picked about three hundred mushrooms. I didn’t really want the mushrooms for myself and thought I would give most or all of them away. It’s something about being in my thirties: the appeal of psychedelics has receded, and the unease I associate with drug usage in general has increased. Maybe it is natural, a self-preservative mechanism that kicks in at a certain age, or maybe I just have more to be apprehensive about. But even if I didn’t really want them, I thought it good that others have them. The magic mushroom is among a handful of psychotropic substances that I have, with certain qualifications, actively encouraged others to try, whose wonders it seems to me a shame to get through a human life without encountering. The psychedelic experience, I have long felt, is so astonishing, opens up such startling vistas of beauty and otherness, that to live and die without knowing it is comparable to never having encountered literature, or travelled to another continent, or attempted to communicate in a foreign language.
I first tried magic mushrooms in my early twenties. I can’t remember the precise occasion, nor much about the trip, but it must have been pretty good or I wouldn’t have taken to them so enthusiastically afterwards. Before trying mushrooms, I had felt towards psychedelic substances the same sort of curiosity that drew me to philosophy, art and literature, particularly those varieties that trafficked in the mysterious, the sublime, the fantastical and the shocking. At the root of my interest in both drugs and art was the longing for an encounter with otherness, a seeking-out of astonishment for its own sake. The craving for fascination that I slaked with the work of, say, Borges, or the more colourfully speculative branches of philosophy – the Presocratics, Nietzsche, the Hindu metaphysicians – also motivated me to investigate the mind-altering effects of plant hallucinogens, and drugs in general. The counterpoint to this hunger for the strange and the sublime was the profound boredom I felt for the world I had grown up in, the revulsion for what seemed to me a crushingly drab, incurious, cultureless environment.
Down the years, I have had many wildly enjoyable, sometimes awesome trips on magic mushrooms, and a few bad ones. Most of the latter have been largely my own fault: I took the mushrooms irresponsibly, wilfully so, in the wrong circumstances and frames of mind. Thelonious Monk had a line about how he would start his improvisations by striking the wrong chord: the music would flow as he tried to make his way back to the right one. For a while, I told myself that my attitude to taking magic mushrooms was in a similar vein, but really it had more to do with impatience and recklessness, and the results sometimes were terrifying, though they never lasted more than a few hours, and usually resolved in a plateau of insight, serenity and euphoria.
A decade before I foraged in the Phoenix Park, Ireland had gone through a period, lasting a couple of years and now legendary among aficionados, during which magic mushrooms from around the world were legally available for over-the-counter purchase. The most commonly propagated version of how this golden age came about is that a Trinity College law student discovered a loophole in Irish legislation: while it was illegal to process or prepare magic mushrooms, it was lawful to possess and sell them in their natural state. When knowledge of the loophole became general, around 2004, outlets across Ireland began selling mushrooms legally, importing potent varieties from Thailand, Mexico, Indonesia and elsewhere. The mushrooms were kept in refrigeration and could therefore be sold and consumed fresh, circumventing the law. My friends and I, enthusiastic about drugs in general (with some exceptions – I never really knew anyone who had taken heroin, for instance), greeted the new-found availability of these exotic mushrooms with an exploratory zeal. There was one summer when we bought and ate mushrooms pretty much every weekend, usually to ecstatic effect. As summer faded into autumn, we realised we needed to lay off them for a while: perhaps as a somatic braking mechanism against an accumulation of psilocybin in our systems, our trips became harrowing and unpleasant, despite our efforts to take the mushrooms in congenial moods and settings (often in the flat of one of our group, with music and musical instruments on hand).
Before that, there were some memorable occasions. There was the birthday of a friend of mine who lived in a shared house in Bayside along with my then girlfriend. It was a sunny evening; we had erected a marquee and spent the day drinking beer and having a laugh. As the sun set, five or six of us ate the Thai cubensis mushrooms we had bought from a head shop in Temple Bar. The effects lasted for hours, were blissful and intellectually stimulating, and inspired us to retreat into the garage, which my friend had converted into a music studio. There, we performed and recorded a chaotic, instrument-swapping, genuinely psychedelic sonic extravaganza that, when we listened to it soberly the following day, really was what it had seemed to be in the moment of creation: the weirdest music we had ever made, in youths devoted to making weird music. A friend mastered the live mix and we put out a few DIY copies under the band name Heads Will Roll.
That same summer, a ginger-haired friend we’d met in college invited us out to camp and surf with him on a deserted beach in his native Mayo. I had little interest in surfing but, like my friends, I reckoned that the raw Atlantic coast, with its dramatic skies, was an ideal venue for yet another mushroom trip. The first night was a disaster: my friends and I, city-dwellers all, had made no real preparations for a night in the screaming wind and cruel cold of a remote Mayo beach. We took some mushrooms (Psilocybe tampanensis, also known as philosophers’ stones or, to us, truffles) then sat there for hours, shivering in misery and darkness. The effects of the mushrooms conspired with our physical discomfort to provoke relentless, brutal introspection – a long dark night of grim self-confrontation. In the morning, though, we found we once more had a huge, golden stretch of beach, crashing sea, plunging dunes and revivifying sun all to ourselves. The others put on wetsuits and got ready to surf, while I decided to eat the remainder of the mushrooms and wander off alone.
I was gone maybe four hours. I followed the beach out to where there was no trace of anyone. I climbed dunes and walked along the crest of the sea. As I moved, the psilocybin flooded my system, nurtured by the warm sun, the stretching of my limbs, and the beauty and expansiveness of my surroundings. There are certain experiences that are impossible to describe satisfactorily, which you can only know by having them yourself. So I’ll keep it relatively brief: alone on the beach, which felt endless, I lay down in the warm sand, sheltered by a towering dune, and watched the sky. It would have been magnificent even without psilocybin; with it, the vastness of swirling, voluptuous clouds framed by bottomless blue became an immense mosaic, depicting a cosmic drama of copulation, birth, transformation and unlimited eroticism. All boundaries were erased – women, men, children and beasts fused in amorous plenitude, a shifting, simultaneous fulfilment of every carnal yearning and sensuous whim. I drank it all in, smiling helplessly at times, powerfully aroused yet deeply serene. As ever, there was a faint sadness to the experience: I knew, even as I was undergoing it, that I could never possibly express the richness of it to anyone else, neither through art nor conversation. Having no skill for painting and being a mediocre musician, the best I could hope for was a few inadequate sentences in a book such as this one. Some hours later, sated with wonder, bliss and insight, I got up and walked slowly back along the empty miles of the beach, to my friends, who were cooking sausages on the stove.
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Rob Doyle's third book, THRESHOLD, was published in 2020 by Bloomsbury, and was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. Doyle's debut novel, HERE ARE THE YOUNG MEN, was published in 2014 by Bloomsbury and the Lilliput Press. It was selected as one of Hot Press magazine’s ‘20 Greatest Irish Novels 1916-2016’, and has been made into a film starring Dean Charles Chapman and Anya Taylor Joy. THIS IS THE RITUAL, a collection of short stories, was published in 2016 to widespread acclaim. His AUTOBIBLIOGRAPHY was published to similar acclaim in 2021. He is the editor of the anthology THE OTHER IRISH TRADITION (Dalkey Archive Press), and IN THIS SKULL HOTEL WHERE I NEVER SLEEP (Broken Dimanche Press). He has written for the New York Times, TLS, Sunday Times, Dublin Review, Observer and many other publications, and throughout 2019 he wrote a weekly column on cult books for the Irish Times.