How the One Becomes the Other
Tim Key, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush: An Anthology of Poems and Conversations from Outside
“Utter” & Press, 296pp, £15.00, ISBN 9781916222663
reviewed by Archie Cornish
Tim Key’s He Used Thought As A Wife (2020) emerged from the first lockdown, the heartbreakingly sunny twelve weeks bookended by the closing of the pubs and their heavily asterisked opening up. Its backbone is a series of dialogues, slant renderings of virtual conversations with friends and family. As we learned, though, Zoom could only ward off so much ennui. In place of dialogue at the end of Week Six comes a solitary dream vision. Key stares out of the window at a ‘parade’ in the street below, composed of ‘everyone he has ever met in his entire life’: his best friends, but also his dentist ‘playing a flute’, and his aunts ‘playing kettledrums’. It’s a poignant image: life out there, thundering past, glimpsed helplessly from inside.
This sequel begins in the disastrously bungled Christmas of 2020. Bohnson, Key’s reimagining of the Prime Minister, quaffs mulled wine in his Rudolf onesie, ignoring the ‘sad-as-hell nerds pointing to their dismal little graphs’. It records those terrible first months of 2021 — receding now, devoid as they were of anchoring experiences — after the evaporation of collective spirit and before the vaccine rollout gained momentum.
This time Key’s reflections come ‘From Outside’, as he trudges circuits of Hampstead Heath in his walking trousers. He isn’t a flâneur: in lockdown the city is for solitary exercise, not walking encounters. He fancies the woman in the coffee van, but can get to know her only in his dreams. With his Kentish Town territory confined to backdrop, Key’s focus is on the figures he meets for socially distanced conversations, or calls on his iPhone: his parents, his niece, and mostly his friends. The book’s through-line (and it could be forgiven for lacking one, since the pandemic always seemed more amenable to episodes than narrative arcs) it’s Key’s relationship with his designer Emily Juniper. She wants him to pick up his orange pen, to write another book, but he’s reluctant; then she becomes obsessed with drawing clocks and stops answering the phone.
In these conversations he seems always on the verge of revealing himself, telling his friends how lonely he feels. It’s the stage Bo Burnham reaches in his comedy special Inside, recorded in 2020: ‘I am not . . . well’, the American comedian tells the camera, before bursting into tears. But unlike Burnham, who talks to himself, Key is in dialogue, and throughout he playfully admits the inevitability of alteration when authentic speech is written down. Even beneath their stylisation, however, these conversations evade direct self-expression. All the feeling and yearning is channelled instead into restless, slightly sterile banter, full of verbal riffs and reactions but not much listening. ‘It doesn’t make sense’, exclaims the Colonel, Key’s pre-pandemic drinking partner, about the rules; ‘have I said it makes sense?’ he shoots back immediately.
Key is an accomplished comic screen actor, most visibly as Sidekick Simon to Alan Partridge. He’s also built a cult audience as a stand-up comedian, winning Edinburgh’s Perrier Award in 2009. (Stage directions from a dialogue with fellow comedian Daniel Kitson, as Key wanders with his rucksack round Highgate Cemetery, inform us that ‘the award is heavy on his back’.) His act alternates an edgy onstage persona, running verbal rings round the audience, with the recital of surreal poems printed on playing cards, tossed to the ground after reading. Some are beautifully brief: ‘Tanya Googled herself / Still nothing’. Longer poems narrate ridiculous events in ordinary settings. A protagonist called Robert Water discovers a fiver on the floor of HMV; when no one claims it Robert ‘uses his gun’ to arrange the customers into ‘orderly lines’. There’s an English buffoonery here — like Bertie Wooster, Robert is oblivious to how much he doesn’t get it – as well as a darker absurdism, the escalations and self-whittlings of Gogol or Daniil Kharms (Key has made Radio 4 documentaries on both writers). Bergson thinks that laughter is a reaction to the encrustation of the mechanical on the living. Key is interested in how the one becomes the other, how flexible life warps into the absurd rigidity of a machine.
It’s as if these poems were awaiting lockdown. Off-stage, a virus killed hundreds each day; meanwhile the restrictions transformed everyday life into a landscape of bleak absurdity, as the distinction between ordinary setting and absurd event collapsed. Key captures how we all suddenly felt like Robert Water: trapped outside a world we didn’t understand, even as it confined us indoors. In the poems’ childlike perspective everything becomes literalised: the virus is spread by a set of bugs who hold board meetings; the variant is a specific body hiding in a particular house, forcing Steve and Lynne Grunt to cook him eggs. Paradoxically, in a time of disembodied communication, words become things: in a poem from Week Eleven, as Key prepares for his first dose and a tentative opening-up shimmers on the horizon, ‘stuff’ starts ‘appearing in my diary’ — a ‘Sunday roast’; ‘rounders with the Prague lot’. He slams it shut, but plans continue ‘to seep out the side’. However vital, the restrictions in their rigidity always seemed brutal, and the poems render that brutality absurd: a notification by text bans you from gathering with anyone, yourself included (‘I edged away from myself, hissing’); unvaccinated snowmen are melted down with ‘government-sponsored flamethrowers’.
We desperately needed calm and clarity from those imposing the rules, but the government seemed mired in their own chaos, prey to childlike whims and passions. As a leader, Bohnson is absurd not because he’s a machine, but because he’s not mechanical enough. Addressing the nation in a ‘divvy chef’s hat’, Bohnson promises not to cancel Pancake Day, whacking a pan with an ‘egg slice’; two pages later he’s forced to cancel it, ‘his voice breaking, flour on his cheek’.
Throughout this beautifully made book we find Emily Juniper’s pen-and-ink drawings. Each poem is prefaced by parts of clocks, levers and racks and rotors. Their jagged forms, fragmented and arrested, also bring to mind the mechanisms of antique locks. Feeling imprisoned without each other, we experienced time in lockdown as sheer duration. Eventually Key and Juniper re-establish contact, accepting that they must make another book. It’s friendship that keeps Key from going mad, even as he agonises over multiple offers of friendly bubbles. Outside lockdown the distinguishing property of adult friendship is precisely how it doesn’t force these kinds of choices; you can be friends with as many people, and as often, as you like. That competitive, not-really-listening banter contains within itself the germ of a different kind of interpersonal relation: playing and making things together, the joy of collaboration.
This sequel begins in the disastrously bungled Christmas of 2020. Bohnson, Key’s reimagining of the Prime Minister, quaffs mulled wine in his Rudolf onesie, ignoring the ‘sad-as-hell nerds pointing to their dismal little graphs’. It records those terrible first months of 2021 — receding now, devoid as they were of anchoring experiences — after the evaporation of collective spirit and before the vaccine rollout gained momentum.
This time Key’s reflections come ‘From Outside’, as he trudges circuits of Hampstead Heath in his walking trousers. He isn’t a flâneur: in lockdown the city is for solitary exercise, not walking encounters. He fancies the woman in the coffee van, but can get to know her only in his dreams. With his Kentish Town territory confined to backdrop, Key’s focus is on the figures he meets for socially distanced conversations, or calls on his iPhone: his parents, his niece, and mostly his friends. The book’s through-line (and it could be forgiven for lacking one, since the pandemic always seemed more amenable to episodes than narrative arcs) it’s Key’s relationship with his designer Emily Juniper. She wants him to pick up his orange pen, to write another book, but he’s reluctant; then she becomes obsessed with drawing clocks and stops answering the phone.
In these conversations he seems always on the verge of revealing himself, telling his friends how lonely he feels. It’s the stage Bo Burnham reaches in his comedy special Inside, recorded in 2020: ‘I am not . . . well’, the American comedian tells the camera, before bursting into tears. But unlike Burnham, who talks to himself, Key is in dialogue, and throughout he playfully admits the inevitability of alteration when authentic speech is written down. Even beneath their stylisation, however, these conversations evade direct self-expression. All the feeling and yearning is channelled instead into restless, slightly sterile banter, full of verbal riffs and reactions but not much listening. ‘It doesn’t make sense’, exclaims the Colonel, Key’s pre-pandemic drinking partner, about the rules; ‘have I said it makes sense?’ he shoots back immediately.
Key is an accomplished comic screen actor, most visibly as Sidekick Simon to Alan Partridge. He’s also built a cult audience as a stand-up comedian, winning Edinburgh’s Perrier Award in 2009. (Stage directions from a dialogue with fellow comedian Daniel Kitson, as Key wanders with his rucksack round Highgate Cemetery, inform us that ‘the award is heavy on his back’.) His act alternates an edgy onstage persona, running verbal rings round the audience, with the recital of surreal poems printed on playing cards, tossed to the ground after reading. Some are beautifully brief: ‘Tanya Googled herself / Still nothing’. Longer poems narrate ridiculous events in ordinary settings. A protagonist called Robert Water discovers a fiver on the floor of HMV; when no one claims it Robert ‘uses his gun’ to arrange the customers into ‘orderly lines’. There’s an English buffoonery here — like Bertie Wooster, Robert is oblivious to how much he doesn’t get it – as well as a darker absurdism, the escalations and self-whittlings of Gogol or Daniil Kharms (Key has made Radio 4 documentaries on both writers). Bergson thinks that laughter is a reaction to the encrustation of the mechanical on the living. Key is interested in how the one becomes the other, how flexible life warps into the absurd rigidity of a machine.
It’s as if these poems were awaiting lockdown. Off-stage, a virus killed hundreds each day; meanwhile the restrictions transformed everyday life into a landscape of bleak absurdity, as the distinction between ordinary setting and absurd event collapsed. Key captures how we all suddenly felt like Robert Water: trapped outside a world we didn’t understand, even as it confined us indoors. In the poems’ childlike perspective everything becomes literalised: the virus is spread by a set of bugs who hold board meetings; the variant is a specific body hiding in a particular house, forcing Steve and Lynne Grunt to cook him eggs. Paradoxically, in a time of disembodied communication, words become things: in a poem from Week Eleven, as Key prepares for his first dose and a tentative opening-up shimmers on the horizon, ‘stuff’ starts ‘appearing in my diary’ — a ‘Sunday roast’; ‘rounders with the Prague lot’. He slams it shut, but plans continue ‘to seep out the side’. However vital, the restrictions in their rigidity always seemed brutal, and the poems render that brutality absurd: a notification by text bans you from gathering with anyone, yourself included (‘I edged away from myself, hissing’); unvaccinated snowmen are melted down with ‘government-sponsored flamethrowers’.
We desperately needed calm and clarity from those imposing the rules, but the government seemed mired in their own chaos, prey to childlike whims and passions. As a leader, Bohnson is absurd not because he’s a machine, but because he’s not mechanical enough. Addressing the nation in a ‘divvy chef’s hat’, Bohnson promises not to cancel Pancake Day, whacking a pan with an ‘egg slice’; two pages later he’s forced to cancel it, ‘his voice breaking, flour on his cheek’.
Throughout this beautifully made book we find Emily Juniper’s pen-and-ink drawings. Each poem is prefaced by parts of clocks, levers and racks and rotors. Their jagged forms, fragmented and arrested, also bring to mind the mechanisms of antique locks. Feeling imprisoned without each other, we experienced time in lockdown as sheer duration. Eventually Key and Juniper re-establish contact, accepting that they must make another book. It’s friendship that keeps Key from going mad, even as he agonises over multiple offers of friendly bubbles. Outside lockdown the distinguishing property of adult friendship is precisely how it doesn’t force these kinds of choices; you can be friends with as many people, and as often, as you like. That competitive, not-really-listening banter contains within itself the germ of a different kind of interpersonal relation: playing and making things together, the joy of collaboration.