In All Its Smallness
Noel Yoorali, The Kingdom
Bookworks, 144pp, £12.00, ISBN 9781912570348
reviewed by John Rattray
One of the stories in The Kingdom, Yoel Noorali’s debut collection, is about a writer who can’t read. He has produced nine novels, one of them a Nobel Prize winner, by ‘typing randomly, with the letters happening to fall into celebrated sequences of words’. He envies his reviewers and is puzzled by their admiration because the ‘pleasure and wisdom’ they appear to find in his books is beyond him. His 12-year-old nephew, Ben, reads excerpts of their praise, each a perfect parody of the publication it appears in. The Paris Review discusses his achievements ‘at the sentence level’. The TLS describes a recent work as ‘an admirably fresh künstleroman’. In the newspapers the combinations of submodifier, adjective and noun are more numbing: The New York Times calls one book ‘savagely funny’; The Guardian labels another a ‘searing examination of toxic masculinity under late capitalism’.
All this has earned the writer comparison with Tolstoy, whose work he hasn’t — can’t — read. His achievements are meaningless to him, his career an accident of criticism and its clichés. Yet the world takes him seriously. He is one of the lucky ones. The characters in the other four pieces of fiction in The Kingdom — bank managers, job applicants, dog owners and gallery workers — are less fortunate. They are sent to suicide-prevention training, thwarted by petty impositions of power, fired by coin toss and denied their wants on a whim. What their stories have in common with the writer’s in ‘Tolstoy’, however, is work, and its peculiar capacity to produce circumstances at once mundane and absurd.
The same is true of most of the non-fiction, including the titular piece, a three-part account of Noorali’s time working an admin job in the NHS, which opens the book and takes up about a third of its pages. This seems the right balance, since you get the sense that the experience informed the collection’s overarching interest in people living and working in a world they don’t quite understand, herded by the bland, faceless forces of management and commercialisation into situations they’d rather not be in.
Sometimes those situations are surreal. In ‘Car Park B’, for example, a man called Wilson drives in a ‘near-perfect square’ around ‘four hills of equal height and length’, searching for a space in a car park enclosed in their tidy topography. Wilson is a well-drawn caricature of a failed modern man: unemployed, overweight, hapless, his mind addled from watching porn and hearing his mother tell him that he was ‘born to fail’. He needs to find a job so that he can pay the rent on his room — important not so much for shelter and his sense of independence than because without the room he will be deprived of the odd glimpse of his landlady, Liza, as she leaves the bathroom in her towel. Despite himself, he has landed an interview and even managed to arrive three hours early for it. All he needs to do is find a parking space.
His prospects are foiled by fate, however, who appears in the form of a parking attendant. He directs Wilson to car park B, reminding him that ‘life [. . .] is just a lot of people searching for spaces that aren’t there’. The attendant’s symbolic role is clear (‘the car park manages itself’, he remarks at one point) but not so obvious as to disrupt their dialogue, which is pulled off with an impressively light touch. It reads so convincingly as a back and forth between a bored but quick-witted worker and the slower, slightly desperate Wilson, that the moral of story — more or less the proverb ‘we plan, God laughs’ — is ushered quietly into the exchange rather than forced onto it. By this point in the plot Wilson’s conclusion is foregone: he will ‘circle the car park for eternity’, even without petrol, he and his shitty Honda propelled only by the hope of finding a place.
A similar hope, the desire for ‘a life like any other’ — hours passed listlessly playing scratch cards and Wordle, retiring ‘in an equal financial position to the one I’d begun in’ — appears to be what led Noorali to the liver wing of a hospital in London. He recounts his start there in the first part of ‘The Kingdom’, which takes its name taken from Lars Von Trier’s trilogy about supernatural happenings in a Danish hospital, the source of most of Noorali’s knowledge about hospitals prior to working in one. He tells of his arrival, getting lost, fumbling through a typing test, sitting his interview — ‘less an analysis of one’s capacity to perform the job in question than a memory test to check one is capable of remembering the lies that claim they have this capacity’ — and his surprise when gets the job.
By the time the story ends, six or so months later (or maybe 16: the chronology is vague, matching the way work blends days and months into each other), Noorali has endured one minor indignity too many. There are maniacally jovial emails; echoey Teams meetings; improbable and uncomfortable conversations with colleagues; the colleagues themselves; depressing Christmas decorations; tawdry office politics; and lots of meaningless management speak.
This is familiar stuff but Noorali is unusually good at charting it. He captures the way in which office life in all its smallness — the clicking, the chair-swivelling, the typing, the chatting — takes on an outsized place in our lives, the way in which it bleeds into our sense of self. He also refrains from overwriting his experience, managing to make it amusing without sacrificing the sense of realness.
Noorali has a straightforward, wry and intelligent voice. He is also self-deprecating. The latter quality in particular makes the moving passages all the more affecting when they come because, though they are as clear-sighted and direct as the humorous bits, they register as moments in which he’s decided not to laugh at himself, moments that he’s decided demand some seriousness.
At one point in ‘The Kingdom’, for example, he gives a beautifully lucid description of a depression lifting. Having gone out for a run, he observes that ‘sometimes I only needed to let some air into my lungs for my eyes to un-sink enough to see everything in its place: birds, cars, children, each knowing where it belongs. Running rearticulated the strangeness of that symphony. Strangeness defanged depression’. Happily, he is too good a writer to let this truth — perceptively captured and straightforwardly delivered — hang heavily. The paragraph ends: ‘How, the runner asks, is a green parakeet at home in Peckham?’
All this has earned the writer comparison with Tolstoy, whose work he hasn’t — can’t — read. His achievements are meaningless to him, his career an accident of criticism and its clichés. Yet the world takes him seriously. He is one of the lucky ones. The characters in the other four pieces of fiction in The Kingdom — bank managers, job applicants, dog owners and gallery workers — are less fortunate. They are sent to suicide-prevention training, thwarted by petty impositions of power, fired by coin toss and denied their wants on a whim. What their stories have in common with the writer’s in ‘Tolstoy’, however, is work, and its peculiar capacity to produce circumstances at once mundane and absurd.
The same is true of most of the non-fiction, including the titular piece, a three-part account of Noorali’s time working an admin job in the NHS, which opens the book and takes up about a third of its pages. This seems the right balance, since you get the sense that the experience informed the collection’s overarching interest in people living and working in a world they don’t quite understand, herded by the bland, faceless forces of management and commercialisation into situations they’d rather not be in.
Sometimes those situations are surreal. In ‘Car Park B’, for example, a man called Wilson drives in a ‘near-perfect square’ around ‘four hills of equal height and length’, searching for a space in a car park enclosed in their tidy topography. Wilson is a well-drawn caricature of a failed modern man: unemployed, overweight, hapless, his mind addled from watching porn and hearing his mother tell him that he was ‘born to fail’. He needs to find a job so that he can pay the rent on his room — important not so much for shelter and his sense of independence than because without the room he will be deprived of the odd glimpse of his landlady, Liza, as she leaves the bathroom in her towel. Despite himself, he has landed an interview and even managed to arrive three hours early for it. All he needs to do is find a parking space.
His prospects are foiled by fate, however, who appears in the form of a parking attendant. He directs Wilson to car park B, reminding him that ‘life [. . .] is just a lot of people searching for spaces that aren’t there’. The attendant’s symbolic role is clear (‘the car park manages itself’, he remarks at one point) but not so obvious as to disrupt their dialogue, which is pulled off with an impressively light touch. It reads so convincingly as a back and forth between a bored but quick-witted worker and the slower, slightly desperate Wilson, that the moral of story — more or less the proverb ‘we plan, God laughs’ — is ushered quietly into the exchange rather than forced onto it. By this point in the plot Wilson’s conclusion is foregone: he will ‘circle the car park for eternity’, even without petrol, he and his shitty Honda propelled only by the hope of finding a place.
A similar hope, the desire for ‘a life like any other’ — hours passed listlessly playing scratch cards and Wordle, retiring ‘in an equal financial position to the one I’d begun in’ — appears to be what led Noorali to the liver wing of a hospital in London. He recounts his start there in the first part of ‘The Kingdom’, which takes its name taken from Lars Von Trier’s trilogy about supernatural happenings in a Danish hospital, the source of most of Noorali’s knowledge about hospitals prior to working in one. He tells of his arrival, getting lost, fumbling through a typing test, sitting his interview — ‘less an analysis of one’s capacity to perform the job in question than a memory test to check one is capable of remembering the lies that claim they have this capacity’ — and his surprise when gets the job.
By the time the story ends, six or so months later (or maybe 16: the chronology is vague, matching the way work blends days and months into each other), Noorali has endured one minor indignity too many. There are maniacally jovial emails; echoey Teams meetings; improbable and uncomfortable conversations with colleagues; the colleagues themselves; depressing Christmas decorations; tawdry office politics; and lots of meaningless management speak.
This is familiar stuff but Noorali is unusually good at charting it. He captures the way in which office life in all its smallness — the clicking, the chair-swivelling, the typing, the chatting — takes on an outsized place in our lives, the way in which it bleeds into our sense of self. He also refrains from overwriting his experience, managing to make it amusing without sacrificing the sense of realness.
Noorali has a straightforward, wry and intelligent voice. He is also self-deprecating. The latter quality in particular makes the moving passages all the more affecting when they come because, though they are as clear-sighted and direct as the humorous bits, they register as moments in which he’s decided not to laugh at himself, moments that he’s decided demand some seriousness.
At one point in ‘The Kingdom’, for example, he gives a beautifully lucid description of a depression lifting. Having gone out for a run, he observes that ‘sometimes I only needed to let some air into my lungs for my eyes to un-sink enough to see everything in its place: birds, cars, children, each knowing where it belongs. Running rearticulated the strangeness of that symphony. Strangeness defanged depression’. Happily, he is too good a writer to let this truth — perceptively captured and straightforwardly delivered — hang heavily. The paragraph ends: ‘How, the runner asks, is a green parakeet at home in Peckham?’