Art and illusion
What connects two YouTube films and a book? Everything and nothing, really...
It’s been a big week for fans of Bobby Fingers, the Limerick artist whose new film dropped on YouTube a few days ago. If you don’t know Bobby Fingers, well it’s quite hard to describe what it is that he does. ‘Multi-disciplinary’ is the tag that art followers might recognise, in that he makes films, writes the scripts and songs for them, is the main character in them, narrates them and creates almost everything that appears on screen. At heart he is, I think, a sculptor, model-maker and painter of sublime skill and imagination with a dark and absurdist take on life and culture.
His latest, which is built around the construction of a diorama of Johnny Depp’s bedroom, lasts for 35 minutes and is so intricately plotted and interwoven that it took eighteen months to make. You really have to watch it to make sense of what happens and why, because what he seems to do with all of his films – and I’m guessing here – is to start with an image, Depp’s bedroom this time, and follow wherever some kind of internal storytelling urge takes him.
I’ve been wanting to write something about Christian Ryan’s new book, but wasn’t quite sure what until I saw the Bobby Fingers film. The book is called Eleven We Burn Them In The Sun, and it’s about… well, what is it about? Just as Fingers’ film is sort of about Johnny Depp’s bedroom but isn’t, Eleven We Burn Them In The Sun is about eleven apparently unconnected individuals who somehow have cricket in common. It took him between 10 and 20 years to write, depending on who you ask, and it’s a true work of art in the sense that it has vision, imagination, ambition and it could only have been written by him. It exists inside a universe of Christian Ryan’s creation in the same way that Bobby Fingers’ films exist in his, and those universes would simply not exist without them.
The threads that link the eleven can be gossamer thin, a picture hung on a wall for example, or a one-off game of cricket, or a fatal car journey, or a piece of jazz music, but these are the dark matter of the universe that Ryan has made. Disparate characters like John the disillusioned groundsman who tried to turn his pitches into works of art, or Watk, who played a solitary Test match that came to overshadow the rest of his life, or Shirvan Pragg, a Trinidadian all-rounder of haunting promise who took that fateful car trip one day in 1982, come together here.
I had to review the book for Wisden Cricket Monthly, and looking back over Ryan’s work, the seeds of this intricate creation were there and sewn into Feeling Is The Thing That Happens in 1000th of a Second, his fragmentary book on Patrick Eagar’s photographs, and also in one of the greatest pieces of sports journalism ever written, Jeff Thomson Is Annoyed, his story about a single afternoon on which Thommo bowled perhaps faster and more terrifyingly than any man ever has. It’s there too in Twenty-Two Balls From Chris Jordan, published in 2015, an outpouring of densely-assembled detail that builds and builds into bright and unexpected illumination.
Imagine that Jordan piece at the length of a book and you’re part of the way there. Eleven is experienced as much as read, with the choices Ryan makes hinting at all of those he didn’t, and at other unwritten books that might have emerged had he pursued them.
“We burn them in the sun” is a throwaway phrase uttered by Shirvan Pragg and in a book about absences, Ryan floats the idea that had Shirvan lived, the decline in West Indies cricket may not have happened in the way that it did, or perhaps not happened at all. Who knows? That ephemeral sense, ghostly and unreal, is what the book drives at.
Are these connections just the process of imagination? As I was watching the Bobby Fingers film, the YouTube algorithm threw up a sad and beautiful little documentary called Scuz: The Life of Graham Kersey. It’s just half an hour long and assembled very simply, mostly talking heads along with old photographs of another cricketer who died far too young in a car accident. Kersey was just 25 when, on Christmas Eve of 1996, he dropped his Surrey team-mate Adam Hollioake off at Coolangatta airport and was involved in the crash as he drove home. He’d been playing grade cricket in Australia, Hollioake had just finished an England A tour, and they’d been on holiday to the Gold Coast together, “just to spend some time,” Hollioake says, “cos he was my closest friend in the team.”
Lots of people felt that way about Graham Kersey. Mark Butcher and Alec Stewart also contribute, along with some of Kersey’s childhood friends and clubmates – Butcher, Hollioake and Kersey were a tight unit, and Kersey was Stewart’s understudy, coming into the Surrey side to take the gloves when the Gaffer was away with England. Stewart keeps a picture of himself handing Kersey his county cap on his office wall: “Do I think of him every day? Yes.”
It’s also impossible to watch the film and not think of the losses to come at Surrey: Adam Hollioake’s brother Ben, Tom Maynard, Graham Thorpe. Such are the connections that emerge. Do watch Bobby Fingers, do watch Scuz, and do read Eleven We Burn Them In The Sun. Art and life, eh?
And a friendly reminder that Vinciness is out now in this beautiful b-format paperback edition, yours for £10 and available here.
