Over the past few years Batley born writer and filmmaker Sean Conway has been slowly building himself a reputation as an uncompromising artist. Short films such as Alex And Her Arse Truck and the feature brilliantlove (the film, for which Conway wrote the script, recently had screenings at Robert De Niro’s Tribeca Film Festival and a European Premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival) are frank and personal examinations of sexuality that play with cinematic and narrative conventions whilst being extreme, funny, profane and utterly dazzling.
His first book, Son of Steve (published by Revenge Ink) reinforces Conway’s scant regard for cultural norms. He eschews any form of coherent narrative and identifiable characters and protagonists for a freewheeling and exhilarating work. With staccato sentences, short paragraphs and an ever changing tone the work occupies a space somewhere between prose and poetry. Yet, even in these short bursts, Conway is a writer of tremendous power. His words are a mixture of the sacrilegious, coarse (indeed, much of the book is almost impossible to quote on a family site such as this without wearing out the asterisk key or offending a proportion of the readers) and intellectual that is alternately funny and confrontational. For example take musings such as:
“Jesus is a Catholic
he is addicted to cats
he wears gold Nike running shoes
the left one has a red tick
the right one has a black tick”
It immediately evokes a heady brew of imagery, humorous ideas and blasphemous notions. Indeed, unsurprising, given his background as a filmmaker, Conway’s writing could be described as cinematic – albeit an experimental and surreal cinema. This is not about gleaning pleasure from a plot or narrative – it’s about constantly evoking a slew of new imagery and generating ever conflicting ideals and emotions from within the reader.
Despite the lack of coherent structure, there are still certain themes that seem to be referred to again and again. Sex (more importantly an agressive denial of the sugercoated ways in which people discuss the subject in public forums), the power of names and words, religion, class and popular mythology are all present and provide much for the reader to think about.
In his introduction to the book, Dr Noel McLaughlin points out that any attempt to ‘master’ the book (by imposing a narrative structure or coherent reading on it) would ultimately be futile. Indeed, it’s power lies in its (almost deliberate) refusal to offer the reader any sort of ‘normality’ and to enter a world that is both familiar yet utterly new.
The book comes with a DVD of Sean Conway’s short films, including the aforementioned Alex and Her Arse Truck and Rabbit Stories. The former is a mindblowing short story of a girl and her (so-called) deviances that garnered Conway a deserved number of awards, whilst the latter is an astonishing and disconcerting piece about mental illness. These – and the rest of the films on the disc – confirm Conway’s remarkable talent as a director and predilection for challenging audiences. On the strength of these and his writing, he is already one well on his way to being one of the UK’s most talented artists.
Son of Steve is available now from Revenge Ink. To buy the book visit www.revengeink.com