Review: Christopher Owens' Soviet Hotel Dressing Gown exploration of damaged psyche

 

 Bold, challenging...

Review by Jonathan Traynor

Soviet Hotel Dressing Gown – Christopher Owens

To base a book around a song title, and name that song in the title is a bold move. However, Owens accepts that, draws deep on the undercurrents in the lyrics – despair, reflection, melancholia and observation.

Soviet Hotel Dressing Gown by Sons of Robert Mitchum – a self-styled neo-noir band – is the hook Owens hangs this tale of two people’s silent taxi ride from Dublin to Belfast, after a flight diversion.

Jake and Roibeard’s stories are bracketed by the thoughts of the taxi driver, a  brief but reliable narrator.

The two protagonists’ separate stories bear Owens’ trademark examination of the buried psyche and interior monologue that explores the parts of the mind most do not wish to delve.

For Jake’s part mental health is painted in stark colours emphasized at one point by the refrain of the word ‘remember’ and the question “What will I do?” repeated four times.

The keen observation of the dangerous urban environment is something Owens’ has explored previously, particularly in dethrone God. Both Jake, in Glasgow, and Roibeard in Birmingham see the moral decay, the world in which they exist is one that comes with too high a price.

Almost echoing the line from SLF’s Picadilly Circus (“he flew safe home to Belfast”) the protagonists are returning for their safety. Jake for his mental health, Roibeard from crime and gang violence.

Roibeard story is one haunted by loss, tainted by violence. The violence isn’t explicitly shown, but it is on the margins, the threat bulging towards reality.

Lines from a ‘drill’ track that glory in a murder and threaten Roibeard hint at one recent high profile court case and its fall out.

Coupled with memories of his grandmother coping with loss, it shares thematic elements with Jake’s path. More than that these are two people who could be writ large outside a world of reality shows, Traitors, The Apprentice and ‘socials’ the assumption that people glued to their flat TV screens or their mobile devices. Because Owens’ observes that Jake and Roibeard is everyone’s story. What is different is they tell it from a deeper perspective.

While the protagonists’ story exists on the fringes, it is the everyman tale of societal decay. It is a challenge to tell such a story, to hold a mirror up to the self, the ID and the ego. It is a challenge achieved.

But, for all the dark explorations and morbid observations this book is not all gloom.

The taxi driver’s conclusion roots a more prosaic take – and pay attention to the weight of his final line. It is that line that just blunts the sharpened edges of modern life.

As always Owens packs in a lot into a relatively short book, layers painted in patterns that force reflection, and should make readers go back for further considerations of themselves and the 21^st Century’s afflictions. Just remember the taxi driver’s final words.

Soviet Hotel Dressing Gown is released on February 26 and will be available on Amazon.