CityLife

Chris Killen debut novel The Bird Room

Chris Killen

IT'S been a busy year so far for Manchester's freshest literary ingénue Chris Killen.

His debut novel The Bird Room (Canongate) was released at the end of January and on 2 February he began a spell as Writer in Residence at the University of Manchester's prestigious Centre for New Writing.

There he joins the likes of Martin Amis and M.J. Hyland in fostering the next crop of the city's writing talent.

He also runs a regular live literature night at the Deaf Institute, a prospect which felt like a bit of a gamble six months ago, but is proving a remarkable success.

it all started with Killen's chaotic, tongue-in-cheek literary blog Day of Moustaches (see link to right of page) which won the 2007 Manchester Literary Festival's Blog Award and continues to function as a promotional platform  for Killen as well as providing a home for his more leftfield literary curios.

Sexual paranoia

The Bird Room itself is a slight and melancholic study of modern neuroses; alienation, sexual paranoia and internet pornography.

But beyond its embodiment of these requisite contemporary literary tropes it also functions as a quasi-philosophical identity fable concerned with the authenticity of self and the dichotomy of absence and presence.

The narrator Will is bereft of self-awareness. He has no idea how he ended up in a relationship with his girlfriend Alice, and no idea why it's going so wrong.

His insecurities slowly annihilate any intimacy that exists between them as he slips further and further into the shadows of his own life.

Spectacular aplomb

The character-focused realism is just elastic enough to allow for a certain amount of casual extremism.  Will's desire to disappear culminates in his request to Alice to ignore him, a feat which she accomplishes with spectacular aplomb by having sex with his best friend while he is still in the room.

Across town, Helen, an 'actress' lives an equally shadowy existence, with her invented hair, eyes and name, a phantom flatmate and a job that consists in being a vessel for other people's sexual fantasies.

Her tale becomes tied to Will's through a series of events that leave her the only character who makes redemption from a life of crippling self-delusion look like a genuine possibility.

Existential vagaries

The humour is always discomfiting and occasionally excruciating; the jokes inconspicuous and poignant, yet still funny.

Killen's style is efficient and dry, peppered with smart, tricksy similes and punchy existential vagaries, but the rawness of the emotional content stops The Bird Room from being a light read.

The novel been largely well-received, the main criticism being that it suffers from privileging style over substance.

The fact remains that for a debut it has received a great deal of attention. There's no doubt that faith in Chris Killen's talent is widespread, and hopes for the follow-up are high.

The Bird Room is out now, published by Canongate at £9.99. For more information and to read extracts visit the link to the right of the page.