Dark Star is an SF epic poem heavily influenced by noir detective stories, written in four-line-long stanzas of iambic pentameter, and set on a world called Vox whose sun doesn’t give out light.

Let’s have that again.



Dark Star is an SF epic poem heavily influenced by noir detective stories, written in four-line-long stanzas of iambic pentameter, and set on a world called Vox whose sun doesn’t give out light.



Writing that a second time doesn’t make it feel any less strange. And embarking on reading Oliver Langmead’s first work of fiction with that knowledge in mind, I felt positively daunted. Here’s the first verse:



Time to waste, so I escape the city

At one of those seedy establishments

They call ‘Glow Shows’ because they fill the girls

So full of Pro’ it nearly burns their veins.

Those heavily stressed iambs, that strong rhyme of “shows” and “pros”, that promise of sleaze – they all threaten leaden footed, self-consciously bizarre posturing. But luckily, Dark Star doesn’t quite turn out like that. To Langmead’s great credit, he’s actually succeeded in creating a book that reads smoothly, helped rather than hindered by its insistent, metronomic rhythm:



Dante checks the address, puts his hat on.

We step out and eye up what we can see.

Langmead’s pentameters are blunt, clipped, practically monosyllabic. He’s no Shakespeare. He doesn’t ride or stretch the rhythm in mellifluous polysyllables. But his pared down, direct prosody is actually well-suited to his gumshoe narrator. Virgil Yorke (his name apparently a tribute to the Roman poet and the Radiohead singer) is a hard-bitten, even harder living detective in the classic mode. He is a lonely, unhappy man, convinced his dark planet is a kind of “hell”, and addicted to a drug called Pro that temporarily lights up his veins. He is also overworked and overstretched, especially when the body of a student is discovered, her veins glowing with unnatural light and when – in an apparently separate case – someone steals one of the three “hearts” that generate what light Vox has. In line with the classic noir narrative, Virgil also finds himself getting beaten up a few times, uncovering high level corruption and, most of all, lost in a world of shadows. It’s a tough job.



All of this is quite appealing and keeps the pages turning. There are some good images – especially when Langmead allows a rare flash of light into his world, such as that glowing corpse.



But while the author should be applauded for taking on such an unusual project, Dark Star often falls flat because he doesn’t take things far enough. It can sometimes feel as if there’s been a failure of imagination, as well as a noble effort to think big.



It’s fun, for instance, that Langmead has co-opted 1920s technology for his dystopia as well as his detective. Vox is strictly analogue. Less enjoyable is the unconscious pre-feminist use of female characters as sex objects or corpses, and apparently not as autonomous thinkers. It’s also problematic that so much of our earth has been transposed to Vox. Everything is the same, only in the dark. There is grass, there are cows (only different in that they are blind), there are rats, there are cars, there are cigarettes. These latter don’t glow – and you have to “ignite” rather than “light” them. But still. There’s even coffee. How do coffee plants grow in the dark? How, come to that, does anything grow?

None of this world actually works. It doesn’t feel as if the darkness conceit has been tested to anything like its limits – an impression compounded because Langmead’s physical descriptions are often lacking. He tells us his apartment looks “like a squat or some sort of drug den”, but he doesn’t show it in any way. His narrator has a further disappointing disinclination to note anything about what people and things look like when he is afforded proper illumination. And so, it all starts to seem shallow, and surprisingly prosaic.



Matters aren’t helped by some clumsy plotting. The connections between the two cases are – forgive me – blindingly obvious, for all the narrator’s protestations:



I’m following up on a buried case

With zero backup, barely any leads

And a whole different major case to solve

And for the life of me I don’t know why.

He might not know why but for we readers it’s all too clear that the cases are going to be connected. Later on, when things turn out as expected (to the extent that I here have no compunction about spoilers) he can’t help declaiming:

Well I’ll be damned. Maybe I should have known

The two cases were linked.

To give Langmead some credit, Virgil is supposed to be a flawed narrator – and not much of a cop. But even so, getting to this connection is exasperating. Indeed, so is hanging around with Virgil full stop. At one point he writes:



A dark took up residence in my head:

Some unmovable piece of nothingness.

And what with the perpetual night, the drugs, the nobody-loves-me moaning, it all starts to feel juvenile, laboured, noisy. At worst, it turns into the epic verse equivalent of being trapped inside the black-walled bedroom of a teenager going through a heavy Nine Inch Nails phase. There’s no doubt that there’s earnest intent somewhere – but it feels embarrassing all the same.

