The Guiltless Bystander
David Wheldon
Confingo Publishing, 2022

T

he Guiltless Bystander is a collection of stories by David Wheldon, a novelist, short story writer, poet, and far from least, medical doctor. It was published posthumously, though I understand its content is that of Wheldon’s choosing.

In his insightful foreword, the writer Aiden O’Reilly, latterly a friend, explains how after early acclaim Wheldon’s writing career fell into abeyance: how subsequently, alongside his medical duties, he continued to write but without attracting the interest of publishers. In the years before his death in 2021, both O’Reilly and the fiction writer David Rose were instrumental in bringing Wheldon’s writing back to public attention, and to finding publishers for a succession of stories, culminating in the publication of The Guiltless Bystander in July 2022.

I confess to feeling daunted at the prospect of reviewing this collection. Wheldon’s stories so beguile me that I struggle to consider them analytically. O’Reilly has used the term ‘ireal’ to describe the genre into which they might be placed, and certainly this resonates. It’s also tempting to think of Wheldon’s style as otherworldly, although that would be a simplification. Like the paintings of Eric Ravilious, the settings and behaviours on display are both very much of this world and very much not. It’s as if the responses of Wheldon’s characters are governed by different laws, though the reader never learns what these are. The people, and beings, who populate his stories are immediate but elusive, cerebral but quixotic, and often hold well-formed assumptions they presume universal.

Despite this, or as a result, the stories contain a pervasive element of things unknown, perhaps unknowable. This does not preclude conjecture on the part of the characters, rather it fosters it. You wouldn’t have to read far to encounter unorthodox belief systems, often in the form of philosophical discourse or speculation.

On the whole Wheldon’s characters seem happy with this. Inhabiting circumstances defined by a sense of unknowing, they retain agency. They do not need certainty in order to act. You might almost say uncertainty is a form of freedom.

Before long, and unlike his characters, it becomes clear that Wheldon is completely in control. Like Penelope Fitzgerald, he displays a preternatural command of detail. Also like Fitzgerald, detail is lightly but expertly deployed, made digestible, providing a counterpoint of authenticity to even the most improbable happenings.

There is, very apparently, something anachronistic about his prose. The sense of courtesy towards the reader, the precision of his word choice, and the unhurried way he allows each story to unfold all speak of an earlier approach. And yet the stories impart a sense of timelessness, of not ultimately conforming to the mores of a particular era. And just occasionally a quirk of language betrays a more modern sensibility.

The subject matter in this collection is wide ranging, the work of a discursive mind. A female chess master, incidentally an automaton, appears to achieve sentience. Medusa, the snake-haired seductress, is reimagined with tinted locks and the utmost sympathy. A medical student, ‘Tall Martha’, co-ordinates an original ruse to end a tedious lecture dead on time. A ‘candidate’ is chosen to be carried by sedan to a hilltop cell, where a brick extracted from the wall allows a conversation of the greatest intimacy with a female ‘candidate’ he will never meet. And, in rare instances, people in normal settings behave, almost, normally.

It might be noted that these examples all contain female protagonists, and the women in Wheldon’s stories are unfailingly distinctive. Despite the limiting circumstances in which they may find themselves, they display poise and independence of character. They are well able to surprise and to initiate, and in doing so they effortlessly entice the reader’s interest. Their speech patterns, and perspectives, are far from naturalistic, yet intrigue. I haven’t come across anything like them elsewhere. But then you might say that of the male characters too.

There’s a wonderfully accessible virtuosity in Wheldon’s style, and it’s hard not to share the amusement he so obviously finds in the act of writing. As with the fiction of G.K. Chesterton, though less explicitly, he relishes paradox, which appears in all manner of guises. For example, there is a formality in the way characters address one another, but what they say can be disarmingly personal. They share a trope of self-explanation, but are held at something of a distance from the reader, who is teasingly drip-fed insight into their singular manner of being in the world. In consequence one discerns, almost by osmosis, considerable depth of interiority. Wheldon’s characters are not simply ideas attached to bodies.

Like other medics turned to fiction—one thinks of Maugham and Conan Doyle—there can be something of the case study in the way Wheldon’s stories are set out. They tend to be front-loaded with information, and you might even wonder where this information is taking you, except that by the time you’ve reached that point you’re spun in his web.

One senses too in Wheldon a secular mindset, nevertheless at ease with the ineffable. Where gods exist explicitly, as in the heartrending ‘Medusa’s Metaphors’, they are corrupt: innocence can only flourish in their absence. However, in ‘The Prayer Factory’, prayers are hand-crafted by believers and non-believers alike, their efficacy or lack of it a different matter from their value.

In all, I can promise that this collection contains stories of rare scope. You will encounter sentences that no-one is likely to have written before or since. It’s fair to say the quality varies somewhat, although even the slighter pieces combine erudition with a charming playfulness. Furthermore, for my money, ‘The Automaton’, first published as a chapbook by Nightjar Press, ranks with any of the great stories of the last century. Paradoxically—that term again—the non-human elicits the most human of responses.

So, despite their many quirks, Wheldon’s characters invite our empathy. Idiosyncrasy is always in the foreground, and in Wheldon’s hands idiosyncrasy is a trove of riches. Doubtless it’s this that make his characters so improbably convincing. They are explicitly concerned with the act of living, and inhabit the human, or non-human condition according to their interpretation. This is their essence. They are interpreters of life as, ultimately, we all must be.