at four o'clock in the morning
Dec. 28th, 2021 09:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabinetzinSO. I got my copy of Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush finally, and I have powered through it. If you're not familiar, this book is the sequel to He Used Thought As A Wife, both of them being by Tim Key, with design by Emily Juniper (the one in the UK). The first book is about the first London lockdown and the beginnings of the coronavirus outbreak; the second one is about the third London lockdown. The main character is a fictionalized version of the author, and the books are made up of poems and script-format dialogues with other people. They are extremely hard to explain, but they were hands down my favorite books this year.
He Used Thought As A Wife is (finally) widely available, but right now the only place you can get Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush is the "Utter" & Press website, as it doesn't go into full release until February.
Get you these books. I promise to you they are extremely good.
Anyway I'm so bursting with feels and opinions that I wrote them all down. This post does in fact spoil both books, but here we are.
(I'm using the following shorthand:
He Used Thought As A Wife = Thought
Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush = Mulberry
The character = Key
The author = Tim or Tim Key
Is an event that takes place within the fiction of the books and is not a hallucination, no matter the events of the real world = actually happened/is real
Note: A theme in Mulberry is that Key's mental health is deteriorating to the point where he can't tell fantasy from reality, but I'm interpreting the last dialogue with the Coffee Girl to have actually happened and the rose to be for her, given their place in the narrative. And, indeed, interpreting the Coffee Girl to be an actual human who exists and not a representation of Key's sense of hope. I think the fact she has a name is really important. Anyway, the people in the books don't even know if its events happened, so I can do what I want.)
What I find interesting about the Amazon Guy as a love interest is the fact that it's not exactly that they're two men. That doesn't really seem like a problem for Key, per se; he never has a moment of crisis or recognition of the fact that this is some real gay shit. Why it matters that they're both men is because the Amazon Guy sees Key as exactly the same as him: a normal heterosexual male who's shacked up with his lady wife. That crumpling when the Amazon Guy realizes that Key is "not normal" and Key realizes that he has utterly failed to be seen doesn't strictly require a romantic component, but it is a BIG QUEER MOOD.
Anyway if you think Key's not in love with him you're wrong. I'll fight you. I'll fight Tim Key. Better be ready to catch these hands if you think Key's not bi, whether Tim Key is or not.
What unites Key's romantic interests is that, firstly, they're untouchable in some way. The Amazon Guy is at the bottom of the stairs (and literally untouchable), the Bar Supervisor is AWOL, the Coffee Girl is in her wagon (and also may not exist). This is interesting to me, because rather than a sort of "you want them because you can never have them" thing, it comes across as a tragedy, at least in the first two cases. Key is desperate to make a human connection, but he's rejected in one case and clearly never in the running in the other.
The second thing that unites them is the fact that they're not just people who are providing services to Key, they're also people who are pampering Key in some way. All the shit he buys from Amazon is shit he doesn't really need. He doesn't need all those mochas. He doesn't need all that beer.
I think that's why I find what happens with the Coffee Girl so interesting, if she's real? At first I didn't really care for her because I just don't like her dialogue very much, but in many thousands of works, a man has had a crush on a woman in the service industry, and it always goes down one of two ways. One, he throws everything away for her, after she falls in love with him for no real reason; two, he loses her because of Manly Abstention, after ditto.
Mulberry doesn't fit this script, whether she's a hallucination or it actually happened. Key just kinda stops seeing her, and in that time she decides she wants to see where it might go, and when she spots him again, he hitches a ride with her and brings her a rose. I have a lot of feelings about when he reaches over and rings her bell, because it breaks the romantic stasis he's been in since the beginning of Thought.
I think I like it because it ties up a lot of the themes of Key's growth in the second half of Mulberry? We don't even know that he has stopped seeing her until she comes back. He needed that, to separate himself entirely, and I would have thrown the book across the room if she'd got in the way of his relationship with the Colonel.
If she's real. Or not, really.
Out of the relationships in the book, the two that made me cry the hardest were the Colonel and Emily. If you don't cry over that, and you are in fact a book crier, you're wrong.
I don't know how Key's relationship with the Colonel manages to be so profoundly homoerotic and also completely platonic. That's part of what's important about it, that it's not a romantic relationship at all. The Colonel doesn't fit into the mold of Key's romantic interests, because his relationship with the Colonel isn't at all fictive. But at the same time the Colonel is a man who is essentially begging for another man's body? He isn't just satisfied with the idea of Key on the phone, like everyone else's getting. He has to have Key physically, and where that could be played for a cheap laugh, it is actually ungodly fucking heartbreaking.
The stuff with the bubbles just like- we didn't have bubbles here? So it was never a calculus I needed to make. It was "just don't see anyone at all, ever, but definitely do go to work and eat in restaurants." But Key being ripped apart this incredibly cruel system that's dragging him between people was just so sad. Key, despite everything else and despite the persona that Tim Key puts on, is very much a people pleaser. He is trying to do his best to make everyone happy, and he's in a situation where he cannot possibly do that.
What's really heart wrenching about Emily and the Colonel is that no matter what, Key couldn't have had both of them. He picked maybe the worst option, but maybe the one that was supposed to hurt the least.
I like? the fact that the impact of Emily choosing Quint is really not felt until later. Quint obviously sucks, but Emily's rejection- or perceived rejection- of Key is why he rejects the Colonel and instead shacks up with Rick and Buddy, who are just some random good time friends who throw him over fairly easily. Key won't break the bubble for the sake of his niece, but Rick and Buddy are happy to for her sister. I do like that they break the bubble, because otherwise I think I would have sobbed, but I kind of started to resent Rick and Buddy. I think Key did too.
And Emily, oh my God. She's just another character in Thought, but the strength of the relationship between her and Key really comes out in Mulberry. And the way she just deteriorates without him just made my heart hurt. Ultimately they have abandoned each other. In Thought she's carrying him through the process of the book, and in Mulberry, when she needs that from him, she doesn't get it until it's almost too late. But the way their relationship really solidifies in Mulberry just did me in. It's so hard to find depictions of a male female friendship that doesn't eventually turn out to be romantic love. What Key and Emily have is so deep and so affecting that I just straight up cried.
I cried a lot. I'm a crier. It's cathartic.
Some general stray thoughts:
I really think Thought is a better book on its own, but I think I think that because Mulberry absolutely does not stand alone. You could read Thought and stop and have a happy ending with one last visual of the doors opening, but you can't just read Mulberry. On the other hand, Thought is a more profound experience if you also read Mulberry. Thought is a story about a guy losing it in his apartment, but Mulberry is this tense, claustrophobic story despite the fact that all of it takes place outside. There are some easy answers in Thought that Mulberry will not give you. From the position of Mulberry, Thought is kind of rose tinted, in a "we thought we had the world figured out" kind of way. Mulberry is in more mature book, and I don't just mean that because the themes are more complicated.
So I am looking forward to reading them both in the correct order, though I just reread Thought probably a month ago. I feel like I need to read them back to back to really get the full measure of it, and I definitely need to read Mulberry again, because I just think it's a book that you can't digest on the first run.
Have I thought about this more than Tim Key did? Honestly, never can tell with him.
He Used Thought As A Wife is (finally) widely available, but right now the only place you can get Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush is the "Utter" & Press website, as it doesn't go into full release until February.
Get you these books. I promise to you they are extremely good.
Anyway I'm so bursting with feels and opinions that I wrote them all down. This post does in fact spoil both books, but here we are.
(I'm using the following shorthand:
He Used Thought As A Wife = Thought
Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush = Mulberry
The character = Key
The author = Tim or Tim Key
Is an event that takes place within the fiction of the books and is not a hallucination, no matter the events of the real world = actually happened/is real
Note: A theme in Mulberry is that Key's mental health is deteriorating to the point where he can't tell fantasy from reality, but I'm interpreting the last dialogue with the Coffee Girl to have actually happened and the rose to be for her, given their place in the narrative. And, indeed, interpreting the Coffee Girl to be an actual human who exists and not a representation of Key's sense of hope. I think the fact she has a name is really important. Anyway, the people in the books don't even know if its events happened, so I can do what I want.)
What I find interesting about the Amazon Guy as a love interest is the fact that it's not exactly that they're two men. That doesn't really seem like a problem for Key, per se; he never has a moment of crisis or recognition of the fact that this is some real gay shit. Why it matters that they're both men is because the Amazon Guy sees Key as exactly the same as him: a normal heterosexual male who's shacked up with his lady wife. That crumpling when the Amazon Guy realizes that Key is "not normal" and Key realizes that he has utterly failed to be seen doesn't strictly require a romantic component, but it is a BIG QUEER MOOD.
Anyway if you think Key's not in love with him you're wrong. I'll fight you. I'll fight Tim Key. Better be ready to catch these hands if you think Key's not bi, whether Tim Key is or not.
What unites Key's romantic interests is that, firstly, they're untouchable in some way. The Amazon Guy is at the bottom of the stairs (and literally untouchable), the Bar Supervisor is AWOL, the Coffee Girl is in her wagon (and also may not exist). This is interesting to me, because rather than a sort of "you want them because you can never have them" thing, it comes across as a tragedy, at least in the first two cases. Key is desperate to make a human connection, but he's rejected in one case and clearly never in the running in the other.
The second thing that unites them is the fact that they're not just people who are providing services to Key, they're also people who are pampering Key in some way. All the shit he buys from Amazon is shit he doesn't really need. He doesn't need all those mochas. He doesn't need all that beer.
I think that's why I find what happens with the Coffee Girl so interesting, if she's real? At first I didn't really care for her because I just don't like her dialogue very much, but in many thousands of works, a man has had a crush on a woman in the service industry, and it always goes down one of two ways. One, he throws everything away for her, after she falls in love with him for no real reason; two, he loses her because of Manly Abstention, after ditto.
Mulberry doesn't fit this script, whether she's a hallucination or it actually happened. Key just kinda stops seeing her, and in that time she decides she wants to see where it might go, and when she spots him again, he hitches a ride with her and brings her a rose. I have a lot of feelings about when he reaches over and rings her bell, because it breaks the romantic stasis he's been in since the beginning of Thought.
I think I like it because it ties up a lot of the themes of Key's growth in the second half of Mulberry? We don't even know that he has stopped seeing her until she comes back. He needed that, to separate himself entirely, and I would have thrown the book across the room if she'd got in the way of his relationship with the Colonel.
If she's real. Or not, really.
Out of the relationships in the book, the two that made me cry the hardest were the Colonel and Emily. If you don't cry over that, and you are in fact a book crier, you're wrong.
I don't know how Key's relationship with the Colonel manages to be so profoundly homoerotic and also completely platonic. That's part of what's important about it, that it's not a romantic relationship at all. The Colonel doesn't fit into the mold of Key's romantic interests, because his relationship with the Colonel isn't at all fictive. But at the same time the Colonel is a man who is essentially begging for another man's body? He isn't just satisfied with the idea of Key on the phone, like everyone else's getting. He has to have Key physically, and where that could be played for a cheap laugh, it is actually ungodly fucking heartbreaking.
The stuff with the bubbles just like- we didn't have bubbles here? So it was never a calculus I needed to make. It was "just don't see anyone at all, ever, but definitely do go to work and eat in restaurants." But Key being ripped apart this incredibly cruel system that's dragging him between people was just so sad. Key, despite everything else and despite the persona that Tim Key puts on, is very much a people pleaser. He is trying to do his best to make everyone happy, and he's in a situation where he cannot possibly do that.
What's really heart wrenching about Emily and the Colonel is that no matter what, Key couldn't have had both of them. He picked maybe the worst option, but maybe the one that was supposed to hurt the least.
I like? the fact that the impact of Emily choosing Quint is really not felt until later. Quint obviously sucks, but Emily's rejection- or perceived rejection- of Key is why he rejects the Colonel and instead shacks up with Rick and Buddy, who are just some random good time friends who throw him over fairly easily. Key won't break the bubble for the sake of his niece, but Rick and Buddy are happy to for her sister. I do like that they break the bubble, because otherwise I think I would have sobbed, but I kind of started to resent Rick and Buddy. I think Key did too.
And Emily, oh my God. She's just another character in Thought, but the strength of the relationship between her and Key really comes out in Mulberry. And the way she just deteriorates without him just made my heart hurt. Ultimately they have abandoned each other. In Thought she's carrying him through the process of the book, and in Mulberry, when she needs that from him, she doesn't get it until it's almost too late. But the way their relationship really solidifies in Mulberry just did me in. It's so hard to find depictions of a male female friendship that doesn't eventually turn out to be romantic love. What Key and Emily have is so deep and so affecting that I just straight up cried.
I cried a lot. I'm a crier. It's cathartic.
Some general stray thoughts:
I really think Thought is a better book on its own, but I think I think that because Mulberry absolutely does not stand alone. You could read Thought and stop and have a happy ending with one last visual of the doors opening, but you can't just read Mulberry. On the other hand, Thought is a more profound experience if you also read Mulberry. Thought is a story about a guy losing it in his apartment, but Mulberry is this tense, claustrophobic story despite the fact that all of it takes place outside. There are some easy answers in Thought that Mulberry will not give you. From the position of Mulberry, Thought is kind of rose tinted, in a "we thought we had the world figured out" kind of way. Mulberry is in more mature book, and I don't just mean that because the themes are more complicated.
So I am looking forward to reading them both in the correct order, though I just reread Thought probably a month ago. I feel like I need to read them back to back to really get the full measure of it, and I definitely need to read Mulberry again, because I just think it's a book that you can't digest on the first run.
Have I thought about this more than Tim Key did? Honestly, never can tell with him.