U Want it Darker: quick links
U Want it Darker: undercurrent of melancholy
Murray Middleton is a master of inference – an art, a style, a skill evident throughout this collection of nine stories. Threaded through each is a strong undercurrent of melancholy. Whether they truly deserve the collective title U Want it Darker is a question best left to the reader.
What is clear is that none of these stories are light-hearted. They are about real people negotiating lives marked by disappointment, compromise, or disillusionment. If you are seeking fiction to cheer you up or make you laugh, this book is not for you.
But if you want slices of life in which plans falter, ambitions fall shor, and art is pursued with limited reward, you will find much to admire here – including characters who feel recognisable and situations that may echo your own experience.
One of the strongest stories is ‘Where We Come to Fall Apart’. Much of it is told through text messages, complete with the occasional typo – enough to feel authentic without becoming irritating. Although the subject matter is serious – a difficult birth and an unwell baby – the rhythm of the messages perfectly captures the fragmented, distracted way we often communicate through our phones.
Two other notable stories, ‘Warm Love’ and ‘Between the Wars’, focus on musicians and painters respectively. Both are written in a more conventional narrative style and fit Middleton’s subtitle for the book: Tales of Artists in Despair.
His artists may not have reached the heights of their professions, but they persist: they work, they maintain relationships and they refuse to abandon their principles. At one point, the painter remarks:
I instinctively felt that telling ‘the truth’ was crossing a line. It was one thing to protest, as I’d done against our country’s invasion of Iraq – and as I’ve done in recent years against climate inaction, family violence and Indigenous deaths in custody – but another to grant yourself a license to indoctrinate innocent minds.
U Want it Darker: invites reflection
This is just one of many passages that invite reflection and linger long after the page is turned.
Not every story is equally compelling. ‘House with White Fence’, presented as diary entries covering several months, is largely preoccupied with pizzas – how they taste, where to buy them, and so on. The entries feel realistic, but the style and subject matter lack the depth of the other stories.
The title story, ‘U Want it Darker’, follows an actor who scrapes together a living from commercials. His biggest success, he tells us, was a river-cruise advertisement: ‘It made me more money than all my acting jobs, combined, in the fifteen years before it.’ But his fortunes turn when he is rejected from a Transport Accident Commission campaign after failing to disclose a drink-driving conviction. The story is a sharp, unsentimental look at the compromises and disappointments of a not-so-successful actor’s career.
U Want it Darker: Sharp eye for the unspoken
It isn’t necessary to discuss every piece in the collection to convey its flavour, but ‘Two Comedians’ deserves mention. It follows Dorf, a reluctant tourist, through parts of Europe, particularly Germany. While melancholy colours much of the book, this story offers moments of humour. Dorf, weary of ‘museum after excruciatingly dull museum – just like Prague’, launches into a tirade about German toilets, designed to allow inspection of one’s Scheisse before flushing. As absurd as this complaint may sound, it grounds the story in human grumbling that many readers will find amusingly familiar.
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Taken together, these stories demonstrate Middleton’s sharp eye for the unspoken, the awkward, and the unresolved. There is wisdom here and many perspectives worth contemplation.
Readers may come to feel, as this reviewer did, that success should not be equated with fame or fortune. Middleton’s ‘artists in despair’ are not simply failures; they are survivors, creators, and, in their persistence, quietly heroic.
U Want it Darker by Murray Middleton is published by Pan Macmillan.
