As an avid reader of fantasy and all other sorts of junk, I have seen many strange tales in my life; endless nexus closets, Gods transfigured into turtles,souls trapped in books – you name it! Even my nights are full of freaky visitations like women taking off their faces at a dance, dining in a whale’s throat, invisible men pleading us to recall their name (Haven’t forgotten you, Pendito!). I’m naturally attuned to the eccentric.

Push Process, despite it’s pretentions, is one of the strangest things I have yet experienced: a half-memoir about photographical awakening in venice.

Honest!

Review introduction: Mysticism of Mundane

It’s a rare occasion to have the author of a novel pitch their work to you. I was lucky enough to meet Mr Walker in person: a chance opportunity resulted in him running a seminar at our university, which also happened to coincide with a campus event. He’d written quite a few books prior – all just as strange. One about a liverpudlian lad who hears angels (Angel of L19); another about supernatural orphans in a floating city (Five wounds).

Hey! I like weird narratives like that!

But his most recent book wasn’t quite so ghoulish. Push process is a story about Richard, another liverpudlian in a more grounded, latin variety of floating city. It is a story about taking Black’n’white photographs; about visiting queasy bars. About pre-brexit EU identity and those bloody tourists sunbathing in San Marco! Yet in these perfectly ordinary themes the eccentricity of the novel truly shines.

Overview – Tourists in Venice

Richard is an awkward, repressed postgraduate who is nurturing a dependency on Temazepam. Without it, the world feels incomplete – ingesting it is the only way he can see light in the world and in himself. Wanting to get the hell away from Cambridge shame and an estranged family, he decides to shoot off to Venice on a criminology project. However, his visits to the archives aren’t particularly fulfilling – having to learn italian on the upstride is weighing him down.

Then he meets a band of other european students like himself – the Danish sculptor Lars, the Dutch photographer Merlo: they too came with no Italian, use English as a crutch to get by. Richard quickly makes connections with these fellow foreigners, and it is through Merlo that he acquires her old Polaroid Camera. Through this lens (pun intended), Richard’s outlook changes completely.Richard comes to reject his study of ruins in favour of immortalising the present – to record history in photographs, not fawn or mourn about the foregone past. I will not spoil the rest of Richard’s arc, but he hits upon an excellent epiphany regarding his photography hobby that satisfies his hidden motivation in ways I didn’t expect!

The plot doesn’t resound with high stakes hijinx. About the worst you get is his hat being stolen by a merry performer on stilts or being interrogated for photographing something private. Then again, it flows better without altercations and conniptions every chapter. Rather, it focuses on often overlooked incidents, revealing corners of life so familiar yet somewhat taboo in other methods of storytelling – taking time to tell life.

Push process is merely the story of a therapeutic hobby and a budding international relationship between outsiders. They go to pubs, share anecdotes about their lives and compare eachother to muppets – it’s an exploration of culture, mostly. It doesn’t get boring – only 200 pages long, I felt myself whipping through the prose without missing a detail. It’s a very visual novel – the speciality of Walker, actually. Every now and again the excursions are punctuated with black and white photographs of various venetian sights relevant to the story. At chapters end, you get a short essay from the Richard’s perspective – Third person swaps to first and you see a flicker of his inner thoughts. There is a strong theme of re-enactment and revitalisation throughout the essays. The second part of the book, beginning around 165, drops text altogether for a graphical essay.

There is a clear arc to this story. The more photographs Richard takes, the more he challenges himself, the more he comes to appreciate the world. The prose, initially cynical, becomes increasingly emotive. Initially, he becomes a little angrier – frustration with the demands of photography, with family loss, with his failed aspirations. But conversely, the description of the photographic process becomes a hell of a lot more transcendant. Each flash becomes an out of body experience. He comes to see photography in terms of engaging every joint to get the perfect angle. So much more than just pressing a button.

Commentary – Spectacles.

This is all strange to me, of course. Beautiful, but unusual, this insight into picture taking. I learnt a lot of new terms, lots of surprising facts. The lengthy exposure times, for example, meant that old spectre cameras literally rendered most moving figures in photographs translucent afterimages. Of course, this makes a perfect opportunity for ghostly, spiritual prose. Sometimes, though, it can be gleefully coarse and silly or even a combination of all three – “The same fuck-off wall, continuing for infinity.” is one of the most perfect sentences read. Walker jumps to and from a variety of styles quite masterfully, with no whiplash in between. It’s all very balanced and never gets too rich or stodgy.

There is a lot of unmarked dialogue, however. Walker approaches punctuation from a highly mccarthian perspective – mostly periods, little exclamation marks and no speech marks. This can make the dialogue a little confusing sometimes, with the text seemingly jumping back and forth between various first person perspectives and the omniscient third. It takes some time to get used to, despite the book’s stubbiness, but I came to appreciate it. The messiness gives the prose a particular tang I can’t describe. I can’t recommend it, just as I know there are some of y’lot who’d love it. There is also a smidgeon of untranslated italian banter (aside from one bawdy college song) throughout the earlier parts of the novel, but it doesn’t detract too much from the clarity of the plot – if anythihg, it adds more realism to the setting.

Worth talking about characters, too! They may not be remarkable, but they are certainly written well. Without going into spoilers, Richard can be a little bit creepy or selfish at times, but is quietly called out on this and never becomes too unsympathetic – he’s a flawed human being who learns to confront his shortcomings by the end. His relationship with Merlo is wonderfully warm yet never verges into romance cliches – this is not Colleen Hoover tripe. While many of those among the crowd are two dimensional, never seem to be completely flat – each one contributes something to the story. The shouting drunk takes interest an interest in Richard’s choice of photography. The aforementioned performer steels Richard’s hat, but relents after Richard refuses to play fool. Enzo the barekeeper works so hard he keeps his legs bandaged to stop his veins from popping under pressure. Everyone is strange in their own special way without painfully trying to appeal as quirky.

Conclusion – an odd little book

I wasn’t just calling this book weird for the sake of clickbait. Push Process looks to areas of humanity that are underexposed; an insider into an art that, for all it’s prevalence in media, is scarcely covered in any depth. Push Process produces such subtle, strange emotions within me that it’s hard to express them clearly – even as I type right now, I’m wary that my writing here might be degenerating into a lexical salad!

No review would give this book justice. If you want to experience an afternoon of pleasant confusion – if you want to see the world through a camera lens for a week – you should just give this a read. If you don’t fancy it, at least you’ll have a pretty little book to decorate your shelf. Be optimistic.

Push process by Johnathan walker is £13.79 at WHSmiths, £14.99 at Ortac press.com. If you look very carefully, you might notice that this review is missing something – whoever spots it first gets a special prize!