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Help in Cucumbers
There were artworks in your face, in the till and at the back of your mind. They were stepped over and veered around, ignored and delighted in, carried about in pockets and under tongues, releasing their minor potency slowly or fizzing up sharply before disappearing. Art was made from leftovers and undercurrents, influxes and overflows; it was functional like the dishwasher and as extravagant as drunkenness. Beer poured from work, and work from beer, and art from beer and work, and work from art, and thought from talk, and talk from thought or beer. Artwork and beerart were indiscernible from celebrations, intermingled with popular secrets; all around was a showy volley of private magics.
Help in Cucumbers is a novella, a memoir, a contemporary art survey and a collaborative artwork. When the staff of a brewery-tied pub hear of minor mutinies by which factory, postal and office workers have recouped a sense of self-worth, they begin to experiment in their own workplace. The social fray becomes a forum for performance, punters an audience and business a source of artistic materials. The book itself is a bar room where many lives and psychologies mingle, and artworks and anecdotes from our world rub shoulders with conceptual musings, personal histories and sheer fabrication.
Sally O’Reilly’s recent projects include Where They Gather, a spoken word and music album with Kit Downes, Three Scoop Complicator on Mattflix and the online pub The Open Arms. Works of fiction include The Ambivalents, Crude and the opera The Virtues of Things. O'Reilly was writer in residence at the Whitechapel Art Gallery and Modern Art Oxford, producer and co-writer of The Last of the Red Wine, a radio sitcom set in the art world, and co-editor of the interdisciplinary broadsheet Implicasphere.
Help in Cucumbers is a novella, a memoir, a contemporary art survey and a collaborative artwork. When the staff of a brewery-tied pub hear of minor mutinies by which factory, postal and office workers have recouped a sense of self-worth, they begin to experiment in their own workplace. The social fray becomes a forum for performance, punters an audience and business a source of artistic materials. The book itself is a bar room where many lives and psychologies mingle, and artworks and anecdotes from our world rub shoulders with conceptual musings, personal histories and sheer fabrication.
Sally O’Reilly’s recent projects include Where They Gather, a spoken word and music album with Kit Downes, Three Scoop Complicator on Mattflix and the online pub The Open Arms. Works of fiction include The Ambivalents, Crude and the opera The Virtues of Things. O'Reilly was writer in residence at the Whitechapel Art Gallery and Modern Art Oxford, producer and co-writer of The Last of the Red Wine, a radio sitcom set in the art world, and co-editor of the interdisciplinary broadsheet Implicasphere.
181 pages
Published January 1, 2023
2 people are currently reading
55 people want to read
About the author
Sally O'Reilly
37 books23 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base.
Sally O'Reilly has received numerous citations for her fiction, which has been shortlisted for the Ian St James Short Story Prize and the Cosmopolitan Short Story Award. A former Cosmopolitan New Journalist of the Year, her work has appeared in The Guardian, The Sunday Times, the Evening Standard, and the New Scientist. She teaches creative writing at the Open University and the University of Portsmouth in England. Dark Aemilia is her U.S. debut.
Sally O'Reilly has received numerous citations for her fiction, which has been shortlisted for the Ian St James Short Story Prize and the Cosmopolitan Short Story Award. A former Cosmopolitan New Journalist of the Year, her work has appeared in The Guardian, The Sunday Times, the Evening Standard, and the New Scientist. She teaches creative writing at the Open University and the University of Portsmouth in England. Dark Aemilia is her U.S. debut.
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August 25, 2023
Martine from the art school had also been observing, taking notes and marvelling at the meanings and ambiguities unearthed in the barroom. Galleries and museums would kill for this, she scrawled, overflowing with excitement, hoping no one else would notice and think it through and have these same thoughts and go away and develop it into a lecture at the very least, if not a seminal publication and panel discussion and possibly even a museum show. This, she was thinking, is the new folkway. This is our mumming and corn dollies. It is cheese rolling, bottle kicking, sword, morris and maypole dancing; it is worm charming, Guy Fawkes burning, embroidery and gurning. It is the creative impulse spurting up like lifeblood through the cracks and holes in everyday norms. This is art woven through the fabric of life, not bricked off in a hushed white corner, apart. Art is pushing on an open door and bursting out into the mainstream. Art for all! She had applauded and applauded, a flushed, breathless in-house claqueur which, in the spirit of Happenings, was also absorbed into the gesamtkunstwerk.
The novel Help in Cucumbers by writer and artist Sally O'Reilly is published by JOAN Publishing:
The book is inspired by O'Reilly's time in the 1990s working in a Soho pub, The Three Greyhounds, managed by Roxy Beaujolais, who later (and at the novel's end) purchased her own pub, the The Seven Stars in Holborn, opposite the Royal Courts of Justice.
The place had a pervasive odour of spilt romanticism about it. It was Roxy’s masterpiece, a picaresque novel in progress with too many secondary characters, each pursuing self-discovery via muddled subplots of largely inconsequent travails and triumphs. Managers and lawmakers, technicians and students, tourists from everywhere, shop workers, criminals, hens and stags, advertisers and actors, local residents, staff from other bars and professional drinkers – all brought their psychodramas to the pub, shifting from periphery to centre for a paragraph or two before retreating to mise- en-scène. And throughout, Roxy filled that strange non-diegetic space of the narrator, who might be but probably isn’t the writer.
The book takes its title from a time when, with Roxy away, the narrator takes up culinary duties, and decides to send messages in her cucumber garnish to the patrons in the bar, although the response to her 'Help' plea (sent for artistic effect rather than genuine) is somewhat underwhelming:
We were all-too aware of those words that get things done, the real doing-words that are actions as well as words. We used them every day at closing time. Stop, we’d groan whenever the pub bore explained the notion of them to us. But help, when in cucumbers, was not one of those words. It got nothing done. No punter sprang to their feet, their Thonet chair falling backwards under the weight of their coat as they bounded across the barroom, fighting their way past startled tapsters to pound up the stairs. But they thought about it. They wondered who might be shackled to the stainless-steel worktop and how: by a Dickensian clanking chain or the invisible yoke of The System or the clinch of some personal obligation? The spectre of coercion flitted through their lunch party and haunted the complex geometry of upstairs and downstairs, cellar, bar and kitchen, punters and workers, labour and leisure, duties, needs and wants.
What we have here, said Jillian, is a captive audience. Art was tapping at the windows, we realised, because it was seeking out just such an audience, like a triffid turning towards screams. If you scrape it back to its rudimentaries, said Jillian, a pub’s a room filled with people who actually want to be here, and who will accept anything happening therein as the natural content of their evening. Oh, the things I could do with that! Her eyes were bright with comic lust as she squeezed her shoulders together kittenishly and popped a crisp into the glistening pink cave defended by her Clara Bow lips.
This concept of performance art, as an act of resistance to and commentary on, the world of work, is key to the book. In the novel's version, the pub regulars and staff include a variety of artists, both contemporary collaborators with O'Reilly and others whose art and history she has repurposed. This is an establishment where people come in not to apply for jobs, but rather for a 'residency'. While in the novel's pub this is openly acknowledged and encouraged, many of those featured actually practice 'stealth art' within their place of employ:
Stealth art is a means of taking control of the site of making and showing, and employment an alternative, regular and comparatively reliable funding stream. The uninvited residency presents a situation that is interestingly complex, with singular opportunities and access that an ‘out’ artist would not be granted. But it is also loaded with risks, ethical concerns and tensions.
The novel comes with 30 pages of notes, almost a novella in its own right, explaining the real-life artists referenced and their works, as well as a list of novels which influenced the book (I was delighted but not surprised to see Sterling Karat Gold) as well as the literary antecedents for some of the clothing featured (which range from the novels of M John Harrison and Bridget Brophy to Alistair Gray).
But my review runs the risk of making this all sound very serious and dull - actually the novel is a riot of eccentric characters behaving outrageously, the landlady - the ale-wife as the novel has her (I think riffing off a review in The Spectator) of The Seven Stars) - foremost among them.
And it is delightfully illustrated by various pencil diagrams of key concepts. I particularly enjoyed this one as great to see someone acknowledging the importance of the G-Shock (I'm a G-2900 fanatic):
I could count on the fingers of one hand, said Lloyd, the things that money can buy that are actually worth anything. In the notebook, he drew:
A wonderful find and recommended.
The novel Help in Cucumbers by writer and artist Sally O'Reilly is published by JOAN Publishing:
The publishing project of London-based artists Rachel Cattle and John Hughes, JOAN is a new independent publisher of contemporary interdisciplinary writing, supporting feminist, queer, and idiosyncratic voices, and innovative fictions.
The book is inspired by O'Reilly's time in the 1990s working in a Soho pub, The Three Greyhounds, managed by Roxy Beaujolais, who later (and at the novel's end) purchased her own pub, the The Seven Stars in Holborn, opposite the Royal Courts of Justice.
The place had a pervasive odour of spilt romanticism about it. It was Roxy’s masterpiece, a picaresque novel in progress with too many secondary characters, each pursuing self-discovery via muddled subplots of largely inconsequent travails and triumphs. Managers and lawmakers, technicians and students, tourists from everywhere, shop workers, criminals, hens and stags, advertisers and actors, local residents, staff from other bars and professional drinkers – all brought their psychodramas to the pub, shifting from periphery to centre for a paragraph or two before retreating to mise- en-scène. And throughout, Roxy filled that strange non-diegetic space of the narrator, who might be but probably isn’t the writer.
The book takes its title from a time when, with Roxy away, the narrator takes up culinary duties, and decides to send messages in her cucumber garnish to the patrons in the bar, although the response to her 'Help' plea (sent for artistic effect rather than genuine) is somewhat underwhelming:
We were all-too aware of those words that get things done, the real doing-words that are actions as well as words. We used them every day at closing time. Stop, we’d groan whenever the pub bore explained the notion of them to us. But help, when in cucumbers, was not one of those words. It got nothing done. No punter sprang to their feet, their Thonet chair falling backwards under the weight of their coat as they bounded across the barroom, fighting their way past startled tapsters to pound up the stairs. But they thought about it. They wondered who might be shackled to the stainless-steel worktop and how: by a Dickensian clanking chain or the invisible yoke of The System or the clinch of some personal obligation? The spectre of coercion flitted through their lunch party and haunted the complex geometry of upstairs and downstairs, cellar, bar and kitchen, punters and workers, labour and leisure, duties, needs and wants.
What we have here, said Jillian, is a captive audience. Art was tapping at the windows, we realised, because it was seeking out just such an audience, like a triffid turning towards screams. If you scrape it back to its rudimentaries, said Jillian, a pub’s a room filled with people who actually want to be here, and who will accept anything happening therein as the natural content of their evening. Oh, the things I could do with that! Her eyes were bright with comic lust as she squeezed her shoulders together kittenishly and popped a crisp into the glistening pink cave defended by her Clara Bow lips.
This concept of performance art, as an act of resistance to and commentary on, the world of work, is key to the book. In the novel's version, the pub regulars and staff include a variety of artists, both contemporary collaborators with O'Reilly and others whose art and history she has repurposed. This is an establishment where people come in not to apply for jobs, but rather for a 'residency'. While in the novel's pub this is openly acknowledged and encouraged, many of those featured actually practice 'stealth art' within their place of employ:
Stealth art is a means of taking control of the site of making and showing, and employment an alternative, regular and comparatively reliable funding stream. The uninvited residency presents a situation that is interestingly complex, with singular opportunities and access that an ‘out’ artist would not be granted. But it is also loaded with risks, ethical concerns and tensions.
The novel comes with 30 pages of notes, almost a novella in its own right, explaining the real-life artists referenced and their works, as well as a list of novels which influenced the book (I was delighted but not surprised to see Sterling Karat Gold) as well as the literary antecedents for some of the clothing featured (which range from the novels of M John Harrison and Bridget Brophy to Alistair Gray).
But my review runs the risk of making this all sound very serious and dull - actually the novel is a riot of eccentric characters behaving outrageously, the landlady - the ale-wife as the novel has her (I think riffing off a review in The Spectator) of The Seven Stars) - foremost among them.
And it is delightfully illustrated by various pencil diagrams of key concepts. I particularly enjoyed this one as great to see someone acknowledging the importance of the G-Shock (I'm a G-2900 fanatic):
I could count on the fingers of one hand, said Lloyd, the things that money can buy that are actually worth anything. In the notebook, he drew:
A wonderful find and recommended.
August 22, 2023
"Carried away by the feel of the obedient blade of the best little knife slickly conjuring delicate pale-green stained-glass roundels for a vegetal cathedral to the gods of succulence, I’d prepared too much cucumber. I laid them out in excessive rows down the side of the plate — an appreciative audience for the silvery herring. Or, if the white plate were a page, the OOOOOO of appreciation itself. I placed the Os in the speech bubble of a lettuce leaf arranged as if emitted by a ciabatta. OOOOOO, said the ciabatta in excitement at fulfilling its potential at last." (p. 90)
I don't know why, but I can't stop giggling imagining excited ciabatta. Together with Catherine Lacey's Biography of X, Sally O'Riley's novel is one of the best that I've read dealing with art and art's role in society this year. The novel's set in a pub: "If you scrape it back to its rudimentaries, said Jillian, a pub’s a room filled with people who actually want to be here, and who will accept anything happening therein as the natural content of their evening. Oh, the things I could do with that!" (p. 96). In the pub, labor is treated as art and art as labor, artwork and workart: "Art was made from leftovers and undercurrents, influxes and overflows; it was functional like the dishwasher and as extravagant as drunkenness. Beer poured from work, and work from beer, and art from beer and work, and work from art, and thought from talk, and talk from thought or beer. Artwork and beerart were indiscernible from celebrations, intermingled with popular secrets; all around was a showy volley of private magics" (p. 104). And while we follow a collective 'we' which morphs into individual names of the pub employees we also get a roster of artists doing their (proclamations of) art. Most of situations and/or performance pieces described are based on actual works of art, and the novel comes with dozen of pages long Index of Punters & Anecdotes wherein O'Riley lists all the artists and their works. Also, and this is what charmed me the most, the clothes the narrator wears are wholly intertextual, that is, descriptions are taken from other novels (there's a three page long list of the sources at the end, too). The whole of the novel is a sort of a meta-performative space about (the theory of) performance art, but also deeply humorous and enjoyable no matter how the matter of labor is actually depressing.
"The body was already so fragile, we repeated, running our finger over the etched lettering. Is this our own body, we asked, or the body in which we are but a corpuscle carrying the oxygen of work to the heart of the City? We stamped our feet, flapped our tongues and felt the shivers roll outwards through the limbs of public life. And we felt the collective stresses and strains roll back to infect us with disquiet. We remembered the alewife’s plague-era pennies in jars of vinegar, and confessed to the paltry change we kept in old shoes and whiskey bottles. How pathetic these attempts were to stem the uphill flow of wealth and the downhill slide to death. How has it come to be that it costs money to stay alive? We shook our heads and made silent resolutions." (p. 101)
I don't know why, but I can't stop giggling imagining excited ciabatta. Together with Catherine Lacey's Biography of X, Sally O'Riley's novel is one of the best that I've read dealing with art and art's role in society this year. The novel's set in a pub: "If you scrape it back to its rudimentaries, said Jillian, a pub’s a room filled with people who actually want to be here, and who will accept anything happening therein as the natural content of their evening. Oh, the things I could do with that!" (p. 96). In the pub, labor is treated as art and art as labor, artwork and workart: "Art was made from leftovers and undercurrents, influxes and overflows; it was functional like the dishwasher and as extravagant as drunkenness. Beer poured from work, and work from beer, and art from beer and work, and work from art, and thought from talk, and talk from thought or beer. Artwork and beerart were indiscernible from celebrations, intermingled with popular secrets; all around was a showy volley of private magics" (p. 104). And while we follow a collective 'we' which morphs into individual names of the pub employees we also get a roster of artists doing their (proclamations of) art. Most of situations and/or performance pieces described are based on actual works of art, and the novel comes with dozen of pages long Index of Punters & Anecdotes wherein O'Riley lists all the artists and their works. Also, and this is what charmed me the most, the clothes the narrator wears are wholly intertextual, that is, descriptions are taken from other novels (there's a three page long list of the sources at the end, too). The whole of the novel is a sort of a meta-performative space about (the theory of) performance art, but also deeply humorous and enjoyable no matter how the matter of labor is actually depressing.
"The body was already so fragile, we repeated, running our finger over the etched lettering. Is this our own body, we asked, or the body in which we are but a corpuscle carrying the oxygen of work to the heart of the City? We stamped our feet, flapped our tongues and felt the shivers roll outwards through the limbs of public life. And we felt the collective stresses and strains roll back to infect us with disquiet. We remembered the alewife’s plague-era pennies in jars of vinegar, and confessed to the paltry change we kept in old shoes and whiskey bottles. How pathetic these attempts were to stem the uphill flow of wealth and the downhill slide to death. How has it come to be that it costs money to stay alive? We shook our heads and made silent resolutions." (p. 101)
July 3, 2024
Help in Cucumbers is that rare novel which is both deeply political and also fun to read. Set in a pub in 1990s Soho, the novel is in one sense a meditation on the intersection of art and labor, while also dramatizing class solidarity and camaraderie. The pub is something of a microcosm for the world at large, a place where regulars and visitors intermingle. It's also an idealized microcosm, with dramas reconciled and the pub a haven for creativity. Work and art are interwoven, rather than opposed. The text is broken into sections, which bear different times of the work day (Closing, Evening, Afternoon, Lunchtime, Opening), notably out of forward sequence and another layer of interest. Following the primary text (which runs about 130 pages), we have 30 pages of notes - an "Index of Punters and Anecdotes" - which shows the deeply intertextual nature of the book, not only with other written texts but with all manner of artists and the fruits of their labor. Written by Sally O'Reilly and published by JOAN Publishing.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews