Books
Murray Middleton
U Want It Darker
It’s traditional to blame the Romantics for the conflation of suffering and artistic genius, but irrespective of where the association began, the idea is now one of our basic assumptions about the creative life. Just as truth comes from pain, artists take suffering and transform it into beauty.
Murray Middleton’s new book takes this idea and turns it on its head, offering a series of sketches of the creative life in which genius is in short supply but hubris, cluelessness and mediocrity are flowing free. The scenarios are varied but united by the growing gulf between their characters’ dreams and their lived reality. In the opening story, “Warm Love”, a drummer who once skirted the bottom end of success but now spends his evenings playing in an oompah band in a Bavarian-themed restaurant is reunited with his ex-bandmate and former lover. “Two Comedians” tracks the parallel lives of a woman stuck working in a data-entry job and an unsuccessful podcaster composing monologues about German toilets, the Freudian dreadfulness of Continental culture and “the Norwegian sociopath Knausgaard” while on a tour of the “grey inferno” of Europe. The title story follows a desperately needy middle-aged actor’s attempts to juggle the humiliations of small parts in crowdfunded short films with his life as a low-level university bureaucrat.
Middleton’s last book, 2024’s ambitious study of racism and inequality in Melbourne public housing, No Church in the Wild, explored the toxic legacies of racial violence and exclusion, powerfully capturing the contradictions and disjunctions of his protagonists’ inner lives. In U Want It Darker the stakes are lower, not least because most of his characters are cocooned by their middle-class privilege, but Middleton is no less adept at zeroing in on the moments of incomprehension in which his characters’ awfulness reveals something unacknowledged or unspoken.
Occasionally the results are heartbreaking: “Warm Love” orbits around the dark star of a baby lost years earlier, and in the title story a suspected sexual assault has knocked one of the characters off-course. Elsewhere they’re blackly funny. But more often they achieve a combination of the two that allows the characters’ vanity and self-delusion to reveal real pain.
That quality is especially evident in the book’s real highlight, “How Cannibals Exist”, in which the narrator describes the swirl of desire and unknowability around his childhood friend’s filmmaker mother and her bohemian household. But it is also there in the book’s closing story, in which a director transforms the grief of almost losing his baby into a play about the experience, leading his ex-wife to reflect that “anyone who conflated the stakes of art with life and death hadn’t experienced enough hardship, or hadn’t engaged with their own hardship properly”.
Picador Australia, 304pp, $34.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on August 2, 2025 as "U Want It Darker".
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