By Daniel Silliman
Collegian News Editor

Daniel Linnell has a life-long attraction to maps.
He has a collection that includes every area he’s lived in and, when feeling unsettled or peevish, he pulls out a map and scans his world as it appears in the order of straight lines, green patches and ordered grids.

Linnell is the main character in Robert Chalmers’ Who’s Who in Hell, a novel that is caught up in details and has no overarching order. A combination of British black humor and tales of commitment and relationships, Who’s Who in Hell leaves the reader lost in the same quandary as Linnell. Chalmers has an attention for little things that is surprising and delightful throughout all 360 pages. But he doesn’t have a plot or a plan, and many of the best parts seem disconnected from the rest of the text.

There is little to propel one through the book. The plot is a shifting and unplanned thing. I began reading this book because it is about obituaries and obituary writers—an interesting subculture and a curious cast. This gives the book its witty title and its original blush of genius.

The book is the tale of Wittington, your classic British journalist who makes a name and achieves success by being heartless and yellow. We meet the cast of the dead and the soon-to-be-dead that have their obituaries written. In a project to array the damned we meet the scoundrels of world.

But these do not coalesce into a story, as one would expect in a novel. The world of the obituaries touches the plot only passingly. It soon becomes a story about an odd British café with haphazard décor and strange rules. Then it’s a story about a British-American love, and we meet Jasper the Kansas catfish. Then it’s a story of life reassessed, and it’s the story of Daniel and his son Jack.

And so the story moves without direction. We read the details but never know where we are going or where we came from. We have the details and the characters, but can’t grasp any solid sense of the whole.

The characters have a game called ‘Oliver.’ In the game, one person proposes a trait and another guesses the person. Playing the game intermittently, the characters seek to sum up and explain each other with the ordering of some sweeping assessment. Yet the words—damned, generous, unfaithful—all fall, cheap and lacking.

The characters fail, but only seem to know this in a way that makes them uncomfortable without startling them. Their knowledge of the failure exists in a way that crushes them slowly as they play a child’s game named, without a reason anyone can recall, Oliver.

The author, his book and the characters are caught in the dilemma of the relationship between the details and the order. They are caught between a world of specifics and the meaning of the whole; between the tangle of details and the order of generalizations.

But Chalmers is an author walking down a street without a map. Like his characters, he too wades in details but struggles with order.

He knows the street as an observant man who inhabits the street, but has never seen it uncluttered. He knows there is some order, but can only give directions based on the street-sweeper and the sleeping dog on the corner. He’s a writer obsessed with details but he has no plan, no view of the whole.

The book is exciting by the page—articulate specifics and fine vignettes lead one to experientially know the described—and heavy in the whole. Other reviews have expressed frustration as the themes and plots shift from counseling the mad, to finding a home in an eclectic café, to chronicling the dead, to an extended story of relational struggles. Chalmers is as entangled in the details as his characters.

He is the man who tells you to turn when you pass the sleeping dog with the dirty brown fur.
He writes with excellent attention to hands, tattoos and speech patterns. He writes of particulars with precision and yet emptily strikes at the general.

Chalmers’s work is a fine execution of human life without any feeling for themes or movements of humanity. Sorting through a mass of exquisite details I find I am playing Oliver with the book, and coming up either cheap or empty.