In All of This Unreal Time, Max Porter Apologizes For Everything

In the summer of 2020, while the world was trapped inside during what felt like an endless lockdown, author Max Porter and actor Cillian Murphy began discussing the idea of collaborating on a project again. The two had previously worked together on the theatrical adaptation of Porter’s novel Grief is the Thing with Feathers, which saw Murphy play the dual roles of a grieving father and the giant crow that visits him after his wife’s death. They wondered whether they could create something that wasn’t quite a film, or a poem, or even a book, really, but rather something transient that sat at the intersection of all of these boundaries. The result was All of This Unreal Time—a film/music/art installation hybrid that allowed the two to explore all the worries they felt about the current moment in a mixed format. Now, three years after the piece debuted at the Manchester International Festival in 2021, and with a foreword written by Murphy, the piece has been published as a handy pocket-sized book to be carried around and poured over at length.

All of This Unreal Time’s journey to publication is a fascinating one—that the book was ever published in the first place feels surprising; Porter admitted that the reason why the project didn’t start as a literary piece was because he felt limited by the restraints of publishing a “copyright-bound object to be sold”. It’s a shrewd perspective on an industry that Porter has been part of (first as a bookseller and then as an author) for over fifteen years, and this shrewdness is reflected in the contents of the work. In All of This Unreal Time, Porter traverses ideas on love, masculinity, and late capitalist guilt to weave together a stream-of-consciousness-style monologue about every mistake he has ever made. The text feels like a confessional, with Porter seeking forgiveness for every sin and every flaw, offering up his deepest vulnerabilities for his readers to consume. It is deeply personal, if a little jarring at first. 

The monologue opens with the sentence “I came out here to apologize.” The sentence is isolated on an otherwise blank page, resting solemnly at the top for the reader to sit with. It’s a bold declaration to start with. It conjures up an image of the speaker taking to the stand to present his case in a bid to mitigate his guilty sentence. Much of the book is formatted in a similar way, the prose disjointed and scattered across the pages to give the feeling of an ever-shifting text, as if Porter quite literally emptied his mind onto the page and allowed the words to land wherever they first fell. There are pages with barely any words on them, and others where the words cascade in the shape of a waterfall. It’s a disorienting reflection of a mind rushing to expel every apology before time runs out. 

As the speaker rattles off apology after apology, the mounting fear that he’ll run out of time before he can seek forgiveness for every wrong in the world is made more tangible. He goes from apologizing to his grandmother at the start of the book to apologizing to a lover and uses the spaces in between to beg forgiveness for every transgression, frivolous or sincere, that pops into his head. He apologizes for cheating on a Geography test at school, for not investing his birthday money well, and for being selfish and cruel. He apologizes for contributing to climate change with his careless flights across the world, for taking part in a capitalist cycle of oppression through his poor consumerist habits, and for not eschewing ‘lad culture’ despite claiming to be a “decent man”. He apologizes for the damage men have inflicted and will continue to inflict on this world, and cynically declares that “the only heroic man is a dead man.” As the speaker meanders through these “half-journeys” of interconnected apologies, the effect of COVID lockdowns and a rapidly increasing climate crisis become ever clearer. These are the ramblings of a 21st-century man weighed down by the unavoidable cognizance of 21st-century problems that were only exacerbated by a global pandemic. It is as overwhelming as it is cathartic. 

At the end of his foreword, Murphy asserts that this project was made to be “discussed, lived with, it’s meant to change according to who’s reading it.” At just 15x11cm in size, with rounded corners and a cover printed in a deep shade of greenish-blue that almost resembles the dark color of a British passport, All of This Unreal Time does present itself as something that should be carried with you and shared with friends and strangers alike as you move through the world. It would be easy for a project like this to appear self-serving—a white man having a crisis of conscience and deciding to seek absolution after being forced to sit in isolation with his own thoughts for a brief moment in time is hardly the most enticing or, indeed, original concept for an art piece. But somehow, Porter’s words come across as sincere. 

All of This Unreal Time feels less like a performance of humility and more like the confessions of a man whose only means of catharsis is through the written word. It is both a plea for forgiveness and a request to appreciate all there is to life, both the good and the bad. Though Porter’s first medium of choice was anything but a book, the fact that he has now chosen to publish this piece suggests a desire for the words to continue living long after the performance is over. As Murphy writes in his foreword, “It’s a gift, written in friendship, to be handed on.” As a snapshot of a specific period of isolation, and as the plotless vehicle through which to examine one man’s guilt and shame over the state of the modern world, All of This Unreal Time will no doubt be passed along from hand to hand for many years to come.

All of This Unreal Time is available now from Rough Trade Books. 

Nadira Begum is a freelance film critic and culture writer based in the UK. To see her talk endlessly about film, TV, and her love of vampires, you can follow her on Twitter (@nadirawrites) or Instagram (@iamnadirabegum).