| Poetry | Novels | Other | Theory |
Wife battering and sensitivity to smells appear rather a lot, and I think that too often a structural gimmick is used to make a plain biography more interesting. "Genteel Potatoes" isn't much of a story, nor is "Star Dust". "The role of notable silences in Scottish history" is better in this respect, the form matching the content. Kennedy tries to show us characters' thoughts using their own forms of languages, but too often the characters (perhaps because of shared pre-occupations or states of mind) sound much like each other.
"Translations" is very different from the rest of the pieces. I'd have liked to see more experiments like this. I liked "The seaside photographer" best, perhaps because the author didn't use adultery or murder to force a piece of "writing" into the shape of a "story".
On the downside, the title story is loose structurally (the parts too long for the framing device) and some of the stories don't know how to finish. Overall though, I prefer this to Kennedy's collection.
Early on we read "It could be said that normally nothing very startling went on in Edward's head". Edward's not unique. All the main characters are male, unassertive, childless, and seem to live in multi-occupier dwellings. If they have jobs we rarely know their profession. They like watching the paths of drops of sweat or rain. They worry about the inadequacy of words (one even worries about boring the reader) resorting to painting as a way to communicate with people; invitations to see paintings end up as sexual advances.
Intermittent Light is my favourite piece - here traditional assets (observation, rounded characters and expectation) combine successfully with New Wave cinematic techniques. The title story works well too. Elsewhere the repetition of themes and images brings diminishing returns - the language doesn't quite shoulder its extra responsibilities.
Should prose writers flock to avant-garde publications? I doubt it; the market's saturated there too, but the mainstream could be enriched by the judicious adoption of some currently marginal techniques such as those presented in this collection which, when all's said and done, is a worthwhile read in small doses and a welcome reminder that there's more to the short story genre than books by Jeffrey Archer (or even A.L. Kennedy) might suggest.
| Mrs Campion is strumming on her harp with woollen strings. Alex is crawling through a nest of bracken. Wendy Eva, with no mouth or eyes, has upturned the pale oval of her face towards the sky. Ernest is on one knee in torrential rain, looking for Germany. Lionel scarcely crackles as he burns. |
2 short stories and a novella, all having a youth as the main character, whose same-sex parent is dead or invalided. They all feature "The Troubles". The short stories feature a first-person youth. Katie in the title piece is 15. She says things like "I stretched wide like love", and "The night had started stars. They were up through the branches. The river was spraying in them". The son in "Wood" doesn't yet shave. He begins by saying "It was just past night-time when we brought the logs down to the mill. The storm was finished but there was snow still on the hedges and it looked like they had a white eyebrow" and later (p.22) says "There was ivy on the walls and it looked like our secret was climbing up the vines to Daddy's room".
They are convenient observers who don't understand (or at least can't express) what's happening, especially in the larger world. This is plausible trait in children. Katie seems naive for her age (taking an instant fancy to a soldier although her father hates them) but maybe she's led an isolated life and has been deprived of love. The children have to play the roles of adults, though they still play like kids sometimes. The author ventriloquizes (rather than intrudes) when the children can't express enough. This mix lets the work be "lyrical" (the author putting words into the children's mouths) and also "controlled" (the children seem unmoved by what they see). We see the committed, emotional parents via the children's clinical observations. It can be highly effective, but you have to buy into the style and its contradictions.
I'd already read the title story in "The Art of the Story: An International Anthology of Contemporary Short Stories". I was impressed. McCann was under 35 when he wrote it. The child feels powerless against fatalism - "Stevie and the draft horse were going to die, since everything in this county must". Perhaps the father knew that the horse was too injured to survive anyway.
In "Woods" the mother colludes in a small way while her husband's bedridden after a stroke. She enlists her oldest son, telling him not to tell the rest of the family.
Kevin in "Hunger Strike" is 13. His mother's trying hard to keep him away from the troubles (they've moved south to live in a caravan, and she's careful with her accent) but Kevin's floundering in search of a male role model. Unlike the youths in the other stories, Kevin is rebellious, has few responsibilities foisted upon him, and is interested in distant events - as long as they involve relatives. He does his own hunger strike secretly, in sympathy with that of his uncle. As in the other stories, there are distracting sentences
The ending is obvious in a short-story way, though effective. At least he didn't burn his boats.
Don't be deterred by the first 2 stories, things improve - she takes language with her when she soars. For the most common character type a moment of respite from stress triggers a flight response - a trip to the toilet ends up with hitching a ride to Brighton; a cycle ride leads to a visit to a prostitute. When previously unadmitted thoughts have a chance to be made manifest, they blossom, though not in ways that makes return impossible - the narrator's partner/family aren't confronted. The straying characters are lucky in who they meet: thoughtful lorry drivers, old ladies in supermarkets, interested waitresses - no wierdos.
In "The unthinkable happens to people every day" a man goes off the rails only to be saved by a chance meeting with a little girl. In her world he's a star, associated with a popular TV program. Again, the internals of the change (in this case a recovery) aren't shown.
Most of the couples are imminently breaking up. The collapse will be sudden because it's already happened internally. Like cartoon characters running on thin air beyond the edge of the cliff, it's just a matter of time before realisation sinks in. But sometimes the shock is unforseen, unprepared for. In "Cold iron" a character searches for fragments of a suddenly shattered past, trying to make meaning from lists and souvenirs.
The lyricism comes mostly from how the phrases are sequenced, how sentences tumble into succeeding one, rather than the words themselves. Here's the start of "Cold Iron" which is an exception.
|
What can I tell you? The sea and the snow and the wind. Earth and then grass and then snow settling on the grass. Snow choking the narrow gravel paths, nestling into the neck and filling the stone eyes of a praying angel, silently mittening the leafless branches of trees, |
Poetry pamphlets seem to be making a comeback, but what of story pamphlets? My guess is that multi-author prose pamphlets won't catch on, though monographs have a chance. This pamphlet of prizewinners has 2 stories of about 2 pages, and 2 of about 8 pages, by 4 authors. Given the context, the range of styles is wide, though the mood is pretty grim throughout - death and dysfunctional relationships dominate the non-fantasy pieces.
I'd like to focus on "Perfect Curls" by Sarah Evans, because it's closest to what I could write, and because I'm interested in the way the story unfolds - there's a narrative time (about 5 hours) containing events, but much of the revelation happens in flashbacks.
Spoiler Warning!
An "All Fiction" issue with 9 stories, each 10-20 pages. The editorial says that in 2004 they came close to refusing unsolicited material (they received 5000 stories a year and depended on voluntary "slush readers"). Luckily, new volunteers came forward and this issue is mostly from the slush pile.
They also say that "Breaking into print has never been easy and the commercial market for short fiction has shrunk dramatically in the last few years. The expansion of M.F.A. programs (on line and off) has added a new dimension in that there is a growing class of individuals who write professionally and need to publish their work in order to advance their careers", so it's not just in the UK that there are problems.
They're all good reads. All use mainstream realism with sane characters whose jobs usually don't matter (or they're writers). Main characters range in age from 5 to 78. Most of the plots and tensions are familiar. The narrative modes, locations, genres and character types come from a narrow range. Back in 1997 Laura Miller wrote an article in Salon saying that Raymond Carver inspired a generation of writers whose work Aldridge condemns as "technically conservative ... and often extremely modest in scope." This is fiction full of lower-middle-class characters who light cigarettes, lean silently against their kitchen counters, and contemplate the anomie of their stifled lives and relationships. ... what Entrekin calls "the 'divorce and cancer in Connecticut' school of fiction."). This selection risks the same accusation. The quality of the writing within these constraints is what wins through. I like "The New Year's Child", "That of which we cannot speak", and "We the Girly Girls from Massachusetts" most.
The magazine depends on an annual subsidy of between $14,000 and $45,000 from the College. Though the college will close in 2008 the web site says that The Antioch Review will continue.
The Guardian newspaper supports the short story on-line and off. This paper edition offers a 50/50 US/UK male/female split. About 18 pages of text, so we should be grateful, but about 12 pages of pictures. The demographic? Well, there are 3 old narrators and 2 adulterers and 2 pregnancies. I was interesting in seeing what kind of stories were chosen.
I like the Burnside piece, pretentious though it might be in the context. Most of the others seemed rather slow to get started and lacked crisp descriptive detail. Most were character-driven - I turned the pages to see what would happen to the main character rather than to see how the plot would twist and turn.
The acknowledgements page shows what you need to do nowadays to have a short story collection published: stories in London Magazine, Staple, Metropolitan, Stand (twice), East of the web (twice), bananas, Radio 3, the Literary Review, etc - a list that puts most poetry collections to shame. The pieces average 6 pages, though they range from 1 page to about 20.
Middle class people dominate, usually in English urban settings. Separated parents with children are often depicted using a female PoV. Early on in the stories we're introduced to all the cast. Stories take place in one location in a narrow time window. There are few loners or loonies - there's always interpersonal interaction. There's little about death - no first loves, no punchlines.
These repeated traits are used in various ways, and the language varies too - one couldn't simply transplant a sentence from one piece to another - "pigeons rise up before her, wheel in a thrill of flight over pinked tinged buildings, then sink back down with a breaking of wings like a sigh" (p.74) is between the extremes of lyricism and reportage used in other pieces.
I most liked "Leaf Memory", "Bread" (based around definitions of words for "roll"), and "Going Back" (perhaps my favorite - shades of Woolf). These have non-standard narratives, though I liked "Shooting Script" (strong comic characterisation) too. I wasn't so keen on "Daniel Smith ..." (too slight), "Conundrum" (too slight) or "Into the Night" (too workshoppy).
Writers sometimes mention an item or event several times in stories, more as an adaptable symbol than a leitmotif. Sometimes it parallels events, sometimes it's more enigmatic, able to mirror, summarize or foreshadow. Quite often the characters aren't aware of the item (which can be a tree, the sky, a neighbour's activities in the garden, or even some extra-narrative element). Even if they are, they're unaware of its symbolic import. Examples include the birds in Hitchcock's "The Birds". It's a technique used in this book. In "Power" for example, the cat (a "he", like the absent father) provides enigmatic symbols to interpret. The wasteland however tracks the mood in pathetic fallacy fashion - it's built upon at the end. "Star Things" has a meteorite, a catalyst to bring out class differences. In "Compass and Torch" the objects are useful almost as objective correlatives (elided similes) to compare the son and father, whereas the horse (a "she" like the absent mother) has a less direct role.
Even though there are family resemblances between stories, one shouldn't underestimate the differences. "Power" has a child PoV, the restriction overcome by quoting overheard phonecalls. When control's not obtained by the child, when beliefs are shattered, the child creates a private fantasy world starring the cat. "Ways to Behave" is more plot-driven. "Condensed metaphysics" uses a pub philosopher and a late-night-cafe physics student to info-dump theories before a group of women on a night out, social divides and broken family units showing through.
But did I like it? Yes. For one reason or another (lack of talent, but also a lack of devotion to character/voice) I couldn't have written most of these pieces. I had a piece called "The Big Climb" published in "Staple" once, about a father and young son on a hilly hike, the mother gone away, but there the resemblances to "Compass and Torch" end.
Jan 2009 - In response to my query that the pieces were more drama- than film-based (few scene-changes or acts; little cross-cutting; frequent voiced thoughts) the author noted that "of the 13 stories in it, I see that 6 do deal with a single episode over a short time span in the time-honoured short-story way, but that 7 deal with several scenes over a longer period. In fact I have thought of some of these last as using the cinematic technique of quick cuts which avoid narrative explanation - 'Who's Singing?', for instance, which keeps cutting between the Medical Professor's home and the hospital. 'A Glossary of Bread' spans a whole childhood, in fact, and 'Holding Hands' a whole life into early middle age." which makes me think I'd better read the book again.
I found this in the local library - another new UK short story collection! In the final story, "Radiant Heat" (published in Prospect magazine), a plane crash is described from 2 viewpoints - that of a physicist in the plane, and of a lorry driver from a family of undertakers called in to help tidy up. Each would merit a story of its own. The writing's snappy, and the incidentals are interesting - cancer, childbirth and static electricity all get a mention. Weighing in at about 20 pages, it's much the best story in the book. Most of the other stories are about 10 pages long and borrow some detail or other from "Radiant Heat" - premature births, static electricity or ball lightning as orgasm, and older men dying. Birth, copulation and death.
There's structural variety. A couple of stories use the 2nd person present. A story or 2 are 3rd person with a large cast and no privileged PoV. "E-love: Heloise & Abelard" is epistolatory, but I don't know the original story so it meant little to me. "The Will Writer" reminded me of VS Pritchett stories. In "Sacred Heart" a girl thinking of ditching her boyfriend becomes attached to a dying man she never talked with. The hints of a sexual edge bring to mind Ian McEwan.
Nothing especially moved or impressed me though. Later I might be able to express why. All I can say now is that I didn't learn much from the pieces.
Some of the other pieces, though they're atmospheric and introduce convincing characters, have the tone/action pacing of longer pieces. They're more like adapted novel chapters; the endings seem merely to avoid closure rather than offer an alternative. And [style-pedant warning] some of the pieces have awkward phrasings that don't seem deliberate
Later stories have more of an arc. In "The Sunflower" the narrator, in a "carnivalesque of Bloomsian anxiety" worries about why he's metamorphosing into a sunflower rather than (say) a cockroach. "Launderama" is fine - again the first paragraph heavily foreshadows: "I have always loved laundrettes. I have never not believed in ghosts. But I could have quite easily passed through a whole life, an eventful one, without ever having reason to bring these two minor facts together". "When I Met Michel Foucault" is the best story of the lot.
147 pages, 19 stories - several of them 3 pages long. I think the first will be enough to make you want to read to the end of the book.
With old whodunnits, one assumes the butler did it. In a story like the first - "Words from a Glass Bubble" - one assumes that the symbolic bubble will be burst, and indeed it is, though much else happens besides. The characters are believable, the descriptions spare and effective, but I'd like to focus on the literary aspects. In the first page we learn that the glass bauble contains the Virgin Mary (the "VM") and child. Eva lives with Connor. It sounds as if their child, Declan, died young 20 or so years before. The VM talks to Eva who often feels the voice in her stomach (her womb?). Then we hear about Finn Piper - an illiterate farmer who lives alone and is first seen walking naked across his yard. Already the bauble's gathering meaning: the VM expresses Eva's repressed thoughts maybe, the VM+child pairing echoed by Eva+Finn/Declan. Throughout, (and usually associated with Finn) birds are mentioned in description or simile - crow, rook, buzzard, sparrow, eagle, cuckoo, pigeon. Eva befriends Finn and takes him to a children's party, the VM + child (extracted from the bauble) in her pocket. At the end the husband returns the VM+child to the bauble, and starts hearing the VM too. Then the Declan=Finn identity is reinforced, the trapped spirit released like a ghost, triumphant, though I did wonder where the Lourdes water went.
This description might lead you to think that you can hear the gears grinding through the piece. Not at all - the symbolism doesn't fit together over-neatly, and there's always enough human interest to distract readers from wondering how all the balls are being kept in the air.
The second story also ends with a man beginning to share the long-held fantasy world of a woman, the woman not disconcerted to see/hear things that others don't. The style's different though, and styles continue to ring the changes until "Irrigation" (mentioned in my Riptide write-up) which comes from the same school as "Words from a Glass Bubble". The next story, "Excavation" (only 3 pages or so), breaks all the preceding moulds - my favourite piece so far. Authorial orientation changes too - sometimes the narrator's invisible, sometimes she's puppeteer, ring-master or quizzing, challenging storyteller. In "Dodie's Gift" the narrator's in charge, having the last word. "The Lych-Warmer" too has an active narrator. After that there are some quieter pieces, though "Cactus Man"'s not at all bad, and "Fuck Magnolia" returns to the type of story that's her strength - with multiple themes held in balance while the narrative drives forward.
Ruth Padel in her latest book described some poems as having "a taut cat's cradle of sonic echoing". Some stories here create a similar cat's cradle of concepts where links are developed between (say) 3 people and a significant object. When everything's finally connected to everything else (in the first story this happens when Connor connects with the bauble) the story achieves a spatial (rather than linear) closure. Contrast that with "Harry's catch" where a fishing story is punctuated by flashbacks. Though more than merely competent it's a standard flip-flop format, and doesn't stand out amongst the competition. This is the only piece that for me disappoints through lack of ambition. Some other pieces (e.g. "The Kettle on the Boat", "Simon's Skin", "The Carob Tree", "Closed Doors"), even if they don't succeed, at least try to be a little different. All in all there are enough good pieces in enough styles for the book to be used as an anthology demonstrating how stories should be written nowadays.
Traits? There are old virgins, wall eyes, "joined up houses", dead children, fostered/adopted children, birds, and the sand gets everywhere. Several churches too - the church-cleaners are perhaps examples of the more general "body" cleaners that pervade the stories. Many characters are outcasts longing for old wounds to be healed, or are merely seeking a firmer identity. It's striking how early the characters introduce themselves (or another character) to the reader - many first pages have "I'm X" or "X is".
It's tempting to compare Baines with Gebbie - both are Salt-published females of roughly the same generation with prize-winning writing credentials and experience of teaching creative writing. Gebbie plans to write poetry. Baines writes drama and used to edit "Metropolitan", a short story magazine. Their stories are rarely formalist or ludic. For the most part they use single-threaded, character-based narratives without plot punch-lines. They tend towards different ways of making a story "short": Baines opts for a brief story-time duration, Gebbie's more likely to hollow out than slice, and is more sensationalist (or striking).
Libbon magazine publishes short stories. It began in 2005 and comes out about once a year. I've seen issues 1 and 2, where submission was by competition. Since then, submissions have been open.
It's an A4 magazine with about 10 stories that are interrupted by little photos. I wasn't keen on the stories in issue 1 - the plot-driven stories were too predictable (having seen the twist of "Pork" from a long way off I was expecting a further twist that never came), and much of the writing was flat. "What hearts can bear" was an exception. Issue 2 was much better - all the stories at the start are better than just about anything in issue 1 - the writing's more confident. Stories like "bad love radio" don't feel the need to explain everything. In issue 2 they boldly print some reviews of Libbon 1.
| 10 stories, some micro fiction, interviews, articles and reviews in an illustrated A4 format all for £4. Not only that but they sent me a badge too! It's been going since 2004, and is more geared towards writers than comparable magazines are. "Is it literary?" was the first question asked when I showed it to a group of writers. I don't think it's challenging or experimental, but neither is it formulaic. I wasn't knocked out by any stories, neither was I bored by any. I'd put it between "Riptide" and "Libbon" on the literary scale - far behind "Short FICTION" (which may not be a bad thing, of course). It's on sale in a few bookshops in Manchester and London. | |
Inchiostro is an A4 100 page Italian magazine (4 euros) for budding writers, available in newsagents of a few big cities, in a few bookshops elsewhere, and by subscription. It focusses on publishing stories rather than market information, which makes it rather like the UK's Transmission. It's survived for 14 years, so it must be doing something right. Here's the winning formula: 16 stories of about 2000 words (8 mainstream, 6 SF/F, 1 Noir, 1 scene from a play), 3 pages of poetry, 2 pages on a selected publisher (interview with publisher and an author, plus a book review), 6 Flash pieces, 8 pages of Web/Book reviews, 2 pages of letters, a page of sentences that could start a story, a section on SF/Fantasy, half a page of news and half a page explaining why 12 other stories didn't quite make it. I can't easily judge the quality, though the subject matter's rather male-oriented (only 25% of the writers' names in this issue are female).
Authors aren't paid and waive all rights to future royalties. All the same, were it English I'd send stuff to them. The magazine offers an evaluation service for 60 euros.
Proulx, Julian Barnes, Boyd, Chris Ware (graphics novel), Alice Sebold, and Tessa Hadley. Stories are 2000-2500 words long. Hadley's has 2.5 pages of solid prose. Proulx's is more broken up - of the 6 pages her story occupies, 2 pages are photos, 1 page is ads and there's half a page of white space. Her story's a list of missing persons - incidentally interesting. Boyd's lists things that the narrator's stolen during his life. Barnes' is dinner-party banter, mostly about smoking.
In Sebold's, an adolescent girl is deserted by her family who are fleeing from toxic gas. She eats the pets one by one, then severs her foot for food, binding a dictionary to the stub to help her walk, finally venturing out to a rich person's big greenhouse where she finds survivors with typewriters. It's reported that "literary critics with oxygen tanks" are approaching.
Hadley's is another party with another adolescent girl. At the end she's in her greenhouse at night with a quirky boy. Together they discover that the abandoned well contains water after all ...
He uses short sentences. At the start of sections one's sometimes disorientated - a fish being cut up isn't the acquarium fish of the previous section but preparation for a meal; nameless people in conversation turn out not to be what the previous section led the reader to expect. He's always ready to pile on detail - "'I'm always well'. He stands for a moment, watching the TV. Catching his breath. On the screen an old woman with dyed-blonde hair and a baby-pram is standing by a blue swimming-pool. Noah can see the shadow of a cameraman on the water.". When he uses the 3rd-persion-privileged voice he's always assured.
The clipped voice is used in several guises. In "The World Feast" a student finds digs and joins in themed feasts. "Losing Track" has another quiet narrator, a closet poet who is killed because he sees a colleague embezzle. "A Honeymoon in Los Angeles" restrains the voice more - an initially reserved S.E. Asian woman speaks as racial tension snaps during her honeymoon in the US.
Less conventional is "No One Comes Back from the Sea", which is told in reverse with sections entitled "December", .... , "June" about the death of twins called May and June. "The Memory Man" brings together a man with perfect recall and a woman with secrets.
"Hammerhead" has an old writer living in a coastal Venezuelan village. "Brolly" is multi-charactered, a social gathering. The 2 novellas, "Skin" and "Zoo" are the best. Both use the whodunnit/quest formula. "Skin" begins particularly well. "Zoo" has an interesting storyline.
I looked first at the 2 pages of acknowledgements. I too raid "New Scientist". I too have been in "Transmission" but never on BBC Radio 4. At least 14 of these 27 pieces are Flash (102 words is I think the shortest) and the others, by being set against the Flash, risk being accused of lacking intensity or not exploiting the possibilities afforded by the extra length (up to 12 pages), so bear with me while I digress about Flash.
Evolution's mutation and natural selection leads to several effects, amongst which are combination, dwarfism/gigantism (part or all of the organism changing size) and neotony (the retention of juvenile characteristics - humans are part-neotonic apes). Genres in the Arts can develop similarly. Before the neotony of Impressionism, artists wouldn't try to pass off their on-the-spot paintings as finished versions, even if those sketches captured the essence of the experience. Though Flash didn't evolve from 2000-word stories or free verse - it pre-dates those by centuries - it's inevitably compared with them. Some Flash focuses on a particular short story feature - epiphany-gigantism, for example - whereas others try to be a miniature, perfectly scaled version of a short story. How do the Flash pieces in this book compare?
Some of the rest save space by being lo-res, fuzzy, or faded. They don't have the initial impenetrability of an autostereogram followed by a "Wow", or that mysterious flatness of a hologram that only reveals its depth when the reader changes viewpoint - not for this reader anyway. They don't magnify a particular aspect of story-writing, or elegize a significant moment. I'm not suggesting that any Flash that transcends my makeshift taxomony is necessarily bad, but if evolution leads to less complexity, the offspring should at least be ideally suited to its habitat. "Heavy Bones" - so what?
Now onto the longer stories. "White Road" has a first person voice (it's been on BBC Radio 4) belonging to the owner of the last cafe before the South Pole. It has innocent phrases with hidden depths - "The road don't cut through it, it's part of it, just flattened out a bit". The ending's a surprise - a dramatic physical event whose timing has no obvious psychological justification. It works for me though, and it's prefigured earlier in the story. It's not the only story about blindness (and preparing for it) or about cold climes, or childbirth problems. Of course, snow doesn't really cause permanent blindness, but the character wants to be blind, and prepares accordingly - "Some things the eye shouldn't see". It could have a symbolic meaning - Death, Dementia, Madness, or most likely the desire to Forget.
"White Road" begins the book. The final story is, neatly, "North Cold" which I've read before in "Riptide". I guess it could be classified as magic realism. I like that too, and "Rainstiffness", which ends particularly well. They're 2 of the stories where it's as if weather corresponds to some internal state.
I'm not so convinced by the "Brewing Storm", "Evie and the Arfids", and "Space Fright" stories. All include near-future technology and some light comedy. The endings of the first 2 are predictable, but I don't really get what the pieces are trying to be. The plots and character studies don't cut it for me, and I can't read them as satire or social comment - they suffer too much in comparison to some other pieces here.
In a story with a title like "Self Raising" one expects double meanings, and we're not disappointed. Cake making is mentioned, and we're given some Science, but what's the connection? We're soon told - the narrator's an under-achieving science-graduate widow, self-employed making themed cakes. The story's last paragraph's a surprise though - again, there's a dramatic event (involving an open window rather than breaking a glass ceiling) without an obvious internal analogue. Something snapped, but why does the internal monologue go suspiciously quiet at the crucial moment? It's a story convention, but all the same.
"Sunspots" exemplifies most clearly the author's ability to speak in voices - it has a believable medieval setting. The voices aren't exclusively female either, and a discursive tone's sometimes adopted - "Express" looks like an essay set in the 2nd person. The material's promising - with a more pressing side-plot it could have been a conventional story. "The Incredible Exploding Victor" is fun idea with a tame conclusion (the characters suddenly acting like grown-ups when "the doctor" intercedes) - so tame I wonder what I've missed. I prefer stories that become pretentious when they fail, rather than fizzle away.
Maybe alternating the long and short pieces wasn't a good idea. I feel that all the required components of stories are in the book, but rarely together in a single piece. To continue the evolution analogies (see "New Scientist", 30th Aug 2008 for details) it's as if the book were a soupy Virosphere with left-over fragments that could be recombined with the larger units to accelerate evolution. The contents needs another shake, more cross-infection, more survival of the fittest.
Surprisingly for a Salt publication there were typos - p.23 has "working it's way", and p.43 has "a annoying".
16 stories, all 3000 words or so except for "Growing", but even that fable isn't short. They're all mainstream structurally (with beginnings, middles and endings) and the narrational voice is not only easily identified but is always educated - 3rd or 1st person. There are female murderers, middle-class widowers, children and soldiers amongst the spectrum of characters exhibiting a range of love - dutiful, parental, blind, transient - in genres that are usually Realist, but in a significant minority of stories aren't. Storytime durations are more often months or years, though in "Moving the Needle ..." it's hours intersperced with flashbacks. In other eras this kind of book would be a popular read. Indeed, some of these stories could have been written in other eras. But there's modern content too, and a wide range of settings - Dunkirk; modern Italian university life; London squats, etc.
Outsiders (but not loners) predominate - children in an adult world, immigrants, and gays. I think the stories fall roughly into 3 categories: stories where relationships are fluid and changing ("Toad"); stories where an individual tries to deal with a rigidly stratified system (perhaps a generation back); and stories about couples. In general couples don't last - events or other people/couples come to symbolise and affect the relationships. In "Air" for example, the acquarium supplies imagery and the gay bar offers glimpses of the future, the thin end of the wedge. In "Crack" Joey remembers stealing a girlfriend from a friend not because he wanted her, but to hurt. Then he steals a cat-shaped pin-cushion from the same friend's cat-loving wife (shades of voodoo), precipitating events.
Throughout, imagery is sparse and effective - "The buildings around the port were painted in cool soft colours, like tubs of ice cream", p.35; "She looks confused and sullen, as though she is posing for kidnappers", p.86; "The bathroom is full of steam, the mirrors behind the tub are furred with it", p.108.
"The Scent of Cinnamon", "Moving the needle towards the thread" and "Soap" could have disguised events to increase later surprise, but the stories don't aim for such punchlines. Many pieces use flashbacks, though the proportions vary. "Something Rich and Strange" is nearly all flashback. Its start sets the scene efficiently - sentences like "He was offered an office larger than this and facing the sea, in recognition of his years of service, but turned it down" (p.127) cover much ground, and flashbacks like the following work for me - "Even now, his most lasting memory of holidays is of the day a boy his age was drowned ... The sea can be very treacherous, he heard an old woman say in a cafe that afternoon. Later he asked his mother what treacherous meant. It's when someone lets you down, she said, because she hadn't heard. But it was odd to think of the sea as someone" (p.127).
He does childhood especially well. Indeed, nothing's merely average, though judged by the high standards that this book merits, the stories might sometimes not deliver the memorability that the word-count might lead one to expect ("Soap" certainly earns its keep, but what about "Little Potato, Little Pea" with its out-of-context "spots with black bits in the middle" and "pale green face" ending?) and though few stories share a mileau, sometimes I would have welcomed a change of register (there are mad people, for example, but they're not very verbal), or even a happy ending once in a while.
Many of the characters are artists. The stories' tensions often revolve around artists becoming famous or rich (frowned upon even if the work's unaffected, poverty being a badge of authenticity). Waitressing and casual bisexuality are common amongst the women.
The first story - "His Blue Period" is leisurely - little exploitation of language, and yet still quite a lot of "tell, not show" - sentences like "David came back to us with a bemused, wondering expression of one who has met up with a natural force and miraculously survived". By "The Bower" I'd got used to the style, though phrases like "Sandra spent the rest of the semester picking over the affair obsessively, like a monkey grooming her offspring" didn't appeal, and the description of the accident on p.48 is implanted by a different voice. "Beethoven" has some snappy dialog, but the final paragraph's a let-down "'No.' I said, 'I want to.' Then, as I followed him to the rumpled matress, I felt, in spite of everything, of the heat, of my disillusionment and frustration, of my fear of the future in which, we both knew, Phil would no longer figure, a perverse but unmistakable throb of dark desire."
"The Unfinished Novel" is novella length - not surprising given that it takes half of p.79 to describe a little event. We've seen the conversational sparring in other stories
|
"How about tomorrow?" she said. "No, I've got appointments all day." This was, in fact, true. "Thursday?" Now she was amused, watching me squirm. I decided to limit her pleasure and my own suffering. "Thursday would be fine," I said. "In the afternoon, around three." "I'll be there," she said. Yes, I thought. I don't doubt you are there most of the time. |
Then there's a dream. Then the narrator helpfully reminds us that "that corporal substance, once beautiful, later unlovely, containing the turbulence that was Rita, was no more. For twenty years she'd been a dim figure from my personal past, and there had been moments, not many, when I wondered what had become of her. Now I knew.", taking the words from the author's mouth. "The Open Door"'s final paragraph begins "The ugly business at the college had shaken Isabel, Edith understood. She was wounded by it in some vital center of her confidence. It was her way to dismiss what she couldn't control, and put the best possible face on every failure, and that was what she was doing now, but it was hard, she was having a hard time of it."
The plot of "The Change" is telegraphed - perhaps intentionally so, but I still don't like lines like "giving Evan a quick, complex look made up in parts of gratitude, flirtation, and suspicion" that pretend to be "show" though they're "tell".
The pieces are between 3000 and 18000 words long. They're all short stories in the sense that they're single viewpoint, single issue pieces. But because of their length they often move slower than many a novel. They're linear, often unsurprizing (even predicting their own endings) with a limited amount of short-story compression.
At the end of "The Use of Reason" the main character thinks of burning the Rembrandt he'd stolen because selling it is a hassle. That he doesn't consider leaving it somewhere may be related to the fact that it's a portrait of a "sour old woman" and he's just found out that his mother's loose-tongued when drunk. She's often drunk. The narrative is structured around a secret plan executed step by step. "The Name of the Game" is similarly shaped.
All but one of the stories is set in Eire. There are mothers who were singers, and several wakes with musings on how dead faces correspond to living ones. It's sometimes a new Eire, with Euros, e-mail, burning CDs, and gay raves. I liked reading them, even the ones loaded with inevitability. The final story ends well - like many of the other endings it arrives once you can guess the rest of the story.Except perhaps for "An Eye for Alicia" (maybe "Two Birds" too) I liked all of these pieces. 4 of the stories feature old people. The most common structure (for these stories, and many stories elsewhere) is for there to be a single main story-line. Flashbacks, the narrator, or a symbolically-adaptable object repeatedly punctuate the narrative. The main story-line may have suspense, but a resolution can also be achieved by having the story-line and the cause of interruptions coming together at the end.
The stories are 2-5 pages long, so the language doesn't dawdle. Here's an extract from p.8 - note the fast-cuts and the imagery.
|
My secret sets off my organs like an expensive brooch, asymmetrical and daring. When Finn came past today, he didn't see me. I saw him though: he was glistening red and grey and blue; the bones of his face were the soft yellow of piano keys. I saw the jump of his oesophagus as he swallowed, and then I ducked behind a lime tree. The affair was brief, if you could call it that. |
Striking similes abound - the following appear on pages 66-72 - "life-sized plastic cross ... glowing like a jellyfish", "the preacher comes right up to me, closer than a dentist", "There's a woodlouse by my hand stuck on its back like a tiny dead spaceship", "smiling like a rocking horse". These, combined with standard "good observation" ("the floor dirty in a line ... where the cleaner is lazy" (p.68), "one baby shoe that had been lost by someone and found by someone else ... spiked up in the rain on a black set of railings" (p.84) should satisfy the conventional story-reader.
I guess the most poetic piece is "High" (add a few line-breaks and you've got a poem). "Music", "Epiphany", "Nightmare" and "Blade" are weaker. Perhaps by then I was immunized to the style. "Witness" has a fine ending but I'd rather get there in 2 pages than 5. "Love" begins "Once upon a time" and more than any other piece wears the linguistic trappings of fable, though the setting's another Council House, and at the end we get confirmation that we're not in an alternative reality but another private delusion. Eventually, in "Sunset", a mother seems to share a viewpoint with a daughter and there's no reality check at the end.
Reading on, the quality rises again. "Nightswimming" begins with arson "The kitchen was ready for burning, after all those sorry years; I let the stove fulfil its secret ambition. The tea towels were bandage-dry" and ends with a long swim to a city under the ocean - "I didn't have a passport, so I showed them how to make a fox's silhouette with my hands". Again, no reality check at the end, no equivalent of waking the reader up to find it's all a dream. So she's not in the end a Realist, she's a Fabulist too.
Lots of details, but not literary enough for my taste, both at the language and structure levels. There are some "talking heads" pieces. Few flash-backs, and little fore-shadowing, or layering. I didn't see the Jeffrey twist coming!
The dazzlement is deadpan, the narrators are unfazed by wonders. I guess this might impress people who don't read much SF - the "science" is mere backdrop. It's a strategy that works for SF-readers too - to them, the worlds are familiar and need little explanation.
Institutionalised religions (in this book there's no other type) don't fare well, and other meaning-of-life props ("identity", "the other") are undermined too. Deceptive appearances abound. Not only do people hide their feelings and misunderstand those of others, but the first person narrators confess their dissimilation. In the main the info-dumping's not too conspicuous - in "The Perimeter" it's done by way of an adult teaching a child. In "Piccadilly Circus" the narrator's conveniently writing a history book.
It seems to me that the author respects the readers and assumes they'll be hard to surprise, so plot-twists are often fore-shadowed. For example, in "Karel's Prayer" Mr Occam and Mr (doubting) Thomas challenge Karel's beliefs (Karel Capek first coined the term 'robot'), and standard TV interrogation strategies are assumed. "We Could be Sisters" starts with "Nature is profligate. All possible worlds exist. In one of them there was once an art gallery in Red Lion Street, London WC1, and its manager was a woman called Jessica Ferne", which given the title adumbrates the plot.
The final 4 stories plus "The Perimeter" are my favourites. The final story could easily serve as a metaphor for the whole mission. A celebrity anthropologist/author travels to other planets carrying a computer shaped like an egg. The computer's more than a dictaphone, it can write to order - "add a chapter about the Aristotle Complex. What we know of the early settlers, their motives, their desire to escape from decadence ... and so on. Themes: finality, no turning back, taking risks, a complete beak with the past [...] Neo romantic style with a small twist of hard-boiled. Oh and include three poetic sharp edge sentences. Just three. Low adjective count.". At the end the writer's boat is burnt (his space-ship destroyed), and he feels as if he's put down a burden. The egg says "A good ending for the book!" and the author replies "What book you idiot?". No longer a detached observer, he "went to the rope ladder and began to lower himself, carefully avoiding looking down."
At times there are apparent lapses that an editor could have ironed out
Since hearing his Goldfish story I've been looking for books by him. It was worth the wait. This guy can write. Not much dialog though. Deaths figure in many of the stories. He zooms in on action.
| [he] did a drop-kick with the toe of his Doc Martens - steel-reinforced soles of some kind of rubber that was OIL FAT ACID PETROL ALKALI RESISTANT and stood up to the toughest abrasions and work conditions, made in England, birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. His kick made the hard, solid sound of castanets snapping between the fiingers of a flamenco dancer as the bones of the man's chin - a dignified sharp chin at that - did a wish-bone break. (p.13) |
|
This takes place on a Wednesday afternoon on the tenth of July on a cooler
than usual day of a long dry hot summer along the
Eastern Seaboard during coitus between Bob Sampson and
Ellen Davison-Simms
(start of "Coitus") |
The pieces are mostly 3rd person. That and the measured prose gives an essay feel to some pieces, "Assorted Fire Events" especially. There are few images, but he can produce them - "the groom with his frank, round face that seemed ... to need breaking in, like a new baseball glove" (p.86).
I found this at a jumble sale. I hadn't heard of the author but a glance at the "Division by Zero" story tempted me to part with 10p. According to Wikipedia he's published 11 stories in 19 years of writing (though some of those stories are novellas). Several have won awards. I think "Story of Your Life" is excellent - its use of tense, linguistics and science to support character development requires the kind of research that can't be hurried. The use of the division by zero idea is less subtle - juxtaposed sections. "Understand" will remind you of "Flowers for Algernon" but its narrative drive leads elsewhere. "Liking what you see: A Documentary" does indeed use the documentary form - a slightly too long collection of statements from students, parents and staff about a college debate. And "Hell is the absence of God" is more than just a good read.
Perhaps some pieces could be shortened. Perhaps the human-based plots are sometimes a little too mechanical to fit in with the other concepts. But I like his approach and much of the execution. 8 pages of notes!
The stories are about 15 pages long except for the commissioned one which is 2 pages long.
I think I'm going off him. His writing's more telly now, more wordy. In the title story a man comes out of a worrying medical test with a clean bill of health. Suddenly the argument with his sister about their inherited house feels so petty - "He had a life - in every sense! - whereas Ellen had nothing. If it meant so much to her to go on living in the family home, then let her. Let her! The decision further boosted his sense of euphoria." He phones his sister, who's less than impressed that he's not going to evict her, that he doesn't after all have a lymphoma. The penultimate paragraph is "But all the earlier expansiveness had gone from him; in its place a drab, ashen sensation, as if the bitterness of the sister's dismal existence had flowed into him through the phone."
Dilemmas are set up, spelt out and openly debated. Revelations are revealed - "The full extent and depth of the man's wheedling, coercive personality seemed to have suddenly disclosed itself. like some strange creature opening unsuspected wings" (p.79). "The thought of this attractive, intelligent woman whom nature had clearly designed for a life of luxury and ease, living under such circumstances, had awakened a protective instinct in him, while her lack of self-pity filled him with admiration." (p.89)
When he has a good image he milks is - "The number that had been growing so rapidly in the Total Gain column, putting out a third, a fourth, then a fifth figure, like a ship unfurling sails in the great wind of prosperity that had seemed set to blow once again across America, had slowed to a halt, lowered its sails one by one, and then, terrifyingly, had begun to sink" (p.7).
Several of the stories involved encounters across a desk and/or affairs between people whose ages differ a lot. "The Old Man" and "Lime Pickle" end well but take a while to get there. "Annals of the Honorary Secretary" mixes stranger material with believably described social nuances. I liked "Caterpillars" - more "show" I suppose.
The same (often gender-free) voice speaks in many of the stories. The roles of storytelling are displayed - telling tales; understanding self by identifying with a character in a narrative that may be self-created; learning by making and interpreting stories; listening to stories others make about you; making up stories that are told sequentially or one inside the other.
The narratives are presented as plays, musicals, films, books, stories and personae. The medium (CD, etc) and act of observing (the cinema, etc) matter. The characters don't define themselves by job, role, nationality, etc. Even their relationships are unstable. Instead, they embed themselves in the narratives, recontextualise themselves, re-interpret the stories.
A daughter greets her father after an absense of several months. "He had not lost weight and the hair on his head was plentiful, more so, she feared, than her own after Akash's birth, when it had fallen out in clumps ... her bathtub was still filled with shampoos that promised to stimulate scalp growth, plump the shafts. Her father looked well rested, another quality Ruma did not possess these days. She'd taken to applying concealer below her eyes ..." (p.12).
| Reviews: |
|
Sections: |
|