107 pages, Kindle Edition
Review by Bill Kirton
Let’s start with the necessary disclaimer.
I received my review copy of this book free from the author, who’s a fellow
squawker. That, however, hasn’t coloured my judgement of it in any way. If I
like books, I say so and I try to say why. If I don’t, I tend to keep my
silence about them (unless they perpetrate unforgivable crimes against the
profession or the language). If Booksquawk were just an incestuous, mutually
back-scratching site, it wouldn’t survive, and it certainly wouldn’t attract
writers of the status of Brian Aldiss.
So, what did I think of Long Stories Short? Well, how long have
you got, because I could probably spend ages on each of the 32 flash stories
that make up the collection? They’re all different, some share themes or
aspects of a topic, but each one is a meticulously well-worked example of the
concentrated impact this form can have when it’s manipulated by a master. And,
while the stories feature specific individuals and/or isolated incidents, there’s
a universality to them. They’re about birth, love, life, death and some, such
as Fallen Angels, have a breadth of
vision that encompasses vast movements and makes the macrocosm accessible.
But before I get too po-faced about this,
let’s note that, while there’s plenty here that’s savage, black and
unforgiving, there’s also plenty of humour and, most of all, there’s a delight
in word-play that’s explored and sustained far more skilfully than any I can
remember from other contemporary writers. Whisper it, but many of these tales
recalled for me the vision as well as the sardonic humour and linguistic
dexterities of Samuel Beckett. I know, I know – heresy, blasphemy. But look at Closed Book, the story of an old writer
looking through the Baby Book his parents had kept of his early years, and its
affinities with Krapp’s Last Tape are
pretty clear.
Then turn to Crush and see how subtly but precisely the writer uses heart-related
terminology to convey the impact of glimpsing his ‘bypassed Miss’, ‘a one woman
love infarction’, a ‘heart stopper’. But even before she appears, the mood is
set in an opening paragraph where a ‘card sharper’ is almost crushed by a
toppling ‘stout-hearted oak’ which nearly induces a ‘cardiac-attack’.
Throughout the tale, the word-play is delicious. It ends thus: ‘As he
re-emerged back into the arteries of the city, the smell of warming cockles
from a stall rendered his sclerotic muscle into a ball of wrinkles.
Heartbroken.’
One final reference to a specific tale – Cry Baby Bunting. As with so many others, there’s a (sinister)
playfulness in the title because the setting is a street party celebrating a
royal wedding during which a toddler has gone missing. The wedding is intended
to secure the succession to the throne but the scene of crime officers fear the
abduction may be one in a succession of such incidents; two successions, then,
one of which must be preserved, the other broken. And, as with the heart
terminology in Crush, so here the
language is manipulated deliberately to bring apparently distinct subjects into
strange, uneasy relationships. ‘No cantankerous drunk,’ writes the author, ‘would
abdicate cradling his bottled entitlement’ just to help a mother trying to
organise a search party and, while the others were ‘drunk’, she was the one who’d
lost her baby, so she was ‘the incapable one’.
Such concentrated effects are everywhere in
these stories. They’re not tales you read if all you want is easy escapism. There’s
an immediacy about each one. Exposition is minimal, we’re right in the action,
sharing it, often getting inside not just the personality, but the psyche of the
characters. Often the focus is simply ‘he’ or ‘she’ and ‘his’ or ‘her’
sensations and perceptions crowd in without preamble. The people here may
mostly be troubled beings, but the natural world in which they live is also one
of disharmony. The author exploits his medium with expertise but simultaneously
subverts it.
So these are self-contained episodes that nonetheless
carry echoes which drift through to others. They’re not just satisfying on a
story-telling, narrative level but as a challenge, a mysterious sharing of
something ‘normal’ and simultaneously not normal It’s our world but adapted,
warped, given a slight axial shift. Indeed, a sentence from Flatpunchline (another Beckettian monologue) could be said to describe exactly
what the writer is achieving here: ‘Instinctively they felt the planet wasn’t
set up right and they needed to tilt it off its everyday axis’.
If you like words, this is for you. In the
end, it’s the handling of language that makes the greatest impression, not
because of any slick sleight of hand but because as the words pick up each
other’s resonances, they blend or slice open meanings and give a new, different
depth to the subject matter. Perversely, the language calls attention to
itself, the narrator is always there, handling his precious words with care,
despairing at the fact that they’re being devalued. In Middle Mass he parallels the corrosive towers of scrapped
computers, ipads and the like with equivalent towers of words ‘typed straight
on to the face of the void’, each new clutch eliminating and compressing those
which preceded it.
Indeed, after Abecedary Incendiary has chronicled the progressive extinction of
various species, its ending foresees the end of culture, even civilisation: ‘Now
I too have become extinct, both in body and heritage, since not one of the
meagre generations which succeed me possesses any ability to read and
understand these words’.
Just one more example, the brilliant Baby Steps, in which the narrator
describes his emergence from the womb and the first years of his development.
The story encapsulates the author’s vision and approach. He recreates the
various experiences – birth, breathing, being breast-fed, learning to speak –
and the reality of it is visceral. In a way, some of the words he chooses are
inappropriate, but only because the reader’s own perceptions have been
conditioned by habit, made comfortable. And, even as he recreates this baby’s
world, language is everything. He asks ‘Is it any coincidence that as verbs, both “milk”
and “cream” have the meaning to cozen or swindle?’ and when his mother
baby-talks to him, it’s ‘a mummy-bird regurgitation of
a bolus of phonemes, dripped directly from her tongue on to my own. Babble
talk. Pidgin droppings. Non-Language’.
He quickly learn to snaps words together
like lego bricks (only he puts it far more elegantly than that), and there’s a
beautifully ironic postscript: ‘He went on to win every youth public speaking
competition in the land and captained the Oxford University debating team to
victory in the Varsity match. Whereupon he entered politics, securing a
Parliamentary seat, but had to resign after a scandal in which he was caught
suckling at the breast of a suburban prostitute, while dressed in a baby-grow
and bonnet’.
Everything is in the mix here – beliefs,
cultural systems, the despoliation of the planet – and with it all, the
precariousness of language and the consequent threat to meaning itself. It’s
brilliant, funny, and a collection to revisit again and again.
The opening of the penultimate paragraph should, of course, read 'He quickly learns to snap words together...' I owe it to Marc to eliminate my customary carelessness from a review of work by someone who takes such care with his own words.
ReplyDeleteYou are most convincing Sir Bill. This now resides on my Kindle for my reading pleasure. Thank you!
ReplyDeletehey thanks Bill, this is almost certainly the best review (in terms of grappling with the material rather then sentiment) I've ever received - so much so as you can see, words have failed me in this comment box. Thanks a million.
ReplyDeleteMarc x
Sorry, DragonLady. I seem to keep loading up your Kindle, but I know you'll enjoy it.
ReplyDeleteMarc, I'm glad you feel I did you some sort of justice. As I said in the disclaimer, I only say what I really feel about books - No point otherwise, is there? It's a great piece of work.