Category: Short Fiction

Still: ‘Midnight Hollow’ by Mark Piggott

26th September 2012 / / 2 Comments

The photograph: a close-up of the view through a keyhole. The doors and corridors beyond could as well be a set of abstract shapes.

The story: an old man named Edward explores the empty town hall where he used to be a caretaker. He finds his old floor buffer, and gives the place a polish for old times’ sake. This piece is a poignant evocation of time passing, and reflecting on what’s been lost in a life. And the ending is a real shock to the system

Link: Mark Piggott’s website / interview with Piggott on his story

This is one of a series of posts on the anthology Still. Click here to read the rest.

Sunday Story Society: “Two Ways of Leaving” by Alois Hotschnig

16th September 2012 / / 8 Comments

Today we have our first story in translation: “Two Ways of Leaving” by Alois Hotschnig (translated from the Austrian German by Tess Lewis). You can read the story here at Untitled Books; you’ll also find it in Hotschnig’s Peirene Press collection Maybe This Time.

First, I’ll link to some reviews of Maybe This Time (not of all of which touch on this particular story): 1streading; Chasing Bawa; Olivia Heal; Andrew Blackman; Beauty Is a Sleeping Cat; The Worm Hole; The Arts Fuse. I’ll also point out this interview with the translator, Tess Lewis, at Love German Books.

Now, something different. I’m going to post some questions as ‘conversation starters’; feel free to answer them or not (I want them to act as jumping-off points, not to strictly define the discussion), or ask questions of your own. Here we go:

Conversation Starters

There’s no small amount of ambiguity in “Two Ways of Leaving”, so I’d be interested to know how you interpret the relationship between the ‘he’ and ‘she’ of the story.

My abiding thought when I finished Maybe This Time was that Hotschnig’s protagonists were caught up in other people’s stories. Would you agree with that in relation to “Two Ways of Leaving”?

Though it relates to a different piece in Maybe This Time, I was struck by 1streading‘s comment that “Hotschnig is playing with the use of the pronoun ‘he’ as a ‘character’”. What does the author do with the pronoun ‘he’ in this story?

Next time: On 30 Sept, we’ll be talking about the story “Drifting House” by Krys Lee.

For now, though, it’s over to you. What did you make of “Two Ways of Leaving”?

Bristol Short Story Prize Anthology, Vol. 5 (2012)

6th September 2012 / / 2 Comments

Now in its fifth year, the Bristol Short Story Prize is establishing itself as a significant award with an eye for good stories. The tales on this year’s shortlist (anthologised in this volume) are no exception.

Top honours in this year’s Bristol Prize (announced on 14th July at ShortStoryVille) went to a fiction debut: ‘Naked as Eve’ by John Arnold. At first, this appears to be a gently humorous piece; the inhabitants of a small Australian town are putting on an act for a party of tourists, entertaining them with lurid tales of a cursed pool. But then we meet the narrator Olivia’s mother, who has dementia, and we realise that Olivia has been putting on a different sort of act as well. It’s this elegant mirroring, and Arnold’s deft shift to a darker mood, that make ‘Naked as Eve’ such a good story.

The runner-up was Alys Conran’s ‘Lobster’, which focuses on a father and son in a drowning future Wales where food is scarce. Conran evokes the boy’s innocence well through his narrative voice; and the ending – with an ambiguity that doesn’t allow for a positive interpretation – carries such an impact. Third place went to ‘Going Grapefruit’ by Ian Richards, whose protagonist speaks in nonsense after a car crash (‘You want to know about the grass my custard changed?’). What makes this work is that there’s an underlying consistency to the language, and enough context for us to understand roughly what the narrator means – which makes it all the more poignant to see other characters failing to do so.

Richards’ protagonist is not the only character in the anthology seeking to be heard and understood. Christopher Parvin’s ‘Ghost in the Machine’ tells of a future where robots (‘people of the Cog’) live alongside humans, but struggle to gain acceptance. There’s dry humour in the way Parvin reflects real-world discrimination, but I also find effective the story’s mosaic construction as a collection of blog entries and emails. The protagonist of ‘Beekiller’ by Ethel Rohan is fast losing patience with her husband over his obsession with beekeeping; she resorts to desperate measures in an ending that balances absurdity with an emotional believability.

Other stories carry a sharp sting in their tails. ‘Yoki and the Toy Surprise’ by Angela Readman is a spin on the classic ‘be careful what you wish for’ tale that shifts from an amusing beginning to a melancholy end. Avril Joy’s protagonist in ‘Meat’ knows where she’s going when she says goodbye to her neighbour at the start, but it’s almost certainly nowhere that readers may have expected. William Telford’s ‘The Attack at Delium’ sees a couple arguing over various academic points of history and science; matters are brought sharply and powerfully back down to earth at the end.

Further tales in the anthology revolve more around character. The narrator of Ellie Walsh’s ‘Jelly Feel Real’ takes a trip from Christmas Island to Perth with her friend Angel; it becomes clear for various reasons what a significant journey this is. The dry narration is very effective in illuminating the protagonist’s character. ‘The Swimmer’ by Lizzie Boyle is the story of Allan Fleming, who goes for an early-morning swim every day, pacing himself according to multiples of twelve. His ordered mind is reflected in the intense detail of the prose, and Boyle shows how Allan’s world starts to unravel when he comes across something he can’t explain – and a few too many prime numbers. Hilary Wilce’s ‘I Once Knew Salman Rushdie’ is about how chance encounters can have unforeseen consequences in life; its understated tone matches the mundane school hockey-game setting, but hides the stirring of some deep emotions.

Reading this book reinforced for me the notion that there’s nothing quite like a good anthology for variety and the potential for discovery. You may not know where you’ll be when you turn the page of a new story in the fifth Bristol Prize anthology, but you can be sure it’ll be somewhere interesting.

(This review also appears at Fiction Uncovered.)

Previously
Read my review of the 2010 Bristol Prize anthology.

M. John Harrison, Viriconium (1971-85)

3rd September 2012 / / 7 Comments

This is Viriconium: the city to end all cities; namesake of the dominant empire in Earth’s twilight. This is Viriconium: an omnibus of novels and stories by M. John Harrison. When you venture in, it’s important to bear in mind which of these statements is the more accurate.

By the way, this post is going to tell you quite a bit about what happens. I can’t really see that as a spoiler, because plot is not the point of Viriconium (except insofar as it’s an illusion, like much else in the stories). It’s the experience of reading Harrison’s work that counts, and nothing I say here can substitute that. Not that it’s going to stop me trying to give a sense of Viriconium, of course.

The first novel in the sequence, The Pastel City (1971), sees Viriconium under attack from the forces of the ruling queen’s cousin. One of the old king’s champions, tegeus-Cromis (‘who imagined himself a better poet than swordsman’), picks up his weapons and sets out to reunite his comrades-in-arms and defend the city. So far, so conventional, it might seem – albeit with a vividly realised setting of a decaying far future. Advanced technology from previous eras (the ‘Afternoon Cultures’) persists, but the world has forgotten how it works. The landscape is one of rust and garishly-coloured metal salts. The stars have been rearranged to spell the name of a past culture, but no one is left who can read it.

But the deeper themes of Viriconium are already becoming apparent. Some say that reality is becoming thin with age, forgetting itself. Cromis’s journey does not run according to plan, and he turns away from witnessing its ending, and away from greater knowledge. By the close of The Pastel City, individuals from one of the Afternoon Cultures have been resurrected – so Viriconium finds itself in danger of being superseded by the past.

As a fictional city, Viriconium is a timeless mish-mash; but, in The Pastel City, one nevertheless has the impression of a coherent, functioning place. That impression is predicated on the structure of the novel, though, as A Storm of Wings (1980) makes clear. This is a much more fragmented text, which could be seen in some ways as a parody of its predecessor’s quest-fantasy. Various characters (some from The Pastel City, some not) assemble in the queen’s palace to begin dealing with a threat to Viriconium. But the sense is much more that they have been moved there, like pieces on a gameboard; the reasons for their gathering are not so clear, to them or the reader.

All those reasons, it turns out, are aspects of the same thing: an invasion of insect-people who have their own way of perceiving the universe, radically different from humans’ – and these alternative perceptions vie for supremacy. Reality in Viriconium (in Viriconium) is literally what you make of it. The scenes of A Storm of Wings slide between perceptions; the reader’s best hope is perhaps just to hang on.

In the third novel, In Viriconium (1982), part of the city has been afflicted by a ‘plague’ which causes reality itself to thin out: people fall ill, buildings decay, ventures fail. A portrait-painter named Ashlyme attempts to rescue his fellow-artist, Audsley King, from the plague zone – a mission which, perhaps inevitably, leads to disaster. Harrison shows the reality of Viriconium to be ever flimsier here: so much so that the real world (our world) is leaking through. The mundanity of the novel’s events, and the fragmented nature of its ‘narrative’, suggest that the coherence of The Pastel City was illusory, no more than a matter of perception.

It might seem at first glance that the Viriconium novels take place in the same chronology, but there are enough discrepancies to make clear that it’s not so. And the stories which were assembled as Viriconium Nights (1985) – and are scattered throughout the 2000 omnibus I was reading – demonstrate that even more emphatically. Characters and places (even Viriconium itself) can have different names or histories. This is revealed to the character Ignace Retz in the story ‘Viriconium Knights’, when he is shown scenes of adventure featuring warriors who bear his face. ‘All knights are not Ignace Retz,’ he is told – but, if all these scenes have happened, or will happen, somewhere, what does that make him?

In my omnibus, ‘Viriconium Knights’ is placed first of all (even before The Pastel City); so we know from the start that there can be no such thing as a definitive vision of Viriconium. Essentially, the Viriconium Nights stories are slices of life from ‘places’ that can have no life beyond their individual tales. In ‘A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium’ – the final story – Viriconiun is no more than an abstract entity for which people in our world may yearn. The protagonist tries vainly to make the mirror of a café toilet act as a portal to Viriconium. After images of the far future and tales of saving the world, that is all you have left. That is what’s real.

Viriconium represents a systematic destruction of the idea of fantasy as escape. It is bleak, even nightmarish at times – yet it’s beautiful, too. You’ll have to read it for yourself, though, to really see what I mean.

Sunday Story Society: “The Merchant of Shadows” by Angela Carter

2nd September 2012 / / 9 Comments

To keep up to date with the Sunday Story Society: view our schedule; follow @SundayStorySoc on Twitter; or visit us on Facebook.

After three relatively recent stories, this time we’re going a little further back. Angela Carter’s “The Merchant of Shadows” was first published in the London Review of Books in 1989, and is available to read here on the LRB website. Normally, at this point, I’d link to some online commentary, but there’s not a lot out there for this story. The only treatment of any length that I could find was in a piece by Kate Webb, written for the occasion of what would have been Carter’s 70th birthday. Webb describes  “The Merchant of Shadows” as ‘containing Carter’s most playful writing on film’, and notes ‘many vertiginous moments [that] Carter achieves through narrative twists but also by stylistic effect: the writing here is pathetic fallacy played as camp, the California landscape is flooded with cinematic meaning’.

What did you make of “The Merchant of Shadows”?

(On a side note, I’ve been wondering about including a couple of questions in these discussion posts as ‘conversations starters’. Let me know if you think that’s a good idea.)

Ten favourite books read during the lifetime of this blog

21st August 2012 / / 9 Comments

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. I’m joining in this week because I was really taken with the theme. I’ve been reviewing books online since 2004, but this blog started in 2009, and I’m concentrating on the period since then. What follows here is not a definitive list of favourites, nor is it in a strict order – it’s a list of highlights. It’s a snapshot of what I like to read.

1. The Rehearsal – Eleanor Catton

This is a tale of pure serendipity. I was visiting Cambridge, and saw the hardback of The Rehearsal in a bookshop. It wasn’t the subject matter that grabbed me, but the blurbs promising something different. I took a chance on it… and really didn’t get along with its mannered prose style at first. But I persevered and, once I realised what Catton was doing – how completely the novel’s different aspects embodied its theme of performance – I got into it, and ended up absolutely loving the book. The Rehearsal is the fondest memory I have of reading a book in the last few years, and it showed me a new way to appreciate fiction.

2. Pocket Notebook – Mike Thomas

A few bloggers enthused about Pocket Notebook in 2010 – and I really liked its Clockwork Orange-inspired cover – but I never got around to reading it. The following year, I started reviewing for Fiction Uncovered; when I saw Pocket Notebook on their review-copy list, I decided to try it. I was utterly blown away by the vividness with which Thomas created his corrupt-copper protagonist. My only regret is that I didn’t read this novel a year earlier.

3. Skippy Dies – Paul Murray

This book has 661 pages. I devoured the whole lot in a weekend. An Irish boarding-school comedy with added quantum physics, Skippy Dies goes from humour to sharp characterisation to social commentary to pathos to the borders of science fiction and back again, without putting a foot wrong. Stunning stuff.

4. Solo – Rana Dasgupta

When I started this blog, I was just beginning to investigate the parts of the contemporary British literary scene that would most interest me. The website Untitled Books was (still is) a great resource, and it’s where I found out about Solo. I love books with wide-ranging sensibilities, and Solo – with its account of a life that feels like a daydream, and a daydream that feels like life – is that sort of book.

5. Beside the Sea – Véronique Olmi

One of the great joys of book blogging has been discovering small presses. Peirene Press are one of the fine publishers who’ve emerged in the last couple of years, and Beside the Sea is one of their best books. Ostensibly the story of a mother taking her children on a trip to the seaside, darkness gradually emerges from behind the happy façade to build up a brilliant but tragic portrait.

6. Yellow Blue Tibia & New Model Army – Adam Roberts

Yellow Blue Tibia was the very first book I reviewed on this blog. I was wanting to catch up on some of the contemporary sf authors I hadn’t read, and my first Adam Roberts novel just blew me away. My second, New Model Army, did the same the year after – a novel that I can genuinely say did something I hadn’t come across in a book before. I can’t choose one of these books over the other for this list, so here they both are.

7. The Affirmation – Christopher Priest

Being surprised by an unfamiliar author is great; but so is reading an excellent book by a writer you already know. A Christopher Priest novel is a maze of realities and unreliable perceptions, and The Affirmation is up there with his best. Priest’s narrative shifts between realities, and his masterstroke is to make our world seem no more (or less) real than his fictional one.

8. An A-Z of Possible Worlds – A.C. Tillyer

You can’t explore the world of book blogs for too long without coming across books that you’re unlikely to hear of elsewhere. I first heard of An A-Z of Possible Worlds through Scott Pack’s blog, and it really ought to be better known. Lovingly produced by its publisher, Roast Books, this is a collection of stories in a box – twenty-six individual pamphlets, each about its own place. The stories are very fine, too.

9. Coconut Unlimited – Nikesh Shukla

Here’s another way of discovering books in the blog age: finding a writer to be an engaging presence on Twitter; then, a year (or however long) later, reading his or her newly-published book. That’s what happened with Coconut Unlimited, which turned out to be a razor-sharp and hilarious comedy. More interconnectedness: I met Nikesh Shukla last year at a Firestation Book Swap, which Scott Pack usually hosts (although he wasn’t there for that one).

10. The City & the City – China Miéville

The City & the City generated one of my longest reviews, and I can’t remember reading another book that had so many interpretations from so many different people. It’s a novel to argue with, and argue about. At the time, I hadn’t read one of Miéville’s adult books since The Scar; I remember thinking that The City & the City was good enough in itself, but too quiet to catch on as some of his earlier works had. Of course, I was wrong. It was fascinating to see how the novel was received beyond the sf field, and the book blogging community was a big part of that reaction for me.

Ewan Morrison, Tales from the Mall (2012)

20th August 2012 / / 6 Comments

Sometimes I’m not sure what to make of the Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize. Look at its processes, and you might conclude it’s not worth paying attention to – often it seems to come down more than anything to which books have the most vociferous supporters. And the make-up of this year’s shortlist suggests there are structural issues with the Prize’s processes, which I believe are now being looked at.

But – fair’s fair – for all its flaws, the Not the Booker has a track record of highlighting interesting books. I’ve read all bar one of the previous winners, and all were very much worth my time. So I’m not about to dismiss a title associated with the Not the Booker Prize lightly, not even when – like Ewan Morrison’s Tales from the Mall – it attracted a deluge of nominations at a stage where the guidelines clearly stated only one per book was necessary. That alone almost put me off Tales from the Mall; but a book deserves to be judged on its own merits, and this one sounded genuinely interesting – so I decided to read it. I’m glad I did.

In his introduction, Morrison describes Tales from the Mall as an attempt to ‘document the folk culture of the mall’ (p. 8). The book is built from short stories, retold anecdotes, and factual sections; loosely structured as a journey around a mall. This is a structure which neatly mirrors the subject: a shopping mall is a place where people gather together but have very separate, individual experiences; Morrison presents a set of individual pieces which collectively tell a broader ‘story’ about the mall.

The different types of text in Tales from the Mall serve different functions. Broadly speaking, the factual material shows the intentions behind the mall: it’s a controlled and controlling space (one designed to encourage people to stay and shop; given names meant to evoke certain reassuring qualities), but also one where that can be subverted (one of the chapters is a list of pranks taken from a social networking site). The fiction and anecdotes, however, are more about the actuality, suggesting the different roles that malls might play in people’s lives.

It’s striking how few of Morrison’s characters are at the mall primarily to shop. In this book, the mall may be a neutral space where a separated father goes to meet his children. It may be a place to arrange a meeting with a blind date – somewhere to create a new persona. It may be the place to escape from life’s woes. Morrison paints a nuanced picture of an institution (institutions, really) being put to many more uses than the one for which it was designed.

The characterisation within individual stories can sometimes veer towards the stereotypical (the separated mother in ‘Food Court’, with her extensive assortment of modern-day worries about her children’s health, springs to mind). But I think it’s fair to observe that everything in Tales from the Mall – characterisation included – has been shaped to serve the book’s wider project. The real protagonist of this book is ‘the mall’ itself, less as a specific place than as a concept. It’s an idea that remains in flux, as malls themselves face competition from online shopping, and are re-emerging with apartments attached as a means of trying retain their usefulness.

There’s been some questioning over whether Tales from the Mall should have been eligible for the Not the Booker Prize – is it actually a novel, or a collection of short stories? For the purposes of this review, that doesn’t really matter, though I have (deliberately) been calling it a ‘book’ rather than anything more specific. I do find myself thinking about Morrison’s book as a complete unit, though. It feels like a composite portrait of its subject, and a different way of approaching fiction. If the Not the Booker brings to light more works with the distinctiveness of Tales of the Mall, then it’s worth following.

Elsewhere
Ewan Morrison’s website
Cargo Publishing
Interview with Morrison at Scots Whay Hae!
Some other reviews of Tales from the Mall: Savidge Reads; Subtle Melodrama Book Reviews; Paul Reviews Books; Stuart Kelly for the Guardian.

Sunday Story Society: “Atlantic City”

19th August 2012 / / 18 Comments

To keep up to date with the Sunday Story Society: view our schedule; follow @SundayStorySoc on Twitter; or visit us on Facebook.

Welcome to the Sunday Story Society discussion of Kevin Barry’s “Atlantic City“. If you’ve not seen one of these before, I always start with a round-up of some online commentary, before opening the comments up to you.

As far as I’ve seen, responses to “Atlantic City” have been overwhelmingly positive – like this one, from Daragh Reddin in Metro:

In…’Atlantic City’ – the languid atmosphere of a sultry summer night in a non-descript midlands town is perfectly evoked. Barry’s dialogue here is suitably sure-footed and he demonstrates a deft hand in capturing the unrealised aspirations of his characters.

Peter McClean praised the story’s sense of place:

[“Atlantic City”] captures the very essence of its location; it portrays the characters in a vivid reality; it uses the real language of the people involved.

For Rob Burdock, Barry turned the ordinary into something more:

The main ‘star’ of this story is James, a lad who would be considered unremarkable in almost any other setting. Yet in this ramshackle arcade – which in itself can be best described as ordinary and plain – James stands on a pedestal as a god among men (and women), and Barry exalts him magnificently.

There are also further positive write-ups of “Atlantic City” and its collection, There Are Little Kingdoms, from Mel u; Andrew of Slightly Read; Elaine Chiew for The Short Review; Rozz Lewis; and Marc Goldin for Laura Hird’s New Review.

So, how did you find “Atlantic City”?

Book notes: collections by Jon Gower and Tim Maughan

8th August 2012 / / 1 Comment

Jon Gower, Too Cold for Snow (2012)

There are funny stories in Too Cold for Snow; dark stories; poignant ones, too – but all are built on a base of ordinary Welsh life, which Jon Gower then transforms in some way. In the title story, we meet Boz, a jingle-composer who answered a job ad and is now in Siberia, working on a documentary about a reindeer-herding people. Gower creates an effective contrast between Boz’ and the herders’ lifestyles, and shows how the gap between them starts to be bridged.

‘The Pit’ is the tale of a miner who became trapped in a collapsed pit, and had to take extreme measures to survive. A borderline-supernatural twist makes this piece a genuine chiller. ‘TV Land’ is a satirical treatment of celebrity culture, in which a burger van proprietor who uses rather… unusual ingredients is invited on a local chat show and his secrets exposed. Gower’s story is absurd, but only just, and has significant bite because of that.

‘White Out’ is a beautifully written piece in which an avalanche has covered north Wales; a sheep farmer explores the ruined landscape, encountering no one but a mysterious young girl. The closing revelation is especially moving, in one of the highlights of a varied and textured collection.

Tim Maughan, Paintwork (2011)

Paintwork is a collection of three stories set in a near future where the online space has become thoroughly integrated with individuals’ sensorial. Tim Maughan’s tales explore issues of control and authenticity in that world.

The story ‘Paintwork’ itself concerns 3Cube, a guerrilla artist whose speciality is replacing QR codes on billboards with his own, to give people artistic vistas rather than commercial messages. But the artist finds that his latest work is being vandalised, faster than should be possible. Subsequent events 3Cube to question whether he’s behind the times, with his romanticism and insistence on old-fashioned methods (such as hand-cut stencils) – and to question how much he’s in charge of his own work.

Similar considerations emerge in ‘Havana Augmented’, whose young protagonists have created an augmented-reality version of a popular fighting game. Business, government, and a major gaming clan all take an interest, and a game on the streets of Havana becomes a fight for something deeper. Perhaps this story isn’t as complex as ‘Paintwork’ in its examination of issues, but it is engaging nonetheless.

The structural similarities of Paintwork’s stories can make individual aspects of them less satisfactory – the beginning of ‘Paparazzi’ (a piece in which a journalist is sent into an MMORPG to investigate a prominent gamer) is a little heavy on exposition in comparison to the other two, though the sting-in-the-tale ending may be the best in the book. But the overall impression left by Maughan’s collection impresses most – the strong sense of tackling issues of a kind that might face us just around the corner.

Sunday Story Society: “Bombay’s Republic”

5th August 2012 / / 6 Comments

To keep up to date with the Sunday Story Society: view our schedule; follow @SundayStorySoc on Twitter; or like us on Facebook.

It’s time to start our second discussion; this time, we’re focusing on “Bombay’s Republic” by Rotimi Babatunde, which you can read here. As winner of the Caine Prize, there’s been a substantial amount of commentary on this story, not least because Aaron Bady of The New Inquiry organised a mass blogging of the shortlist earlier in the year. As with last time, I won’t pretend to have covered everything here.

Aishwarya Subramanian saw “Bombay’s Republic” as ‘a story about stories and how they are told, and the relationship between stories and the world’.  Stories and storytelling were recurring themes in the commentary:  Ndinda described Babatunde’s tale as ‘a story that simply ridicules stories of war.’ Peter Day noted that ‘Bombay begins the story as a reader like us, practically anonymous, nameless, pulled from the “droves” of unknown men…[and] becomes the writer, that perverse egomaniacal hermit.’

The Oncoming Hope felt that Bombay’s period as a ‘writer’ came to a bad end: ‘Unfortunately for Bombay, he had the opportunity to create his own story, but went home instead and trapped himself in delusions’. In contrast, Matthew Cheney considered that Bombay ‘liberates himself through stories, and the stories become true, and he becomes a story.’

Aaron Bady’s own response examined how truth in the story is malleable, and can be exploited: ‘the entire course of [Bombay’s] experience in Burma is marked by the repeated discovery not of what the world really is like, but of the extent to which people will believe totally crazy things. For City of Lions, “Bombay’s Republic” parodies ‘the idea that storytelling is a kind of heroic calling. And the destabilizing shifts in style are part of that, because they play against the individualistic notion of author-as-brand.’

Soulfool reflected on the story’s theme of possibility:

Possibilities peddle themselves with sour faces and sharp swords of obloquy. They demand that something must be done with them. And yet what is it that one is to do with possibility? What is one to do with the obscenity of knowledge? Bombay is obnoxious to the possibilities of possibility.

Richard M. Oduor explored the representational aspects of the story:

Bombay’s Republic is a metonym for white-black relations during the World War, mapped on the dichotomy of good and evil, civilized and savage, colonizer and colonized. It should be celebrated by Africans as a great lamp post lighting the path for continued de-authorization of colonialist literature. Dotted with unending tints of dark humour, Bombay’s Republic forces us to see ourselves as we need to see us, not otherwise.

Olumide Abimbola also touched on this:

Even though he does not repeat the Burma returnee cliché Bombay is still recognisable. He is a Big Man who spins wealth out of political power, and whose political sovereignty and legitimacy is fully acknowledged only by himself. In that sense, one can read Bombay’s inhabitation of a jailhouse as a metaphor for the alienation that high political office sometimes imposes on office holders, especially those whose legitimacy is questionable.

Stephen Derwent Partington felt that “Bombay’s Republic” tailed off in its final third:

And so, a story with great start, and which performs an important recuperation (for the western reader) of a Burmese campaign that s/he might not be fully aware of. If this section could somehow have been maintained without the awkward later shift into hard-and-fast, uncompromising allegory, this would have been, for me, a brilliant story rather than a very good one.

(But see also his comment on Bady’s post.)

I’ll also highlight positive views from Adjoa Ofoe; Saratu; Bookshy; Jayaprakash; Klara du Plessis; Mel u; Alan Bowden; Jeffrey Z.; Nana Freuda-Agyeman; and (positive with reservations) Ikhide.

And now, the floor is yours.

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