Reading Tom Fletcher’s short story ‘The Safe Children’ was all it took for me to place his novel The Leaping on my to-read list. Now that novel is here, and it was worth the wait.
The Leaping centres on a group of twenty-something housemates who all work in the same call centre in Manchester, and particularly on Jack, who also has a sideline in writing articles about the paranormal. One day at work, Jack meets – and falls in love with – the beautiful and enigmatic Jennifer, though she warns him that it’ll be an open relationship, as she believes in the free-love ideals of the Sixties. This leads to certain complications involving Jack’s housemate, Francis (who shares the book’s narration with Jack).
Jennifer has recently come into some money after her mother died, and uses it to buy Fell House, a creaking old mansion in Cumbria, where she moves in with Jack. Back in Manchester, the remaining housemates plan a surprise birthday party for Jack – but some uninvited guests turn up, and everyone discovers that there’s some truth to the old tales of werewolves, after all.
One of the first things I noticed about The Leaping is how good a writer of voice Fletcher is. I like the narrative voices to be differentiated in stories with multiple first-person narrators, and Fletcher does this very well indeed. Francis’s voice is particularly striking, revealing an earnest personality and an obsessive eye for detail (he lists all his friends’ favourite books, films and music because, he says, ‘the only way of working out the true personality of a person, their true soul, is by their taste’ [42]). Those same character traits are used to brilliant effect later in the novel, when events take a horrific turn.
And it’s the horror where Fletcher’s prose shines its brightest. The best of his passages about the werewolves are as good as one could wish horror writing to be, as Fletcher captures both the profound horror of having one’s very self undermined and transformed, and the primal attraction of the lycanthropes’ existence. He also gives his werewolves an air of genuine strangeness, which makes even this hoary old staple feel fresh – no mean feat.
Where I think The Leaping is less successful is in its treatment of the larger dichotomy it seemingly aims to dramatise – broadly speaking, that of modern life versus nature. Jack expresses disillusionment with urban life – and, with what he and his colleagues have to put up with at the call centre, it’s no wonder – but the ‘push’ of this doesn’t seem to me to be as strongly felt by the novel as the ‘pull’ towards the wildness of nature. When Jack talks about wanting to run with the werewolves, he does so with a deep yearning that’s woven into the very fabric of his words. But Jack’s comments about city life don’t come close to that, and this imbalance dilutes the impact of the theme.
Even taking this into account, though, The Leaping is still a very good piece of horror fiction. That puts an interesting spin on a venerable motif. After years in the wilderness, horror currently seems to be undergoing something of a resurgence; as long as there are writers like Tom Fletcher working in it, the field is in good hands.
Given that I rather disliked the two Scarlett Thomas novels I’d previously read (Bright Young Things and PopCo), you might reasonably wonder why I even contemplated reading a third. Curiosity, I suppose — I just wanted to see if I could find one that I liked. And, well, I wouldn’t go so far as to say I particularly liked Our Tragic Universe, but certainly I found it a more worthwhile read than those earlier novels.
Friday, 18th February, 2000: a meeting of the book group at Inverness Library. It’s notable because the reclusive writer Marjorie Macpherson is leading a workshop; but three people are making their way to Inverness with agendas that will make this truly an evening like no other. Henry Jennings, a single, middle-aged financial adviser, became infatuated with Marjorie (or, at least, with his mental image of her) from reading her books; now, his chance to meet her has come. Henry’s estranged brother, Peter, has been sent a manuscript of a recent poem in Scottish Gaelic by one Angus Urquhart, with mysterious instructions to return it by hand; as Peter translates the poem, something clicks – could Urquhart be Calum Calum, the subject of Peter’s thesis, whose last known work was composed sixty years previously? And Elena Martìnez also has business with Angus Urquhart, as she believes him to be the veteran of the Spanish Civil War who betrayed her grandfather and brought shame on her family.
In the heart of the Darwin Centre at the Natural History Museum lies its star attraction – a preserved giant squid. Curator Billy Harrow prepares to take another party of visitors in to see it, only to find that it has, impossibly, been stolen – even the squid’s tank has disappeared. Subsequently, Bily is drawn into a world of feuding cults, where he discovers that some believe the giant squid to be a god, that magic works, and that the end of the world really could be nigh.
Kirsten Reed’s debut, The Ice Age, is a short novel (little over 200 pages), an extended snapshot (if there can be such a thing!) of a period in its protagonist’s life – at one and the same time both satisfyingly complete and intriguingly incomplete.
These thoughts came to my mind when reading the latest chapbooks from Nightjar Press, which are both short, intense bursts of story. ‘When the Door Closed, it Was Dark’ by Alison Moore tells of Tina, a British girl who has travelled to another country to work as an au pair, and finds it hard to adjust to her new surroundings. There’s a palpable sense of menace about this piece, which comes less from images and individual word choices (though it has its share of striking examples; I love this image from when Tina is trying to understand her host family’s rapid conversation: ‘her formal phrases were like wallflowers at a wild party’), than from details of the broader structure. Tina never learns the family members’ names – they’re just ‘Uncle’ or ‘Grandmother’, and so on – which itself makes them more unknowable to her; but, more than this, the whole piece feels like a closed system. We discover barely anything about Tina’s life before the moment of the story; and the accretion of repeated details – the monotonous food, the outside staircase – heightens the feeling that there’s no escape. Moore’s tale is excellent.
violent all of a sudden. Our man is reluctant to return, as he thought he’d left his old life behind; but he seems discontent with even his current circumstances. ‘Black Country’ is a story built on shifting sands, as the actual investigation recedes into the background somewhat (though an answer to what’s going on is provided by the end), and the focus is more on the narrator’s emotional state. Lane’s main theme, I would say, is loss – loss of place, and loss of self. There’s a parallel, I think, between the protagonist’s difficulty in getting a handle on his life, and the social and geographical changes being depicted. I feel that those parallels don’t quite have all the breathing-space they need to establish themselves fully, but it’s a very good story and portrait nonetheless.
This is the launch title of Peirene Press, a new publisher specialising in English translations of short European works. And what a book to begin with. Véronique Olmi’s Beside the Sea, first published in France in 2001, and now available in Adriana Hunter’s superlative translation, is the story of a single mother taking her two sons to a seaside town. But all is not as happy as it sounds. Here is how Beside the Sea begins:
I can safely say that New Model Army is like no other book I’ve ever read. I know this because I have no name for the feeling I was left with after I’d finished it. That’s a recommendation, by the way.
The Solitude of Prime Numbers tells the story of two young people who have been scarred (both physically and mentally, in their different ways) by events in their childhoods: Alice Della Rocca, who survived a terrible skiing accident; and Mattia Balossino, whose twin sister Michela (who had learning difficulties) was never seen again after he abandoned her on the way to a party.
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