Tag: Reviews

BBC National Short Story Award 2015: ‘Do it Now, Jump the Table’ by Jeremy Page

4th October 2015 / / 0 Comments

This is part of a series of posts about the shortlist for the 2015 BBC National Short Story Award.

Thom goes to visit his girlfriend Susan’s parents in rural Wales. On the way there, he remembers Susan’s warnings about them sometimes walking around the house with little (if anything) to cover their modesty, and being free about touching each other. These colour the way Thom approaches the meeting, making an already awkward situation even more so. But Thom finds his feet with time – or at least he thinks he does…

I really enjoyed this story. Page’s humour really hits the mark, and I don’t mind admitting that this went a long way. There’s also a lightness of touch here which I don’t really find in the other stories, and it works well. But the heart of Page’s tale is the sense of Thom entering unfamiliar territory – a household and family whose conventions and codes he does not understand – and trying to find his way. It’s sharp and funny… good stuff.

Listen to a reading of ‘Do it Now, Jump the Table’

Anthology details (Foyles affiliate link)

The BBC National Short Story Award 2015, Comma Press paperback

BBC National Short Story Award 2015: ‘The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher’ by Hilary Mantel

4th October 2015 / / 0 Comments

This is part of a series of posts about the shortlist for the 2015 BBC National Short Story Award.

Perhaps the single best-known short story that would have been eligible for this year’s award, purely on account of its being the title story of a collection by such a high-profile author (oh, and perhaps the storm-in-a-teacup that went on in the media over the subject matter, I suppose). Mantel imagines the occasion in August 1983 when Margaret Thatcher went into hospital in Windsor for eye surgery. Her narrator lives within sight of the hospital, and receives a visitor who is at first assumed to be a photographer – though it soon becomes apparent that he’s after a different kind of shot.

It’s been a recurring theme of my engagement with the shortlisted stories that I’ve found the tone of the narration a little jarring (at least to begin with) in the context of what the stories were doing. It’s the same here: Mantel’s protagonist looks back on these events calmly, with a certain sense of being above it all (“Picture first the street where she breathed her last. It is a quiet street, sedate, shaded by old trees…”). This seems to work as something of a wink to the reader: you know that Thatcher wasn’t assassinated in real life, but this is fiction, so all bets are off, okay? But I also find that it takes me out of the moment a little. All the same, the interplay between narrator and (would-be?) sniper brings humour, then tension.

Listen to a reading of ‘The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher’

Anthology details (Foyles affiliate link)

The BBC National Short Story Award 2015, Comma Press paperback

BBC National Short Story Award 2015: ‘Broderie Anglaise’ by Frances Leviston

2nd October 2015 / / 0 Comments

This is part of a series of posts about the shortlist for the 2015 BBC National Short Story Award.

Invited to her cousin’s wedding – but “not maid of honour, not even a bridesmaid” – a young woman determines to take a private revenge by wearing a dress that will subtly outshine the bride and annoy that side of the family. Unable to find something suitable in the shops, she decides to make her own in secret. The trouble is that, no matter what method she tries, she can’t quite get the hang of it.

There were times when I found Leviston’s first-person narration a little over-egged (that is, more like a writer’s voice than a character’s), especially in comparison to the snappier rhythms of the contemporary dialogue. But I guess you could also take the view that it creates a contrast between the narrator’s interior and exterior life, in a story which is all about breaking down emotional barriers. The protagonist’s relationship with her mother is transformed through the act of making this dress, leading to the kind of symbolic patterning for which I always have a soft spot in fiction.

Listen to a reading of ‘Broderie Anglaise’

Anthology details (Foyles affiliate link)

The BBC National Short Story Award 2015, Comma Press paperback

BBC National Short Story Award 2015: ‘Bunny’ by Mark Haddon

2nd October 2015 / / 2 Comments

This is part of a series of posts about the shortlist for the 2015 BBC National Short Story Award.

I was not much enamoured of this story at all, I’m sorry to say. Birdy Wallis is a morbidly obese twentysomething who finds the scope of his world contracting, until he’s befriended by Leah, an old acquaintance from school. The tale is one of two characters searching for an emotional connection: Birdy stuck in his house, and Leah who never followed her friends to the big city.

There’s some effective use of rhythm and repetition in Haddon’s prose, and (for example) the opening passage detailing Birdy’s excesses is appropriately enticing and repulsive at the same time. But ‘Birdy’ ends up falling awkwardly between several stools: it’s a character study that doesn’t get under the skin of its characters enough for my liking; its realist approach points towards social commentary, but ultimately it doesn’t seem to say much; it has a touch of the macabre that doesn’t gel with the rest, and leaves the story’s ending unearned. Frustrating.

Listen to a reading of ‘Bunny’

Anthology details (Foyles affiliate link)

The BBC National Short Story Award 2015, Comma Press paperback

BBC National Short Story Award 2015: ‘Briar Road’ by Jonathan Buckley

1st October 2015 / / 0 Comments

It’s BBC National Short Story Award time again, and they’ve kindly sent me an copy of the shortlist anthology, so I can do a story-by-story blog of the list. I’ll be going through each of the five stories, before the winner is announced on Tuesday. It’s been a good few years since I’ve done one of these, so I’m excited to get started…

First up, Jonathan Buckley’s ‘Briar Road’, which begins with its narrator observing the house she’s about to visit. If I’m honest, some of the imagery here feels a little too crisp and studied (“Every sill gleams like milk”); but this woman’s occupation and purpose eventually justify her narrative voice. She is a psychic, come to help a family whose daughter has gone missing; the way she describes it, her talent is like picking up traces that others wouldn’t notice in the manner of someone with a more acute sense of  smell or taste, so it’s only natural that she should be finely observant, and her voice rather measured.

‘Briar Road’ is a story of familial tensions being revealed, albeit in an understated way. The trouble for me is that, on the one hand, I find it short on ambiguity (although Buckley doesn’t spell everything out, you can infer pretty clearly); but, on the other, the sheen of the prose creates a distancing effect which lessens the story’s emotional impact, despite its directness. I find ‘Briar Road’ fine as it goes; but I would have wished for more.

Listen to a reading of ‘Briar Road’

Anthology details (Foyles affiliate link)

The BBC National Short Story Award 2015, Comma Press paperback

The Black Country: We Love This Book review

28th September 2015 / / 0 Comments

We Love This Book have my review of The Black Country, the fascinating debut novel by Kerry Hadley-Pryce (and another of Nicholas Royle’s finds for Salt Publishing, which include Ian Parkinson’s The Beginning of the End and Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse amongst others). It’s about a couple whose lives begin to disintegrate when they’re involved in a road accident one night – but the novel is transformed by its fuzzy prose style:

Harry pads out his memory of this day quite a bit. Maybe what he tells us is important. We’ll decide that. he tells of a time during the service when he reached for Maddie’s hand, prompted by what he calls a ‘prickle of a memory’ — Harry’s the type to say things like that — a prickle of a memory of a time when Gerald suggested the two of them work together, help each other out, pool ideas. So they worked together for the first time, reading some book or other. Harry says he wasn’t sure he got it, but Maddie did. Maddie got it, she understood it. If we let her, she#ll go on about how she found it all so brilliant, and Harry, being Harry, sort of fell for her then. That’s what he says.

Read the full review here.

Book details (Foyles affiliate link)

The Black Country (2015) by Kerry Hadley-Pryce, Salt paperback

Miranda July, The First Bad Man (2015)

28th July 2015 / / 1 Comment

MJulyOne of the words that I’ve seen bandied around in newspaper reviews of Miranda July’s novel is ‘quirky’. I can see where this view is coming from, but there are two main problems with it: one is that it’s inherently dismissive (as July herself puts it, it makes her sound like a little girl); the other is that it overlooks the specifics of what the novel actually does.

July’s narrator is fortysomething Cheryl Glickman, who works for a self-defence training company named Open Palm. She has eyes for Phillip, a colleague twenty years her senior; and imagines that certain young children she sees are Kubelko Bondy, a baby she was sent to play with once when she was nine. When Cheryl agrees to have her employers’ twenty-year-old daughter Clee move in, her careful household routine is disrupted – and things change even more when Clee becomes pregnant.

There’s a lot of artifice in the characters’ lives, but it seems to me that this is often a defence mechanism. Cheryl has worked out a system at home for streamlining day-to-day busywork, but the sense is that really it’s an excuse for disengaging. She goes to see a chromotherapist who rents an office for three days of the year, then makes an appointment with a psychologist who uses that office the rest of the time, and turns out to have been acting as the chromotherapist’s receptionist. When Cheryl overhears a conversation between the two, it reveals what a front they’ve been putting up.

The ‘first bad man’ of the title is not a character in the novel as such, but a figure in one of Open Plan’s DVD scenarios, a role taken on by Clee when she and Cheryl act the scenario out. This is an example of how relationships between the characters become performances. Another is Cheryl’s fantasies of Phillip mid-novel, where the lines between reality and imagination blur. Then there’s complicated dance of a relationship between Cheryl and Clee later on. In all, The First Bad Man is quite a powerful novel, whose characters’ eccentricities are central to creating that power.

See also

Reviews of The First Bad Man by Naomi Frisby at The Writes of Woman, and John Self at Asylum.

Iván Repila, The Boy Who Stole Attila’s Horse (2013/5)

22nd July 2015 / / 4 Comments

RepilaSometimes the design of a book just hits the mark. The Boy Who Stole Attila’s Horse has the characteristic small paperback format of the Pushkin Collection, With David Roberts’s cover illustration, the physical volume has a timeless, ‘storybook’ quality – as does Iván Repila’s novel itself.

Repila tells of two brothers, Big and Small, who are trapped at the bottom of a well for reasons unknown, and are determined to get out. When attempting to throw Small out of the well doesn’t work, Big takes to exercise, keeping most of the food for himself– but that takes its toll on Small, so Big then has to look after him. Dreams and hallucinations abound as time passes. You can get a flavour for the writing from this passage, where Big and Small can hear animals approaching the well:

The steps become and more and more clear, and the sound of panting coming from the animals has taken over the night. Inside the well, the brothers’ stillness is catching the insects have stopped buzzing, the water has stilled in its tracks; at last, nature is silent. For a moment, the well slips its bonds and breathes like a home that the brothers don’t want to lose. The siege appears to be a fleeting assault. A wash of calm crawls up the walls, stills the mouth of the well and extends beyond its sheer edges to where the baying creatures howl. They go quiet, and for a split second the forest settles like an implosion of peace.

The translation from Spanish is by Sophie Hughes. I particularly like this passage for its use of personification, and the way the imagery transforms the physical space of the well. Each chapter brings a slightly different tone and perception; I could imagine The Boy Who Stole Attila’s Horse as a stylized animated film, its palette shifting with each scene.

It would be a dark film, too, because there’s a solemn allegory of metaphorical imprisonment lying beneath the surface story. It makes for a potent brew, and I hope we see more of Repila’s work in English before too long.

Shiny New Books: Janice Galloway and the IFFP

19th July 2015 / / 0 Comments

A new issue of Shiny New Books went up earlier this month, so this is a quick post to tell you about two pieces of mine…

JellyfishThe first is a review of Jellyfish, the new short story collection by Janice Galloway:

[Jellyfish] takes as its starting point an observation by David Lodge: “Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children; life’s the other way round.” The twelve stories in Jellyfish don’t disprove Lodge exactly, but they do approach the topics of sex and parenthood – or, to take a more general view, heightened moments of feeling and the longer-term experience of living – from a variety of angles, bringing more nuance to the straightforward opposition of Lodge’s statement…

The full review is here.

You can also read my report on the IFFP ceremony, which includes photographs by my fellow shadow judge Julianne Pachico. On that subject, there’s also an article by Tony Malone on the IFFP shadow jury. As it turns out, this year’s IFFP was also the last, as it is now being merged into the reformatted Man Booker International Prize. I’m sure we’ll still be shadowing, though.

Nell Leyshon, Memoirs of a Dipper (2015)

28th June 2015 / / 2 Comments

Dipper

In that minute when you’re somewhere you oughtn’t to be, when your fingers are touching someone else’s stuff, when you know a key could go in the lock, a door be opened, a footstep come into the room, in that minute you feel it all over your body. You’re alive. The hairs on the inside of your nose are raised. Your ears are moving to help detect any sound. Bits of your body you didn’t know existed are switched on.

– from Memoirs of a Dipper by Nell Leyshon, which I’ve reviewed for We Love This Book.

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