Jack Messenger's Blog, page 6

Four American Tales Q1

‘I seen one!’ May Alice took a hold of my arm, her eyes filled up with nightmare. ‘It’s got claws and fur and lives at the bottom of the water. It hides in the grass and drags you down just when you thinks it’s safe. Ain’t nothin’ you can do about it ’cos you’s already died. Then it eats you and it hurts somethin’ awful.’

‘Wichega’, Four American Tales

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The Water Rabbits | Paul Tarragó

[image error]The Labelling of Monsters: A book review of The Water Rabbits by Paul Tarragó

Reading The Water Rabbits by Paul Tarragó is something like the literary equivalent of touring an exhibition of contemporary art, at which we are made to confront the unfamiliar, the secretive and the inscrutable. We wander through the galleries, alternately perplexed and intrigued, distracted and stimulated, occasionally consulting our watches and wondering if that fire extinguisher attached to the far wall in magnificent isolation is in fact an exhibit. Afterwards, probably over a meal and a drink, we struggle to process the experience and find things to say that sound remotely insightful and intelligent.

Reviewing books is an odd occupation and a presumptuous one. Subjective responses and evaluations can be dressed up as objectivity (whatever that is), while the reviewer poses as a kind of invisible Everyman who speaks for us all. Alternatively, subjectivity can be allowed to strut its stuff, the reviewer parading his or her feelings and awarding merit stars on the basis of sublimely unexamined preferences and prejudices. Perhaps neither of these extremes is preferable to the other: context is all, and what works one day will fall apart the next.

The Water Rabbits exposes the limitations of the review process to an embarrassing extent. It is entirely artificial to read this book from cover to cover more or less in one sitting. It is doubly artificial then to sit down and think of things to say about it. The Water Rabbits needs to be read in small doses; indeed, its stories, dialogues and occasional poems and photographs are arranged in small doses. Sense needs to be made of each individually before the collection can be grasped as a whole. Even then, that grasp will probably prove elusive, requiring another attempt later in life.

Fortunately, Paul Tarragó ‘heartily believe[s] that a reader can assume a substantial and active role in the meaning-making process … so any difference in understanding seems quite reasonable.’ Reading is certainly a highly creative act involving a wide range of seemingly contradictory means and ends. We forget how miraculous it is and just how big: most of the time, the hard work it entails is hidden from our own sight, so that all we see are our immediate emotional responses. The Water Rabbits brings to consciousness our search for meaning while we read, rewarding and frustrating that search in equal measure.

If anything unites the pieces in The Water Rabbits it is humour. ‘The Bombardier’, for instance, is interspersed with user-reviews of the Bombardier slow-cooker, pitch-perfect in tone and faulty orthography:

Technically, it cooks to fast on a high setting. Very bubble mixture when cooking. So the glass lid is always misty. Therefore, you cannot see the food clearly, as advertised. I have also noticed that my phone is ‘tingly to the touch’ when placed near (though am not definitely sure whether phone or cooker is doing this).

In the eponymous story/dialogue, a police officer has been assigned to a teaching programme:

Henry has realized by now that keeping order in class is very different from the streets. There you could draw from a range of implied threats – incarceration, arrest, fine, forcible detention, even shame – but in school it was more like dealing with embassy officials: everyone had some kind of diplomatic immunity and was operating under a different Rule of Law, one which he was only hazily aware of.

Hazy awareness – the feeling one has when one intuits something just beyond one’s capacity to perceive or understand it – is another major concern, and is perhaps representative of the reading experience itself. In the same story we are told:

The enigmatic turn of the image sequencing suggests there are links that we have missed, or allusions that have been badly articulated.

Appropriately, one of the pieces in The Water Rabbits is called ‘Pattern Recognition’. Throughout the collection, characters – insofar as they are characters at all – strive to find patterns, to hang on to understandings, clarity, details, while constantly assailed by doubts and distractions. They participate in conversations that stalk agreement but are continually sidetracked by stray thoughts and random interruptions. Even the apparatuses they use to record and create – particularly cameras and the very fabric of film itself – eschew technical certainties and open themselves to multiple interpretations with each tiny adjustment of the equipment, each micro-decision of the user. Truth may be socially determined, but that determination is hard to come by.

Here and there, and most importantly in ‘The Water Rabbits’ and ‘Absence of Monster’, a focus on the mutability and indeterminateness of human systems of classification and appraisal suggests that what we call monsters can be something else entirely, or else two things at once. The morphology of the monstrous varies according to proximity: if this particular rabbit does not possess webbing between its toes then it cannot be a water rabbit and, hence, cannot be dangerous; if these monsters are microscopically small and unthreatening when clinging to our clothing, how dangerous do they become when they grow large and run off to hide in the woods? And are they still a threat when they send us considerate letters containing helpful advice? Systems of classification are culturally inflected, as is the very vocabulary of our taxonomizing (cf. Borges’ 1957).

The Water Rabbits will not find a vast readership. It is too wilfully absurdist, too playful, too unconventional. It refuses to compromise and rebuffs our friendly overtures. It even resists assessment: like it or loathe it, or like some of it and loathe the rest of it, it keeps its secrets so well that we are unable to tell whether or not they are worth the keeping. Is it really about anything at all?  Does it have to be? Our answers will depend on our monsters.

Mistral Studios | ISBN 9781326986674 (pbk)

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Also available at Foyles and Lulu

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Long Distance Q1

All at once, Lucy remembered Trevor and began to weep. He would never grow old as she had grown old. His youthful face remained unchanged and unwearied, preserved forever in her faithful memory. She did not love him – did not know if she had ever loved him – yet there he was. Was he still alive? She tried to think of Gerald, dead Gerald, dull, oblivious, bullying Gerald, but his face had turned bland and bloated with the years, like a blurred photograph of an undistinguished stranger.

‘Long Distance’, a free short story

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Hairway to Heaven Stories | Patty Somlo

[image error] Golden Braid: A book review of Hairway to Heaven Stories, a collection of short stories by Patty Somlo

Many of the short stories in Patty Somlo’s Hairway to Heaven were previously published elsewhere. While each story can stand alone, reading them all together in a single volume is an enormous advantage. One of the major accomplishments of Hairway to Heaven is its interconnections and associations, its themes and variations, which gradually resolve themselves – effortlessly, beautifully – into a novelistic whole. Hairway to Heaven is a very good book indeed.

Hairway to Heaven is set in and around Martin Luther King, Jr Boulevard (MLK) in Portland, Oregon. Union Avenue, an arterial highway that ran through the city, became MLK only in 1990, in the teeth of much racially motivated opposition. Zoning restrictions and city planning had effectively marginalized and impoverished the area for decades, and in the late 1980s crime rates were high. However, its rich multi-ethnic history includes Native Americans, Germans and Scandinavians, and African Americans. In the 1990s the area began to be regenerated, leading to problems of gentrification and the exclusion of the very populations it was intended to benefit.

Readers are able to glean much of this history from Hairway to Heaven itself, in asides and observations within individual narratives, as characters encounter the infrastructure of daily life in and around MLK, travelling between work and home, exterior and interior, public and private. The streets and the businesses, the houses and the renovated loft spaces – the ubiquitous Portland rain itself – form the world of Hairway to Heaven, evoked casually, naturally and with delightful economy, even when its violence is at odds with individual and community aspirations, as in The Spell:

[Elidio] sat on the porch of the house he would one day build and breathed in the sweet damp air. He ignored the endless sirens wailing up and down MLK Boulevard and the pop-pop-pop-pop of gunfire outside. He failed to notice the thrum of the bass thumping from passing cars.

Major characters in one story often appear as minor characters in another. This simple device serves as the literary equivalent of meeting a friend on the street: a frisson of recognition, a smile of surprise, a moment of community. Every mention of MLK Boulevard has a similar effect, placing us there and adding detail to our mental maps of the neighbourhood. By the end of the book, MLK is as emblematic and evocative as, say, Lake Wobegon or Yoknapatawpha County.

Hairway to Heaven never for one moment suggests that Patty Somlo is making decisions about who to write about next, or that she is deliberately cultivating variety. In lesser hands, the movement from a young African American woman to an Egyptian immigrant to a gay white man to a former baseball star to a homeless Native American would call attention to itself as something self-consciously ‘worthy’ and ‘concerned’, even condescending, but which would nevertheless perpetuate the controlling, categorizing, ethnographic gaze of (usually white, male, heteronormative) outsider elites.

Ms Somlo writes as if this is her community, as perhaps it is; as if these people are her neighbours, as perhaps they are. Everyone has his or her dignity, everyone has his or her unique history. Their lives overlap in a multitude of ways, often simply as a result of geography. They live and work and die within a few blocks of one another; their world is small but it is a universe of experience and meaning. Tragedy and heroism and suffering and goodness are enfolded in the normal, the ordinary, the everyday. We are privileged to spend time with such people.

These days, short stories often conform to some kind of template. Many of them read like overly prescriptive models issued by tutors of creative writing – first-person, present-tense tales focused on language and microscopic fragments of experience, lifeless and instantly forgettable. Others divide themselves neatly into three acts, often with an ironizing epilogue meant to upset our readerly assumptions. Hairway to Heaven follows its own path, telling stories that are spare but never slight, conveying sentiment untouched by sentimentality. They have an unobtrusive structure that progresses the narrative. Things happen and we learn the significance borne by people who have seen a lot in their lives.

In the Afternoon Mail is the first of a minority of stories to use first-person narration:

What I can’t bear to tell my mother is that America has worn me down. I have made mistakes, yes. Not understanding the freedom I was given here has certainly exacted a price. My mother cannot understand my world, since her life has always gone along a pre-planned path. She would not believe all the choices and opportunities available to a person in America and how easily one can take the wrong steps.

This admission contains some principal themes of the collection, among them belonging and loss, the pull of place and past, the importance of people telling (often hidden, painful)  stories, and a sense of treading water so as not to drown. In the Afternoon Mail also has one of many little epiphanies:

I stared at the tall buildings downtown on the river’s other side. The city where I’d lived for going on – was it twenty-five years now? I had hardly seen it before. The river was beautiful, as were the boats, the sunlight and people pedaling across the bridge on bikes.

Loss takes various forms. In Angelina, a story told from multiple viewpoints, an abandoned baby is found in a bus shelter:

Jonathan kept telling himself to leave, that the last thing in the world he wanted was to get involved. But these were his neighbors, and he needed to find out how the story would end after all.

The endings to some of these stories occasionally snatch a sacred moment from the jaws of disappointment, defeat or death. The Spell, Pickets and Bein’ Good – a story of a young girl with new shoes (they light up!) retrieved from the donation pile at the local family shelter – have particularly affecting conclusions.

Emergency Room is possibly the best in the collection. While people in need of urgent medical attention wait patiently in the local hospital, they gradually coalesce, sharing each other’s stories and revealing the eternal truths of the poor and marginalized:

She’d woken up that morning with the curse of women everywhere – a bladder infection. She’d had one before and knew all she needed was a course of antibiotics. Without insurance, the only way to get them was to sit here and wait for someone to see her.

As the wait extends to many hours, throughout the night and into the next day, an old man named William Shine shakes his head, ‘letting a weak, sad grin take over his mouth’:

‘Oh, you know, they always come out,’ he said. ‘Eventually. They just want you to wait and make you understand.’

‘Understand what?’ I asked …

‘They need us to know that we nuthin’. Just nuthin’. That’s what this country all about … They say, you mess up, you deal with it.’

There follows a surreal incursion into the menacingly deserted corridors of the hospital, the patients banding together to take matters into their own hands. The doors they push open become metaphors of empowerment and community.

Cowboy is a sensual exploration of a passionate relationship shared by people of very different backgrounds:

Catherine made love to Nganga that night as if he were a beautiful black jaguar she’d decided to ride. She wrapped her thighs around him, letting his heat warm her. From Nganga, Catherine pulled power and energy into her calves and up to her thighs. She rode Nganga, taking his name like a hot lozenge on her tongue and, as the name melted to liquid in her mouth, she swallowed. She let the force of that dark river swirl through her and then pulled out its thick wet sound.

This erotic apotheosis of connectivity appropriately concludes Hairway to Heaven, the significance of whose title is woven into the imagery of this oustanding achievement.

Cherry Castle Publishing | ISBN 9780692964385 (pbk)

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The Book of Air | Joe Treasure

All the Elements: A Spring Reads book review of The Book of Air, a novel by Joe Treasure

The Book of Air by Joe Treasure is an exceptionally fine novel that discloses its secrets gradually, in triumphantly unexpected ways. The stories it tells gather momentum and significance with each short chapter; it is populated by personages in whom we can believe; it is profoundly intelligent and deeply engrossing. Its allusions and references are delightfully subtle and oblique, conveyed effortlessly by the author’s gift for language and ideas. I doubt I shall read a finer novel this year.

The Book of Air presents the reviewer with an impossible dilemma: how to talk about it without giving the game away. By ‘game’ I don’t mean mere plot spoilers – The Book of Air is a novel that positively requires to be read and reread. Rather, the pleasures the novel provides are so intricately bound up as parts to a whole that any choice of things to highlight risks exposing the entire enterprise. So I shall have to talk about The Book of Air by carefully avoiding talking about it.

Joe Treasure has the great gift of making the reader feel intelligent. When realizations dawn as to what exactly is going on, when small epiphanies and powerful revelations are grasped in all their ramifications, it’s hard not to be gratified, intrigued and somehow enhanced. This is particularly impressive if, like me, you are not drawn to speculative fiction, or your heart sinks at the sight of a novel that switches between two different stories chapter by chapter. In lesser hands, this latter aspect is so often a gimmick packed with forced associations and overly neat plot devices. In The Book of Air it is redeemed as an intensely literary and naturally expressive structure, entirely unforced and beautifully vindicated.

The Book of Air is about ending and beginnings, the past and the future:

‘…the world’s about to end all over again. There’s no end to the ending of things. Our life is one long sickening plummet into loss and more loss.’

I used to think of myself as walking forward into the future, constructing the future I was walking into. I used to think of myself as not wasting energy thinking of myself as one thing or another, but just doing what had to be done. Now I seem to stand sideways on, watching some version of me that isn’t quite me. I notice myself feeling things. Or not. Or more than one thing at a time.

It is a gothic novel inasmuch as it is centred chiefly on a single location – a large country house that has endured as uniquely itself yet is always in transition, in need of rescue.

Either we pay attention, or we abandon the place to the slow invasion of nature, the seep and drip of water finding the weak points, until a dozen winters have split it open like a fallen trunk for woodlice to crawl through and rodents and nesting birds … The heat’s off, the damp’s rising. The works of man are rotting from the inside.

Its inhabitants – pre- and post-apocalypse – are unwittingly associated across time. Thematically, this association is the most important aspect of the novel and its principal concern: how, why and in what forms a culture (especially literary culture) is transmitted, interpreted and fragmented, used and misused, twisted and distorted, lost and found, particularly after immense social upheaval. Why has humanity always needed to tell itself stories? Here is one answer, perhaps the only answer:

‘Maybe because it’s our deepest instinct – to make meaning.’

‘Even when there is no meaning?’

‘Especially then.’

The Book of Air is thus of necessity intertextual, and one of its pleasures is to identify its many instances. Byron, the Brontës, the Bible, George Eliot, Hardy, Hemingway, Austen, Conrad, Lawrence, Rhys – these are the few I identified, but there are surely many more. Try as I might, I cannot resist quoting one of the references to another cultural phenomenon: ‘In all the empty houses in all the towns in all the world she had to squat in mine.’ And it’s oddly typical how external coincidence plays into a novel of this kind: two days prior to reading The Book of Air, a film I was watching quoted from Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon (1947), which is also referenced in the novel. It felt to me as if the book was reaching out and claiming my experience for its own.

The gothic frequently encompasses gender power relations: how men seek to exploit, control and confine women, and the mental and emotional consequences of oppression. In The Book of Air Agnes speaks from within the prison of her room: ‘This room is memory and I am lost in it … This room is mad and I am its only thought.’ Shades of The Yellow Wallpaper haunt her words.

Illegitimate claims to authority and righteous resistance to its demands reflect forward and back between the two stories of The Book of Air. The will to power – usually subconscious in its causation and explicitly provided with a religious justification – manifests itself over and over again by means of words in a book. Things change in order to stay the same, as Jason realizes:

I wanted to ask her – hadn’t she been here before? They give you a book. They say, it’s all in here, this is all you need.

The discovery that there is more than one book, that each has a story to tell, that we each have our own books, is The Book of Air’s liberating riposte to such dangerous nonsense, the outworkings of which are described in its moving finale.

As some of the extracts above indicate, the dialogue is natural and unforced. There is a great deal of it, but it never feels excessive and it always reveals character in precise, unmistakable ways.

There are occasional typos and, towards the end of the novel, someone should have known the difference between leaks and leeks. These irritations aside, The Book of Air is a major achievement: compelling, surprising, true. A book that must surely endure.

Clink Street Publishing | ISBN 9781911525097 (pbk) | ISBN 9781911525103 (ebook)

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This review is my contribution to Spring Reads 2018. Today’s other posts can be found at these participating blogs: MiniMac Reviews, Novel Kicks and Steph’s Book Blog.
Organized by Rachel Gilbey at Authoright Marketing & Publicity.




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Farewell Olympus (4)

Someone had pitched me into the freezing waters of a dark and pitiless lake. Monstrous predatory creatures circled in the primordial gloom. High above, a pinpoint of grey light flickered on the edge of extinction. I had to swim for that light – swim for it or else sink into unfathomable loss …

Farewell Olympus

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A Way Out | Michelle Balge

[image error]Out of the Wilderness: A non-literary book review of A Way Out: A Memoir of Conquering Depression and Social Anxiety, by Michelle Balge

As Michelle Balge acknowledges in her epilogue to A Way Out, the trouble with mental illness is that so much of it is ‘about me, me, me and how I’m insecure, but this is what these illnesses do to you.’ It follows that A Way Out does not hesitate to divulge its author’s most intimate secrets in her long battle with depression and social anxiety. Such honesty and candour lays bare an individual life in ways that illuminate our own experiences of mental illness: in speaking of herself, she speaks of us all.

Of course, each of us is different, and mental illnesses such as depression and social anxiety strike us in highly specific ways, targeting our individual fragilities and fears with pinpoint accuracy. Yet there are always commonalities – there would have to be, otherwise how could these dreadful conditions be identified, diagnosed and treated in the first place?

One such commonality is the paradoxical feeling that one is simply unworthy to be afflicted. After describing her happy childhood with loving parents and sisters, Michelle asks:

You may be wondering what this middle-class, straight, white girl in an intact nuclear family has to complain about? The truth is I don’t have anything to complain about.

‘I was just a depressed girl with no real problems.’ What did she (I, we) know of poverty, lovelessness, violence and oppression? So many of us with mental illness simply don’t deserve it because we have never truly suffered as others suffer, day in, day out. What have we got to complain about? And thus we go round and round, accusing ourselves of self-indulgence and self-pity, making ourselves depressed about being depressed, anxious about being anxious.

Yet Michelle’s childhood was not entirely untroubled:

It certainly didn’t help that I had severe acne with very oily skin … I also had braces, glasses, frizzy dark blonde hair and a large nose that I hated.

Adults often make light of these things, forgetting just how awful they are for young people desperate to fit in and be liked. Michelle saw her first therapist at age nine. She suspects that the acne pills she was prescribed might have had something to do with the onset of depression. Mostly, however, it appears to be her genetic inheritance that predisposed her to mental illness, just as it did her mother, her sister and her great-grandfather.

And the problems multiply with the years: arachnophobia sends her screaming from the room; an undiagnosed lactose intolerance has embarrassing social consequences; menstruation causes extraordinary mental anguish; seasonal affective disorder casts its pall over everything. Coupled with the paralysing panic attacks that render her blind and deaf (literally) to the world around her, it’s no wonder that

It’s exhausting being depressed. Every day it feels like you’ve run a marathon, but all I ever did was lie in bed or cry or stare into space. Life like that is just existing, not living.

Michelle did her best to hide what was happening to her. The thought of worrying her family and friends with the true extent of her misery was too much to bear. ‘They couldn’t find out I was hanging on by a thread.’ In the worst of her social anxiety she could not leave her room and let herself be seen by others. Self-loathing found nourishment in isolation: ‘In my head, everything was my fault.’

Then there are no words, no thoughts, to describe what is going on. ‘There are too many feelings to explain, yet I also feel nothing. I am nothing.’ To be bursting with feelings and yet to feel hollowed out, empty, is a crushing experience. As Shakespeare’s Cominius says of Coriolanus, ‘He has become a kind of nothing’, and nothing is the worst a person can become this side of death.

Yes, you’re consumed by self-hate when on that fence [between life and death], but it’s because you believe others are better off without you here.

The agonizing wait for a medication that works is passed in sleeping as much as possible in order to put an end to the day; in internet searches for the best, least painful suicide options; in succumbing to fears of humiliation and ignominy.

Thankfully, medicines, mindfulness, and familial and social support eventually helped lead Michelle out of the wilderness. Despite her illness and her interrupted studies, she graduated from Brock University with an Honours BA in sociology and a concentration in critical animal studies; at the same time, she became an impressive advocate for mental health awareness. She could, at last, know what it is to feel genuinely happy.

A Way Out is a short confession, frank and artless (not a criticism). Men and women – especially students and young women – who feel alone in a struggle with mental illness will find it a helpful book and a hopeful one. Michelle Balge is chiefly concerned with the endogenous aspects of mental illness and only hints at  social and cultural factors. This may be because she comes from a happy, close-knit family, and her illnesses seem to have had a genetic cause, among others. For those whose families were less than ideal, or for whom the world’s evils are a constant barrage of existential anguish, there may be less comfort in Michelle’s story.

Michelle is a vegetarian. She is haunted by her glimpse of a distressed piglet in a video clip about factory farming. I happen to be vegetarian myself and am similarly upset by images of animal suffering, which are horrific in themselves and – to me at least – symbolic of just about everything that is wrong with humanity. To individuals who feel they no longer belong in the world we have made, whose culture seems deliberately to exclude them, who are besieged by anger and powerlessness, it is society itself that is at fault, and their illness is simply a rational response to an intolerable condition. Our home is our sickness.

Similarly, in the modern era, when facts often seem no longer to count and truth is a perishable commodity, we are caught up in what could be called a flight from the ordinary. To be extraordinary is our common pursuit, and we forget that being ordinary is neither a sin nor a crime, and virtue is not a particular friend of the rich and powerful. Ordinary is not a synonym for worthless.

A Way Out speaks of conquering depression and social anxiety. I am unconvinced by this metaphor. It seems to me that it’s the illnesses who are the invading army and it is they who conquer. The most we can hope to do is drive them out and patrol our borders, because the enemy is implacable and inexhaustible. Perhaps taking back ownership and control of our own territory is what it means to be truly alive. The photograph of a smiling, accomplished, charming young woman at the end of A Way Out is proof that Michelle is just that.

Michelle Balge | ISBN 9781775094227 (ebook) | ISBN 9781775094210 (pbk) | ISBN 9781775094203 (hbk)

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Spring Reads 2018

Spring Reads 2018

I am delighted to be part of the blog tour for Spring Reads 2018. My thanks to Rachel Gilbey at Authoright Marketing & Publicity  for making it all possible.

Feed the Monkey is just one of many excellent blogs reviewing books for this event. I shall be dropping by as many of them as I can, so please take a look at them as well.

The novel I chose to review is The Book of Air by Joe Treasure. Fortunately for us all, it turned out to be among the best books I have ever read, as you will see when my review is published on 27 March.

 

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Farewell Olympus (3)

Giles Manningtree had the annoying habit of latching on to me simply because we were the same nationality. He believed fellow-countrymen should stick together and defend their common culture before it was trodden underfoot by ignorant Gallic hordes. I wondered what had induced him to set up shop in Paris in the first place. There was forty years’ difference in our ages, but he looked ten years older than that. He had actually lived through the 1960s; unfortunately, he’d been too stoned to remember much about them.

Farewell Olympus

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Tess and Tattoos | H. A. Leuschel

 New Friendships, Old Trauma: Book review of Tess and Tattoos, a short story by H. A. Leuschel

Tess and Tattoos by H. A. Leuschel is a short story whose thematic concerns revolve around the figure of Tess, a cultured woman in her eighties who resides in a Scottish care home, and whose life is reaching its end. Lonely and isolated, she strives to preserve her independence and dignity, but is haunted by her troubled past and a sense of a life wasted. Tess is a well-drawn, sympathetic character and the environment of the care home and its gardens is competently realized.

Structurally, Tess and Tattoos alternates between Tess herself and Sandra (a new nurse), plus italicized sections devoted to Tess’s innermost thoughts, which dwell on a painful relationship. They also turn to her son in Australia, with whom she speaks once a week on the telephone. This structure works well and contains some nice transitions, although in one or two places my initial confusion would have been dispelled by the use of a character’s name rather than simply ‘she’.

The story builds to a dramatic revelation that will ask some readers to rethink their expectations and assumptions. This is a classic device that is always welcome in a story of this length, which can be read comfortably in a few hours. The concluding pages of explanation and discovery lose in artistry what they gain in lengthy exposition and extra-diegetic motivation.

With a little careful rereading and judicious rewriting, the author might easily have eliminated some ubiquitous infelicities, repetitions and curious constructions. H. A. Leuschel is inclined to carry a word or phrase over with her from the previous sentence. On the first page alone, ‘the odd’ is used twice in quick succession, ‘up’ is repeated three times in the space of two sentences, and ‘all’ is used twice in the same short clause. Repetition, used wisely, can be effective, but in these instances it is merely clumsy, and it is a problem throughout the text.

In addition, pleonasms abound. Many of them are minor but, taken together, they disturb the reading experience. For instance, ‘wait for the kettle to boil its contents’ is not something anyone would say. Similarly with ‘drove into the indicated staff car park’ and ‘whistling to the tune of the music’. ‘Pushing excessively onto the accelerator whenever possible’ requires no comment from me. The list goes on.

The author also has a tendency to lapse into hackneyed phraseology, while favourite qualifiers such as ‘slightly’ display an irritating reluctance to be precise. The story takes place in a Scottish care home, so the US-English ‘dove’ (instead of ‘dived’) and ‘guy in the garage’ sound out of place. An abundance of missing commas change the author’s intended meanings – amusingly so in ‘They’d been far from a picture of the perfect family with their socks lying around’. And ‘literally burning with impatience’ should not be taken literally, lest the reader be alarmed.

As these pervasive problems suggest, Tess and Tattoos still needs a lot of work, but I have no doubt it will reach an appreciative audience.

Helene Leuschel Publishing | ebook

 

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