Jack Messenger's Blog, page 8

Good reviews of one’s own work are so encouraging. I just...

Good reviews of one’s own work are so encouraging. I just discovered these wonderful reviews of Four American Tales on Goodreads, after eighteen months or so during which I have avoided social media etc. for the sake of my health. Thank you to all my reviewers, whether you have liked what I do or not. See the Goodreads reviews here.

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Farewell Olympus

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Farewell OlympusWriting Over, Designing Begins

 

I am tremendously excited to have finished my new novel, Farewell Olympus, which was an entirely new writing experience for me. Now it’s time to think about cover copy and book descriptions. I find it difficult to describe my own work, partly because I dislike blowing my own trumpet, partly because I can never decide what it is exactly. Farewell Olympus is no exception: I think it’s funny, but in a dry, seldom laugh-out-loud way. I also think it’s clever and entertaining, but then I would say that, wouldn’t I? It has elements of mystery and thriller, but it’s definitely not either of those. About all I can say with any confidence is that it’s fiction. Here’s what I have come up with so far.

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Farewell OlympusDraft sentences for the front cover

In Paris, in summer, in love. The sweet life could never turn sour – or could it?

‘A wise and wonderful novel, especially the bits about me!’ M. T. Cicero, author of On Friendship

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Farewell OlympusDraft book description

A long, hot summer in the capital of the world.

Life is sweet for Howard. He plans to make it sweeter.

When a patron of the arts named Serge loans him a luxurious penthouse apartment in central Paris, Howard can’t believe his luck. Now he can live cheaply while he translates articles for shortlived websites and doomed art journals nobody reads. And he’ll have more time to devote to his inscrutable French girlfriend, Delphine, a trainee lawyer.

Then, disaster strikes, in the shape of Eugene, Howard’s half-brother and personal nemesis, who sows chaos and discord wherever he goes. Abruptly, Howard’s uneventful life is plunged into mystery and farce. People are suddenly not what they seemed, and danger lurks in every restaurant. Serge himself is implicated in wrongdoing, while Giles, an Englishman abroad and seldom sober, knows more than he’s prepared to tell.

Can Howard and Eugene overcome their mutual antagonism long enough to survive? Should Howard forgive Eugene for being better looking? Will Eugene ever help him with the housework? Above all, will they ever agree about anything, particularly women?

Farewell Olympus is about love and rivalry, ambition and morality, Armageddon and the quest for the perfect croissant. Witty, intelligent and entertaining, it will make you feel you are too, even if you have no experience of volleyball.

I believe this is a reasonably accurate description for content and tone, and I hope it will whet people’s appetites. What do you think? Would you rush out and buy?

I’m looking forward to revealing the cover design, which once more will be in the expert hands of Dave Pettit, who produced the wonderful cover for Four American Tales (look right to the sidebar on this page), which really zings!

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Book Reviews

After a lengthy pause due to writing commitments and ill-health, I hope gradually to get back to book reviewing. Please read my review policy page before sending me anything, as I receive an awful lot of books that do not fit my criteria.

The post Book Reviews appeared first on Jack Messenger | Feed the Monkey.

You Will Grow Into Them | Malcolm Devlin

[image error]Published by Unsung Stories

ISBN 9781907389436 pbk

ISBN 9781907389443 ePub

Metamorphoses sudden and brutal characterize many of the stories in Malcolm Devlin’s excellent collection of – what? Speculative fiction? Horror? Gothic? Supernatural? Dystopian? I am happy to say I don’t know what it is precisely, for, like a lot of good writing, Devlin’s eludes definite classification and description, and to pigeon-hole it as one thing or another would be to diminish and distort its achievement. It evokes genre without being bound by it; its ideas and metaphors speak of larger things beyond genre expectations; its departure point is ordinary life made extraordinary by the seepages and eruptions of the inexplicable, the unknown and half-suspected, the fearful and the beguiling.

Devlin’s prose is polished to a bright colloquial sheen that rarely dulls; his characters speak as if they have just thought what to say. It is confident stuff that puts the reader immediately at ease: it is reassuring to sense one is in the hands of a writer who knows exactly where they are going and how to get there.

The collection traces a nervous line that leads from adolescence to adulthood, from isolation to community. In ‘Passion Play’, the opening story, Cathy McCullough, a schoolgirl, has gone missing; her ‘best friend’ is chosen to re-create Cathy’s last known journey, a walk that leads through dense thickets present and remembered to something very dark indeed. Here and throughout, one of the most interesting themes of the collection is revealed: power, a subject rarely written about with any seriousness in the current cultural moment. Devlin writes about power in its various guises: the power of the past over the present; the power of the unknown and inexplicable over daily life; the power that exists in unequal measure between people. Power is exercised, revealed, in these stories both casually – a conversation in Betty’s Tearooms, for example (‘Songs Like They Used to Play’) – and ominously – societal reaction to ‘Lunar Proximity Syndrome’ (‘Dogsbody’), the dark magma of unliveability in ‘The End of Hope Street’.

Paradoxically, ‘Passion Play’ sets the tone for the collection despite a certain confusion of tone: for me, the interior voice of the young girl is intermittently endowed with the vocabulary and imagination of her creator, which undermines the premise of the story. The tone of ‘Two Brothers’, on the other hand, is perfect, its dissection of the effects of public school, the internalization of the worst Victorian values and its disdain for honest feeling, is chilling. This is power again, but this time that of institutions, of upbringing, of tradition over the natural and spontaneous.

The spontaneous outgrowth of unstoppable transmogrification in ‘Breadcrumbs’ has venerable antecedents in classical myth – one thinks of all those dryads, especially – and also in fairy tales like Sleeping Beauty and the tales of Angela Carter. This is an amoral transformation that just happens – one doesn’t know what to think of it, which is perhaps the point. One suspects that even the author was taken aback by the fecundity of this story, which, in common with ‘The End of Hope Street’, is a little too long for its own good.

Elsewhere, the abnormal continues to pullulate and ramify, overwhelming the normal:

In her turbulent world, any island of normality, no matter how small, stood little chance of remaining a sanctuary. (‘We All Need Somewhere to Hide’)

The monster within – literally, beneath the skin – prowls this story and ‘Dogsbody’, where he is ‘uncomfortable, under his human skin’. Here, ideas connect in Jekyll and Hyde fashion via Leopard Man to a particularly unsettling fear: ‘It’s frightening, isn’t it? That sense that you’re not quite in control of who you are?’, a resonant insight that could stand as epigraph – and epitaph – for the entire collection, as Tom in ‘Songs Like They Used to Play’, understands:

Tom imagined his life as a transplant operation. The fictional world he’d lived in was being cut out of him and a weighty reality was being wired into the hole it had left behind. But transplants were dangerous, and Tom found himself living at one remove, convinced his body would rebel at any arbitrary moment, rejecting the reality he had been forced to accept.

This is how many persons in existential anguish can feel, day in, day out. ‘Songs Like They Used to Play’ reads like something out of Twin Peaks, complete with weird nightclub at the end of a hidden passage behind shimmering curtains (shades of Blue Velvet), with strange music and even stranger habitués – Lynch’s signature grotesques would not have been out of place in this place of dread, where time seems poised on the brink of revelation. I suggest these linkages, not to belittle You Will Grow Into Them, but to illustrate its depth and power.

And in ‘The End of Hope Street’ (a gloriously ambiguous title):

This was how it started, he thought. In corners. In clefts. In alcoves where the shadows conspired and bred like spiderwebs. As he stared into the corner of the room, he imagined how the darkness might creep across the contours of the ceiling tiles, snaking across the room like tangles of long black hair.

The same story has this intensely human gesture of rebellion:

There would be a Christmas that year in Hope Street, no matter what happened, no matter what it represented. It would be both spiritual and secular, and in its own peculiar way, it would be an act of rebellion. Because even joy and companionship could be subversive under the right conditions.

This spark of hope is probably a good place to end: reviews can only do so much, and this one has left much that is interesting out of account. If it has left you with a wish to discover these stories for yourself, you will not be disappointed. Prepare yourself for the genuinely unheimlich.

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An Accidental Profession | Daniel S. Jones

[image error]Published by Waxing Press

ISBN 0998562009 (print)

ISBN 0998562017 (digital)

Why can novels about people at work be so pleasurably captivating? Undoubtedly, it’s rather nice to think that others are toiling away while we read about them, and the similarities and differences with our own working lives emerge with unusual clarity: occupations do not have to be exotic or abstruse for us to find them fascinating. An Accidental Profession is all about work: its organization and administration, what it does to people, the power of the corporation, our ambivalent relationships with our co-workers.

Author Daniel Jones makes some strategic stylistic decisions in telling his story, which takes place over a few days of diegetic time and involves layoffs, corporate restructuring and a trip to a conference, where the interestingly analytical narrator turns out to be less above the things he describes than we might have thought. Significantly, the company for whom everyone works, the Canterbury Education Company (CEC), provides products and services to institutions of higher education; this rather vague and vaguely parasitic corporation strikes just the right postmodern note in a narrative given over to the opaque manoeuverings of executives and staff alike.

The first-person narration works extremely well: descriptions of past events are sufficiently numerous to avoid the potentially soporific effect of all those third-person singulars in the here and now. Another important decision is that no one is named; instead, they are alphabetized and anonymized: A——, B——, C—— etc. Shades of Kafka’s Joseph K—— are immediately evoked but, more significantly, the suggestion of interchangeable productive units is never far off, as is the peculiar blend of distant friend and intimate stranger that co-workers can constitute for each other.

An Accidental Profession is concerned with how hard it is to preserve our specificity, our uniqueness, our interconnectivity in a modern work environment:

People here have a habit of disappearing – either they are fired or quit or get transferred, in which case we never see them once they are gone from the office. Or they get absorbed into their job and become something else entirely. Either way, the struggle is to keep something of yourself alive before it is entirely deleted. We spend the years in pursuit of similar goals, being around other people without having to get close to them. Sharing in the illusion of having friends, but in fact not really knowing these people with whom we spend the majority of our waking hours.

It’s in this awkward, near-impossible non-space of the heart and head that the aspiration for something real and nourishing struggles to be articulated, appropriately and inappropriately:

What I cannot reach, what I have not been able to shed, is the idea that there is something more than compensation, that work should be worthwhile in and of itself, rather than for its rewards. Somewhere, we are told, is an office in which employees are excited to work, enjoy their jobs, collect their pay with happiness. A place, it seems, where they do not plan their days as a series of time-wasting exercises in fifteen minute chunks, taking long walks around the work spaces, taking smoke breaks even though they have quit smoking, riding the elevator one floor to use the bathroom, reading novels tucked beneath their desks or falling in love when one shouldn’t or having anonymous sex in the stairwells. And yet the promise of business, not of this or that particular business, but the promise of business itself, is that somewhere people can take meaning from what they do to earn their pay. This is the elusive promise, the unanswerable question. In any case, as an employee, as a businessman, my purpose in life is not to find answers to these questions, ultimately, but to survive, a process that must admit this stark reality.

There are many references to truth in An Accidental Profession: the narrator frequently asserts in passing that he is speaking it; it is a precious commodity buried beneath an avalanche of corporate-speak and ungrammatical inter-office emails; it has to be gleaned from the gossip of co-workers, via observations of their movements. There is a kind of corporate aphasia that stifles true feeling which, when it does emerge, can be shy and painful:

When F—— stands to leave I come out from behind my desk and lean to shake his hand. It is not the typical handshake for our office, a contest of strength, a who-can-squeeze-whose-hand hardest, but a more friendly connection: handshake, fingers clasped, fists, and then a one-armed hug that alarms me for a moment but not enough to pull away.

It is touching that the narrator keeps a copy of Wallce Stevens’ Harmonium on his office bookshelf, sandwiched between ‘The Ultimate Corporate Strategy Resource and The Fundamentals of Accounting.’ It is an act of resistance – perhaps merely a gesture at resistance – from someone who has survived in his job and part of whose job it is to fire others.

The central controlling metaphor of An Accidental Profession is of the red-crested cardinals that peck and flutter at the office window of the nameless narrator. Dead ladybugs (UK: ladybirds) accumulate along the edge of the windowsill every spring, and the birds attempt to reach them through the glass. The significance the birds hold for the narrator – his attachment to them, the distraction they provide – codes him as different, as ‘ours’, enabling us to enter comfortably into his reasonings and observations. However, we are also invited to regard the behaviour of the birds – particularly the complex interactions of males and females – as correlative with the behaviour of the office workers distributed at their work stations in a large open-plan office. One may be less convinced by this than intended: zoological comparisons only extend so far; culture – human and office – is an anamorphic lens that splays nature in myriad dazzling ways.

An Accidental Profession is a little too long and is occasionally marred by typos; it could certainly do with more action and fewer contemplations; ultimately, the pledge of its journey is not sufficiently redeemed by its conclusion. Nevertheless it is enjoyable and comforting in ways that books about people working usually are; it has a quiet anguish about the indignities of work that many will recognize; it is an act of resistance.

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She Receives the Night | Robert Earle

[image error]Published by Vine Leaves Press

ISBN 9781925417371

Robert Earle’s admirable new collection of short stories ‘tells the stories of women everywhere from New Mexico to Melbourne. They are young and old. Their lives are the landscape of the heart.’ As described by the publisher, that is an ambitious undertaking for any writer – especially perhaps for a male writer – and one that requires immense artistry and intelligence.  Earle has these things in abundance, and he uses them to compelling effect. Many of these stories are gems of the form; they feel inevitable, surprising, effortless.

These are all stories in which things actually happen, and to persons in whom one can take a real interest; at the same time, many of the stories are  political, in the broadest sense of that term. In ‘Trouble Sleeping’, for example, Elizabeth is provoked to step outside her role as an immigration official when she listens to Marta Carrasco, a refugee from El Salvador. Marta is unable to disclose her dreadful trauma in anything other than fragments; Elizabeth is obliged to respond as a human being. She concludes: ‘What happened somewhere happened everywhere. What happened to someone happened to everyone.’ This realization –  personal and political in equal measure – requires the relinquishment of certainties, of prejudices, of accepted ways of thinking:

She listened to the night, the insects in the garden, and imagined driving through Melbourne to Marta’s apartment building – the clarity of nocturnal urban solitude, night’s way of averaging the upscale and downtrodden into a mean of sprawling mystery, Elizabeth not knowing where anything ultimately led, no captions, no charts, no directions, her dreams before dawn wandering up and down the avenues, peering into darkened windows.

That is also a lovely piece of writing in a rich American tradition, and entirely typical.

‘After Apple-Picking’ – after Robert Frost’s poem of the same name – describes how Angela, a state’s attorney in New Mexico, has her life whittled away by her employer, by society: ‘They started taking things from her. First, the marriage, then the job.’ She gives up her possessions and her home, and takes to the road with Howlie, part-wolf part-dog. Angela thus claims a desperate kind of freedom.

The kinds of structural violence that inhibit legitimate autonomy and freedom emerge in all sorts of settings. The telegraphese of ‘The Frying Pan’ captures the frantic pace and unfairness of family life:

Pee brush teeth let Frank shower snip beard nose eyebrows choose right suit right shirt right shoes pull on robe wake Alissa Teddy Sealie downstairs everyone milk orange juice waffles.

‘Birth’ is exceptionally good, and only a few pages long:

Somehow their marriage got caught in the car engine and it blew up. First it ground to a halt, then it smoked, then came the fire and the explosion … She felt the thud drifting into her chest as she stood on the soft shoulder and then she saw it illuminate Hal’s face with a purple powdery light, a light full of recrimination.

She had made the car do this.

‘The Woods’ – another reference to Robert Frost – is a terrific tale about the struggle for selfhood amid the pressures of family and society: ‘People close to you spoke as if they were inside you, which they weren’t, and knew all about you, which they didn’t.’ This kind of observation is powerfully resonant for readers because we know it is hard-won; it resists a person’s efforts to bring it to conscious awareness.

‘What Now, Widow?’ is that rare animal, a story set in classical Rome which is utterly convincing. Seneca’s widow tells us:

Most of what he wrote (excepting the tragedies) contradicted his experience. He insisted he considered this his civic duty.

‘To lie?’ I asked.

‘Someone has to praise friendship, mercy, generosity, dispassion, or where else would these things be found? Not here. Not in Rome.’

‘A Life’ is exactly that, an astonishing accomplishment that begins with a girl and ends with an old woman. ‘Do You Even Know I Exist?’ is a marvellously real account of family tensions whose controlling metaphors and images are quite perfect:

A message appeared on Alison’s smartphone accompanied by a photo of a woman who looked like what she’d look like in a few years. The message read: ‘Do you even know I exist?’ Sender: Margot Morton.

‘Into the Dark Soil’ is, I think, a particularly effective depiction of wilful ignorance; Katherine shuts her eyes to evil and guilt and responsibility even as she is confronted by them in her own life.

The worst that can be said of She Receives the Night is that a few of the stories, although immensely readable, do not quite reach the high standard of the majority. I found ‘Through the Ice’ and ‘Who Has a Real Castle Where I Can Hide?’ to be too long. The latter story – about a South Korean sex worker – struggles to bring anything new to its subject. Lastly, ‘The Door’ is for me the only disappointment in the collection: far too long, it reads like an abridged novel and is misjudged.

Many of these stories were previously published separately. Now that they have been collected together in one volume, they should find a wider audience. They certainly deserve it.

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Health Warning

My health has not been good for some while, so I have had to decline many requests for reviews. I am trying to get back to work, however. Thank you for your understanding.

Something You Once Told Me | Barry Stewart Hunter

[image error]

Published by Martin Firrell Company

ISBN 9780993178641

Trains and boats and planes – modes of transport abound in Barry Stewart Hunter’s interestingly varied collection of short stories, although the people they convey are seldom up to speed with their own lives. Persons in transit and the mental dislocations they experience are a recurring motif; thematically, however, there is a great deal more going on, much of which is intriguingly elusive. This is a collection for readers who have downed a few years derrière la cravate and know the score, if not themselves; who can recognize confident writing when they read it; who can pluck humour from the jaws of tragedy.

The opening story, Accidental Death of a Novelist, begins to map the territory. Like others in the collection, it is a story in and of a city: ‘London’. That resonant proper noun is followed by a parenthetical dash, whose pause allows us to register its Dickensian connotations. Of course, it is neither necessary nor likely that the first paragraph of Bleak House spring immediately to mind, but its long, dark shadow is evoked nevertheless. Jack is a novelist whose largely unremunerative vocation is bankrolled by Miriam, his hard-working wife. They are sitting in their ‘modest Fiat’ at the traffic lights outside Hampstead tube station, listening to the car’s ineffectual wipers squeaking in the rain, and arguing about his unpublished novel. ‘I thought we’d agreed it was about London,’ says Jack querulously, whose earlier attempt at amplifying his theme – ‘The human heart in conflict with itself’ – could stand as the subject of the entire book. Accidental Death of a Novelist details the emotional self-pillaging required of a creative mind, the peevish desire to be understood if only one didn’t have to explain all the time, the stresses and surprises of love.

Beginnings are often difficult, but Hunter is exceptionally good at them. ‘It was Bennett who found the first dog’ begins The Dog Murders, the strongest story of the collection, whose characters inhabit a kind of dingy Greeneland, replete with vicarious liability and occasional moments of grace. Another London story, it makes an outsider fret at his or her ignorance of the city and the significations of its geography. Bennett’s shortcut home from work as a hospital porter through Highgate Wood is a sad and menacing metaphor for his own young existence, with ‘little relief, little dimensional relief’, and ‘the insolent kiss of ivy in the dark’. Bennett is anxious to please and  placate, but the direction of his life is not in his hands and he knows it: geography correlates with outcomes. He comes across a dog strung up and recognizes something of himself in its cursory life and lonely death. It is a peculiarly upsetting and frightening image; one thinks of traditional representations of Vodou and witchcraft, but it remains inscrutably sinister.

In many of Hunter’s stories, relationships between people and with the world at large need to be renegotiated, often in fraught circumstances, whether it be ‘in a packed Central line carriage several metres below the busy Bayswater Road’ (New Shoes) or with a beribboned government minister wearing an Arsenal football shirt in an office in Juba (Incident at Juba). Masculinity is constantly under threat amid the lies, accommodations and deceptions of marriage,  friendship and society. For instance, the synapses of middle-aged Clive practically pop and fizz while his mind navigates a straight line from banality to tragedy:

Now their train driver apologised in the mellifluous whisper of customer relations – they were being held at a red light in order to even out the gaps in the service. Even out the gaps? Shouldn’t they be working to reduce or, better still, to eliminate those gaps? Clive thought about it for a moment and felt a ripple of rage spread from his heart to his head and back again. That was the way it was now. Every corporate slogan was a parody of the truth. The most routine slight became a personal injustice that had Clive’s name written on it. He was without influence. He was powerless to affect the destinies of men. At fifty-three his life – its range or scope or compass – was heading south. (New Shoes)

This is age talking, when the young have become a separate species and older male minds tend to mystery and longing. ‘If only the film could be wound backwards’ is a recurring plea of Clive and assorted kindred spirits. Their favoured cultural references are to things long past but which remain doggedly persistent emblems of their youth – John Lennon outside the Dakota building, Blood on the Tracks, Zager and Evans.

Hunter is unperturbed by the pathetic fallacy (‘the last sky-scraping bullet returned sheepishly to earth’) and his writing occasionally slips into preciosity or defies logic: ‘clattering silently’, for example. Yet ‘shy knuckles’ is exactly right in its context, as is ‘the twinkling streets of Knightsbridge beckoning like jungle runways’ (both from New Shoes). And this description of pub regulars is wonderful:

And the pink-faced drinkers might have known each other for years. They were physically intimate with one another, leaning close as they spoke and stroking each other’s arms with the tenderness of teenage lovers at the edge of the reservoir. (The Lucky Dust)

Every now and then, remarks with their tongues hanging out suggest themselves as statements of intent: ‘Every journey towards recovery or redemption has its defining moment of crisis or breakdown’ (The Lucky Dust); ‘We’re just innocent bystanders, right?’ (Good Friday, Primrose Hill); ‘He had a function. Ah, joy! … It was enough to keep Denholm sane’ (Denholm’s Epiphany). Not inappropriately, the sad, bewildered face of character actor Denholm Elliott came to mind when reading this story, which strikes out in a new direction with a surreal opening: ‘If, in happier times, you had suggested to Denholm he might turn himself into a chair he would have laughed at you.’ Surrealism becomes literalism when Denholm subsequently experiences a pointillist dissolution/amalgamation with the physical world.

From Incident at Juba onwards the stories tend to lose focus. In my opinion, The Metaphor Coast is the least successful; overlong, its tale of a rain of fish on Valencia relies too much on the writer’s undoubted technical skill in associating ideas and images, its loquacity  reminiscent of William Saroyan, whom I find unreadable. Seven Sisters tries too hard to be not about anything but itself, its characters’ path to self-immolation potted with unlikely similes.

Good Friday, Primrose Hill redeems the second half of the collection. Its description of two, simultaneous, live and literal reenactments of Christ’s crucifixion, voted on by ‘innocent bystanders’, is a serio-comic extension of current commercial logic, and perhaps the ultimate absurdity of the media’s continuing distortion of all that makes us human. The point seems to be that the very act of ranking competing Golgothas renders them valueless – empty signifiers, after all, form the perfect crown of thorns for a population anaesthetized by pervasive trivialization.

In other words, maturity is in question throughout this collection, for in its trembling hands lies our wimpering future. Its pleasures and perils mostly traverse the male psyche, but women also make the journey, and not merely as adjuncts to men. I prefer the London stories, which make the normal and familiar distinctly strange, but Something You Once Told Me will, I believe, appeal to readers patient enough to read and reread tales that do not disclose their secrets all at once.

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Gnarled Bones | Tam May

Published by Dreambook Press

ISBN 9780998197906 (print)

ISBN 9780998197913 (ebook)

‘The past does not exist, so it cannot hurt me.’ How many desperate people, I wonder, have muttered some such mantra under their breaths in the hope they can stop brooding about things dead and buried? The trouble is, of course, very few things are dead and buried. Each of us lives with the consequences of the past; its deeds are all around us. And if we insulate ourselves from the pain it can cause, we can also miss out on its pleasures and joys.

The stories in Gnarled Bones are much concerned about the past’s persistence through time, whether through learned and internalized ways of seeing oneself and the world, as in the opening story, ‘Mother of Mischief’, or the power of a single event to derail a life, as in ‘Broken Bows’, or – implicitly and explicitly throughout – a semi-malevolent maternal love that seeks to control and cripple a child’s natural urge to explore and engage with the world.

On reading these stories, one is reminded of the paintings of Marc Chagall: a hermetic world of imagery, difficult to interpret, informed by rich folk traditions and personal experience. In Gnarled Bones, women are the principal (but by no means sole) targets of the past’s slings and arrows. In this regard, the opening story, ‘Mother of Mischief’, is the most interesting in the collection, casting retrospective light on its own ambiguous title and showing us how we can, after all, be the authors of our own entrapment.

‘There is no trap so deadly’, writes Raymond Chandler, ‘as the trap you set for yourself.’ Some of the characters in Gnarled Bones learn this for themselves. Helena, for example, in ‘A First Saturday Outing’, has a sudden moment of revelation when, at long last, she leaves her apartment (her prison, her refuge) for the very first time and visits an exhibition of sculptures at a local museum. The sculptures are of women, situated significantly in a context of disciplined learning. It is the postures of these female figures – their physical contortions, their cumulative weight – that bring Helena to knowledge of herself.

Ironically, however, the past has too tight a grip on Gnarled Bones itself: the stories have more or less severed their temporal moorings, and are difficult to situate in any kind of modern world, whose intrusions are few and far between. This lack of engagement with the present – stylistically, culturally and psychologically – has odd consequences, among which is the impression that one is reading tales written no later than the 1950s, say, and set in an even earlier era. I kept picturing the women in long dresses and prim bonnets, the men draped in ulsters and carrying canes.

In addition, there are curious word choices whose confusing implications trip up the reader: ‘worrisome eye’ and ‘loving conscience’, for example, in ‘Mother of Mischief’, left me puzzling as to whether or not they conveyed the author’s intended meaning. Other instances appear to me to be just plain wrong: ‘She [settled] in the largest and most oblivious city she could find’, where ‘oblivious’ should surely be ‘anonymous’ or ‘impersonal’, a city where she could lose herself. And ‘devout’ should surely be ‘devoid’ in the clause ‘thrust out into the world devout of happiness and sanity.’

Metaphors and images often seem to have been chosen for evocativeness rather than accuracy (e.g. ‘bone hollow in his cheeks’, ‘his eyes glossy’). And what is one to make of the following: ‘The living room looked like a canopy of stars without the furniture and lamps’; ‘His breathing became heavy and blank’; ‘Her thin hands warmed a spot of her bones’? Such fancies are often considered a poet’s prerogative, but poets, too, strive for precision, no matter how startling and original the image, and no self-respecting poet would have let these slip past his or her creative intelligence. One can work out what is meant by ‘His face blushed like a boy’ and ‘his face crawling with fear’, but it is irritating that it is not said properly and clearly in the first place. And the power of ‘Playing a different tune is like Lazarus rising from the ashes’ is immediately diffused as soon as one recalls that Lazarus was not cremated.

As these few examples indicate, the book would benefit enormously from elementary copyediting and proofreading to eradicate basic  errors and infelicities, including mistakes in layout, missing words, clichés, wrong use of uppercase, clumsy repetition, confusingly mixed tenses, under-punctuation, and the dreary use of typewriter quotes.

These problems are pervasive and far too abundant to be discussed at length. Together, they are cacophonous, drowning out Tam May’s individual voice. That is a great shame because there are good things to savor, such as darkness ‘folding over him like the lid of a coffin’ (‘Broken Bows’), or these sentences from the titular story: ‘I understand now about Priscilla’s hands. Grief makes gnarly bones. They are mine now.’

The past clutches at us all.

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Edenland | Wallace King

Published by Lake Union Publishing

Edenland is the evocative title of an evocative novel set in the early days of the US Civil War. Its story plunges us into the Great Dismal Swamp that straddles Virginia and North Carolina, and never quite allows us to escape the treacherous waters that threaten to engulf its protagonists.

The Great Dismal and other swamps were places where runaway slaves could hide from their pursuers. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s second novel, after Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856). Thus, the literary and historical sources of Edenland flow across the years in currents swift, deep and wide.

In Edenland, Bledsoe is a runaway slave determined to fight in ‘Lincoln’s army’, Alice a penniless Irish indentured servant. Both have fled their captors and are intent on escaping from the South. Their stories converge and diverge as they make their way northwards, encountering the chaos and horrors of the war, the comforts and dangers of the natural environment and, above all, the moral terrors of institutionalized slavery.

Wallace King is excellent at evoking nature, especially the fine-grained details that capture characters’ eyes when they themselves are suffering:

When he opened his eyes he was blinded by the sun … He was lying in smashed ferns only inches from sluggish water that glinted metallic where the light broke through the trees. Above his head was a canopy of green. The springtime-opened leaves of slender cedars, junipers, and swamp oak fluttered like iridescent wings. Great cypress trees stood big trunked, their wild tangled roots home to otters and snakes. Birds told each other things, some sang. A shimmering damselfly flitted by the boy’s face. He watched it alight on the sunny side of a pawpaw tree, where it was swiftly picked off by a warbler. The bird flew with its prize into the treetops, a bright yellow dash. Close by, something splashed in the bark-coloured water.

We learn of the firing on Fort Sumter via newspaper headlines seen by Bledsoe, who learned to read in secret and has instant recall of articles he read on the sly in his ‘master’s’ Encyclopedia Britannica. At first, Alice is a hindrance, a weight around his neck. Her ignorance of wider events, her vanity and self-obsession slow him down and threaten their safety. Gradually, however, she reveals a capacity to grow and to feel, plus important knowledge of the healing properties of plants and the natural world that proves crucial (she can deliver a child and knows how to skin a rabbit). Both of them are changed by the other; both of them discover themselves in the other.

As the title suggests, Bledsoe and Alice are heading for a destination that may or may not exist – more myth, memory or aspiration than it is a historical reality. An extended idylic interlude far from human habitation invokes an Edenland that can only be discovered in prelapsarian isolation. Society is sick with moral corruption, its rampant disease symbolized by ravening dogs and a perverted sense of justice.

When they are obliged to renew their journey, Bledsoe and Alice encounter bloody history by way of Norfolk, Virginia, Bull Run and Fort Monroe. Interestingly, they are both forced to play-act in order to survive. Indeed, the novel shows how everyone – slave and slaveholder alike – performs in some fashion in order to stave off the full implications of the peculiar institution. Of course, far more was at stake for the slave than for the free, and our sympathies are entirely with the oppressed, yet the oppressor, too, is made misshapen by the illogicality of the evil he or she represents and perpetuates. It is almost incomprehensible how so many slaveholders believed themselves beloved by their ‘servants’, and how they could be surprised and hurt when their slaves turned against them.

‘God is a bastard,’ declares Tirzah Brennan, who is one of the most memorable characters in Edenland. Tirzah is positively Dickensian in the depths of her anguish, hatred and cruelty, a distant cousin to the thwarted Miss Havisham in Great Expectations (1861), but with none of her redeeming qualities. It is a resonant line, truer than Tirzah suspects. People have a habit of creating God in their own image; certainly, the slaveholding South justified itself in terms of Christianized racial theory that was complete nonsense, and allowed slaveholders to hide behind religious ideology, to think well of themselves even as they treated the Other with unspeakable cruelty. Tirzah is no exception: she only comes to recognize the true nature of the God she has created when she herself suffers beyond endurance and loses everything.

Edenland is very good indeed at evoking this inner tension – the danger lurking beneath the gentility and manners of  southern slaveholders, whose sentiments can turn on a dime, whose rage and cruelty can be unleashed at the slightest challenge to racial stereotypes. Bledsoe and Alice cannot trust anyone because no one can be relied upon to understand truths that are beyond their capacity to comprehend. Recurring imagery of drowning conveys much of this tide of terror – literal drowning in swamp or river; nightmares of drowning dreamed by Bledsoe and Alice.

While Edenland could be said to have too much plot and to be too episodic, so that there are few genuine surprises – one knows, more or less, where it is going and how it will get there – nevertheless, I am glad to have read it and I admire its achievement. Readers looking for an excellent story in a vital historical setting will, I am sure, find it gripping and illuminating.

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