Go When You See the Green Man Walking

by Christine Brooke-Rose, Joanna Walsh (Introduction)

First published in 1970, this collection of eleven stories showcases Brooke-Rose's innovative credentials at their zenith. 'The Foot' and the 'The Religious Button' deploy to stunning effect her unique evolution of the run-on first person camera-eye narrative style as pioneered by Robbe-Grillet in the nouveau roman movement; 'Small Loser and Medium Winner' is a multilingual mix of allusions and discourses in the style of her 1968 novel Between; while 'Troglodyte' and 'The Chinese Bedspread' offer a more straightforward comic and realist approach. Go When You See the Green Man Walking is a dark, challenging, often science-fictional, frequently droll and sublimely erudite selection of stories from one of the unsung heroes of exploratory fiction.

Genres: Short Stories

155 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 1970

About the author

Christine Frances Evelyn Brooke-Rose was a British writer and literary critic, known principally for her later, experimental novels. Born in Geneva and educated at Somerville College, Oxford and University College, London, she taught at the University of Paris, Vincennes, from 1968 to 1988 and lived for many years in the south of France.

She was married three times: to Rodney Bax, whom she met at Bletchley Park; to the poet Jerzy Pietrkiewicz; and briefly to Claude Brooke. She shared the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction for Such (1966).

She was also known as a translator from French, in particular of works by Robbe-Grillet.

NYT obituary.

Reviews

[Scribble Orca · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seeing no green man, not walking but waiting surely to arrive soon the words?

Interim Brooke-Rose (dated 1956)

The Lunatic Fringe

Have you ever felt madness behind your eyes
cold as a draught from a forgotten door,
when you are talking intelligently to those
who think you sane, poised and perhaps a little more
brilliant than that flask of liquid brain allows,
that honeycomb filled with the drugs of bees
out of a season’s hearts, then drained
by the insomniac insolent machinery of love?

Madness, like shame or rage, is not hot as they say,
but like a stylus needling in a groove
to some loudspeaker at a distance of
about God’s nearness to us,
which for the lunatic is close
as his own brain that sometimes runs away
into an ocean of prehistoric fish,
long-playing to the beak of a bird,
and amplified
in, maybe, sex.

I must get into the mad world now.
There is a secret in the lunatic fringe,
a way of impinging
on God without mock-heroics of spirit.
When the soul is anyway lost,
given up with awareness,
generously as a gambit
in life’s deadly conversation with death,
there then can be no remorse,
only the cold closeness of creation,
a white filament of matter through the brain
ejaculating from generation to generation,
like Lucifer, falling.

Original publication

The Chinese Bedspread (also appearing in Winter's Tales 8) is the only one of the collection thus far read. Five stars for that alone.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

These stories have recently been reissued, apparently. I am as delighted as you, and you, and you, and you are.

[David Erik Nelson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here's the hitch in this rating: I think that any one of these stories (DISCLOSURE: For reasons that I'll detail in a sec, I hunted-pecked-and-skimmed a bit in this collection, which is to say that the preceding clause should read "any one of the stories I attentively read: "George and the Seraph," "On Terms," "The Troglodyte," "Red Rubber Gloves," "The Chinese Bedspread," "Queenie Fat and Thin," and "Go When You See the Green Man Walking") would earn an easy four stars, with both "Red Rubber Gloves" and "Go When You See the Green Man Walking" creeping up from there. But the collection, as a collection, is too exhausting.

I was put on to Christine Brooke-Rose after hearing the Pseudopod audi rendition of the momentarily gory "Red Rubber Gloves,", and so came to her as a horror writer--which isn't really her bag; Brooke-Rose was primarily known as a literary critic and experimentalist. There's a lot of room for overlap there: Horror is probably the closer to literary fiction than any other genre, both in intent and devices, and is more open to narrative and linguistic experimentation--which is inherently unnerving--than say romance or science fiction.

Standing by itself, "Red Rubber Gloves" is an excellent tale precisely for this uncanniness. Even "Go When You See the Green Man Walking"--which in no way conceives of itself as horror--is so thoroughly uncanny that it royally creeps the reader out.

But here's the thing about experimentalism: It's hard work for the reader. We can only juggle so much, and so for a work to be broadly accessible and generally enjoyable, it can only lay so much cognitive load on the reader. If a novel is hella long, description-rich (and thus slow-paced), has a cast of thousands, spans centuries, and is told backwards with no vowels--that's a lot of channels to track. Humans only have so much bandwidth, and most of it is already dedicated to not forgetting stuff in the oven and remembering that your kid has aftercare on Mon-Wed-Fri and takes the bus on Tue-Thurs, accept on the first Thurs of the month when he stays after for ballet boxing. You're going to lose readers if you hit them with too much cognitive load, and the unreadable book probably ins't worth writing.

So, if your story calls for some heavy lifting on the part of the reader, you need to go out of your way to lighten the load in most other regards. Lots of characters? Then you better be sure the language is transparent and the plot tidy and traditional. Strange dialectic with lots of apostrophes? You can probably get away with it if you keep things short and minimize characters. Tons of characters? For the love of God, keep the language clear and dialogue easy-to-parse.

When readers know what to expect--in broad terms--they're eager to put in the work on the hard parts in order to get there (for the most part; when things are hard, you're still going to lose folks. but there are folks it's ok to lose. This is more for another time, but I'm advocating for fiction-as-brain-celery, as opposed to fiction-for-brain-candy. You can be tough and crunchy, just don't be impenetrable).

Brooke-Rose's stories are a little on the tough side: Characters often go nameless, with a fogginess around dialogue and the protagonist's PoV bleeding into the omniscient third person narrator (or, alternately, a limited-first person narrator who drifts toward omniscience). The language is poetically concise--which is occasionally a barrier more than an aid. And the arc of each story is often pretty shallow; even in something like "Red Rubber Gloves," the revelations and realizations available to the protagonist are purposefully subtle and muted. That's part of the gag, and I appreciate it. I also appreciate that, when you peel back the gauze, you find that these are pretty structurally sound little stories, with their setup-complication-conclusion timed right and hitting their beats. The rock solid structure gives the reader firm footing as they much through the muzziness, and make the stories work. And when the work, they work.

But, man, reading them as a collection, one after the other--it's like floundering through one creepy, mucky swamp only to get to the edge and discover you haven't actually *reached* the edge, just a solid little hillock, and there's yet more marsh as far as they eye can see. Creepy marsh. And the sun is getting down past the treetops. And you haven't the foggiest where you are or where you're heading.

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

In most cases, I much prefer the greater development afforded longer-form fiction to stories written by the same author. There are, of course, exceptions to this who excelled in compressed bursts of myth-making, but CBR's short works, though often bursting with her singular repetitions and linguistic innovation, generally don't have as much chance to pick up the momentum that drives along her more sustained efforts.

This may be more a reflection of my reading habits than Brooke-Rose's skills.

And that said, several of the stories here are really fantastic: The title story, The Foot, Red Rubber Gloves, Small Winner and Medium Loser.

[David]

The extant Goodreads description is not bad. I would add the title story to those worthy of individual praise. Brooke-Rose is perhaps not most at home in short fiction format, but the collection is worth reading, in the same way that a musician's "best of" collection may not quite reach the integrity of individual albums but still provide lots of things worth listening to.

[Velma]

Recommended by Joanna Walsh for #readwomen2014: http://booksbywomen.org/readwomen2014...

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

challenging, smart, fluid stories full of beautiful language and wonderfully real people. sometimes pure voice, sometimes abstract or swirling. but always gorgeous.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted to read Brooke-Rose's collection of short stories for quite a long time, as she's generally a really fascinating and underappreciated woman - a member of the WAAF during the Second World War, she was quickly commissioned at the age of 18 to work at Hut 3 at Bletchley Park, translating intercepted German messages, and married 3 times throughout her life. She was a wonderfully experimental author, taking really avant-garde narrative choices in her novels ('Next' had 26 narrators, each of whose name began with a different letter of the alphabet, and she omitted the verb 'to have' throughout to emphasize the depravation they faced), so I was looking forward to seeing what she could deliver in short story form.

For me, they're a little hit or miss in terms of keeping my attention, but nonetheless I still appreciated them all. The misses were partially due to my own hatred of stream-of-consciousness narrative, which is a feature in some but not all of the stories. It works in some instances ('The Foot', for example, a first-person story of a ghost that embodies the invisible pain of an amputee's phantom limb, seems the perfect conduit for the repetitive lines and repetitive thoughts that weave through her stories like thread. The titular short story, however, is far more laborious. Sometimes the telling is lost in the speed of the action.)

One thing I will grant is that they're all incredibly memorable and individual. George and the Seraph opens the collection with a strikingly described yet beautifully simplistic view of the gateway to the afterlife, and the repeat visitations of one man. Red Rubber Gloves creates an incredibly detailed world from the static view of its paralyzed narrator, all around a simple object moving from window to window in a house across the street. It's probably one of the most remarkably clever short stories I've ever read.

They deserve praise for being so varied yet always told with such a tactful, authentic voice. Brooke-Rose had a remarkable handling of her craft, instilling an unshakeable trust in the reader of an author brim with lived experiences. If you can get hold of a copy, do give this forgotten writer some attention. She deserves it.

[Jonathan Norton · Rating 3 out of 5]

CBR's short stories from 1970, this is a varied collection. There is fair bit of social observation, about the new world of European sunbathing holidays and the possibilities for single women to be free sexual adventurers. "Queenie Fat And Thin" charts the rise of a pop-culture celebrity. Extreme mental conditions are also touched in "The Religious Button" and "The Foot", and the very bleak "On Terms", centred on obsessive, rejected love and suicidal despair. Stylistically this fits with the novels she was writing after 1964, after this came the formal disintegration of "Thru", which had to wait years to be published.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sensational prose and shorts in this collection. All the more impressive given the form isn't CB-R's bread and butter.