Jackdaws

by Neil Campbell

Genres: Short Stories, Contemporary

11 pages, Paperback

Published June 1, 2016

Reviews

[Des Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Above all stood the bulk of Castle Naze, and the long ridge line of Coombs Edge with the cotton grass still blowing.”

I was intrigued by the word ‘Naze’ as I had seen it previously used but only as part of the name of my birthplace 68 years ago, Walton-on-the-Naze…
Beside the point …but the main, imputably shocking, point — of this obsessive, almost incantatory, almost anti-novelistic, detail-poeticised, recurrently seasonal walking through the narrator’s rural locale in Derbyshire — is also half beside the point, even if it is disguised like the beautiful pamphlet’s signature. It’s the other half of the point that counts, with the motivational nuances of the Jackdaws’ scryable patterns as well as of the tontine’s numbers in Numbers. We draw our own conclusions.
I was also impressed with the detailed refrains of the locale’s places in the narrator’s
art of walking around and around, not around an ‘elephant in the room’, but around, say, the evidence in the household rubbish dump. An art of walking like that of Richard Long.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've reviewed this book alongside another recent story from Nightjar Press – The Numbers by Christopher Burns – in this post.