It’s about time,
really, that I reviewed some short stories. After all, I am a massive fan of
the short story, and it is to my mind a bit of a neglected form. Admittedly
there are lots of brilliant online and in-print literary magazines publishing
short stories, but most book shops don’t stock many collections of short
stories, much to my sorrow (and not only because I write a lot of short stories
myself). It’s just a lovely form. I am (in general, and in a completely and
utterly subjective way) more fond of prose than poetry, but short stories,
especially flash fiction, are sort of a perfect in-between point for the novel
and the poem. Short stories have the concise power of poetry but the style and
characterisation which I so love about novels. When you have less words there
is, naturally I think, more of a focus on the words themselves than in a longer
work. I love short stories that are snapshots, sketches, that imply so much
more beyond the read words. I like that as a form they’re more suited to being
read aloud than novels. I think I just like the idea that you can fit a whole story,
the whole impact of a longer story, into such a small space. It’s beautiful.
So it seems about
time that, eight months into this blog (well that’s scary) I should review a
collection of short stories. And as we’re just into 2015 (also scary), I
thought I’d start with the assembled Best
British Short Stories 2014, edited by Nicholas Royle, featuring stories by
Jonathan Gibbs, Jay Griffiths, Richard Knight, Vicki Jarrett, M John Harrison,
Sian Melangell Dafydd, David Grubb, Anna Metcalfe, David Constantine, Louisa
Palfreyman, Stuart Evers, Elizabeth Baines, Mick Scully, Ailsa Cox, Christopher
Priest, Joanna Walsh, Adam Wilmington, Claire Dean, Joanne Rush and Philip
Langeskov. Unsurprisingly I’m not going to attempt to review every short story
in the collection, or I’d be here until a week on Tuesday, but I will write a
little about each of my favourites, and my not-so favourites.
Much I love the short
story as a form, I’m ready to admit that I’m a bit more picky about my short
stories than my novels. Because I’m the sort of person who just really really
loves books, I can find good things to say about most novels. Even if I think a
book is poorly written, I can usually find something good to say about one bit
of the plot or there’ll be a character I liked – or the other way around. An
atrocious plot line, but oh what superb similes. That sort of thing. With short
stories though, where there’s less time to get involved and less to attach to,
I generally find myself either completely loving a short or being somewhat
bemused by it.
There was several stories in the collection
that I didn’t really get much out of at all (for example, Gibbs’s ‘The Faber Book
of Adultery’ or Harrison’s ‘Getting Out of There’). I can’t say whether they
were good or bad stories but they certainly weren’t stories for me. I obviously
missed the point somewhere along the way, where someone else would have got it.
But what I like about collaborative collections / anthologies of short stories
like this one is that if one story doesn’t appeal to you, you simply move onto
the next one.
I think short stories
more than novels have the power to be truly unsettling, because most novels
have some form of resolution, or at least have some change in tone over the
novel. Short stories tend to effect you in less of a multitude of ways, but in
one way more intensely. I suppose that’s just the thing about short stories:
because they are in essence short, they are in essence intense. I like that. There’s
something very disturbing about Scully’s ‘The Sea of Birmingham’. I didn’t like the story, certainly, but I don’t
suppose it was written to be liked. I can’t decide whether I think it’s good or
not. I feel the same about Knight’s ‘The Incalculable Weight of Water’, and
Wilmington’s ‘It’. They’re disturbing, unsettling stories, stories with a
strong impact that I won’t be able to forget in a hurry. So I suppose in that
sense I’m impressed, and I certainly understand why these stories appeared in
the collection, even if they’re not exactly my cup of tea.
And then, while we’re
on unsettling stories, there was Palfreyman’s ‘The Jewel of the Orient’, to
which my main reaction was, what?! I have
no idea what happened here... It was creepy, weird, and entirely bemusing –
not in a fascinating way so much as simply in a weird way. Plus I have a phobia
of fish, which probably didn’t help in my appreciation of this story, seeing is
it involved a lot of fish. On finishing this short story I felt a little as I
felt when finishing Will Self’s Umbrella:
not such if I was foolish for not understanding it, or if I was foolish for
having bothered to read it. Anyway, I just absolutely did not get this story.
But beyond the
unsettling stories and the stories I got little out of, there were some
brilliant pieces in this collection. I’m impressed by the clever use of second
person in Dafydd’s ‘Hospital Field’ and in Walshes’s ‘Femme Maison’ (which, it
is worth mentioning, is also unsettling, in a good way). ‘The Spiral Stairwell’,
by Griffiths, is simply lovely, and I like Metclafe’s sad examination of
different cultures and expectations in ‘Number Three’; it’s simple, subtle, and
really moving.
And then there are my
four favourite stories in the collection. I love Elizabeth Baines’s ‘Tides, or
How Stories Do or Don’t Get Told’. In part I love it because I like self-reflective
writing, because it’s clever, because it’s in part about writing, about telling
stories. But it’s also just a beautiful, moving story, a story about the lack
of story almost. It’s brilliant.
‘Guests’, by Joanne
Rush, was another enigmatic gem. When the narrator’s husband travels to Bosnia
for work, she finds her flat slowly filling up with mysterious ‘guests’, the
ghosts of the Bosnian war. It’s a moving and unsettling story, lifted by
brilliant writing.
One of my other
favourite stories was David Constantine’s ‘Ashton and Elaine’. It’s the only
short story I was fascinated enough by to go out and buy the collection it was
from (and not just because I realised half way through that there was something
very Brontë-esque about it). It’s from a new collection of short stories
inspired by the Brontë sisters, Red Room,
edited A. J. Ashworth, which I think I’ll review next week, because I love
nineteenth century literature, and I greatly enjoy seeing it twisted into new
shapes – so long as it’s done well. I’ll say more about this story next week
then.
But perhaps my
favourite of all was Philip Langeskov’s ‘Barcelona’. I actually read this collection
a few months ago, and it’s this story that has stuck with me perhaps the most.
I was genuinely on my seat for all its thirty-eight pages. I always (probably
too much) judge works of literature by their endings, and with short stories
there is no exception. The ending of ‘Barcelona’ was superb, dramatic – everything
a great ending should be. I kept on thinking it was going to be something it
wasn’t, and it kept tricking me. It’s a truly brilliant story. I also
particularly enjoyed the intertextuality, the story’s comments on the ambiguity
of short stories. It seemed a perfect story to end the collection on.
Favourite
Story (Ooh look a different format. How strange.): For me, Philip Langeskov’s ‘Barcelona’
Least
Favourite Story: This
seems a little mean, but for me, the weakest story was Palfreyman’s ‘The Jewel of the Orient’. It might be very clever
(who knows), but I just absolutely didn’t get it one bit.
Let’s
finish on a quote: We joined hands in the dark, in the oncoming rush of all the possible
stories.
(From Elizabeth Baines, ‘Tides, Or How Stories Do or Don’t Get Told’)
Next week: Red Room: New Short Stories Inspired by the Brontës, edited and
compiled by A. J. Ashworth (because who doesn’t love the Brontës?)
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