The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story
CONTINUED FROM HERE: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/12/26/the-penguin-book-of-the-contemporary-british-short-story/#comment-24492
Edited by Philip Hensher 2018
Stories by A.L. Kennedy, Tessa Hadley, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jackie Kay, Graham Swift, Jane Gardam, Ali Smith, Neil Gaiman, Martin Amis, China Miéville, Peter Hobbs, Thomas Morris, David Rose, David Szalay, Irvine Welsh, Lucy Caldwell, Rose Tremain, Helen Oyeyemi, Leone Ross, Helen Simpson, Zadie Smith, Will Self, Gerard Woodward, James Kelman, Lucy Wood, Hilary Mantel, Eley Williams, Sarah Hall, Mark Haddon, Helen Dunmore.
My previous reviews of the BEST BRITISH SHORT STORIES series (2011-2021): https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/best-british-short-stories/
When I read the second half of this book in 2022, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
WOMEN
POISON by Lucy Caldwell
“The cloying smell of the perfume was making me dizzy, and I couldn’t seem to straighten my thoughts.”
A genuine entertaining, suspenseful read, of a woman’s memory of when she, at 14, had a crush on her Spanish teacher who had already ditched his wife for an ex-pupil. Along with a friend from babyhood baths and two other girls from school during a Baker Day in Belfast, she leads a foolhardy foray into stalking this man and his ex-pupil partner and their toddler daughter. Even to the extent of stealing the partner’s perfume from their house by means of rôle-playing, a perfume called Poison and smelling of fox. She sees him many years later in a bar with someone young enough to be his daughter. We spend a fruitful time deducing what such obsessions had led to in our witness’s mind all those years ago and even now in the bar. A classic of what was truth, and what was fiction, fiction. Even the truth or fiction of a burst sac of a cyst on a KFC chicken. I reckon it may have been mayo all along, whatever she thought.
….and here another woman stalking after smelling expensive perfume on the woman she stalks….
THE CLOSING DOOR by Rose Tremain
“…the ticket puncher at the barrier was trying to laugh and joke with the boarding school girls,…”
Boarding school girls in 1954 with no hyphen, also boarding a train, one of them a tearful, tantrum-fisted girl upset at leaving home, saying goodbye to her mother who is also upset after having looked after the child during earlier wartime, a boarding-school demanded vicariously by the war-dead father as voiced by his own still living parents. The mother follows, into areas of London that she did not know, two other mothers, women celebrating a new won freedom for themselves, two women with fading film star glamour whom she wanted to ‘elbow’ out of the way as they blocked the vanishing figure of the daughter… and she creates a sad story around them that this story’s ending tellingly transcends, almost sends away her own sadness and ends her now distant daughter’s sadness, too, if by added dint of Button A.
IF A BOOK IS LOCKED THERE’S PROBABLY A GOOD REASON FOR THAT, DON’T YOU THINK
by Helen Oyeyemi
“‘I grew up in a city where people fell out of windows a lot,’ you say. ‘So I used to practise falling out of them myself.’”
A satisfyingly oblique story in mutual synergy with Robert Aickman fiction, one where ‘you’ as a second person narrator study the case of Eva as part of management manipulation amidst office politics, personal manoeuvres that take on powerful forces to keep this story locked, just as physically locked as Eva’s book within it. Give or take the odd wily bird who can spring such locks open.
A story where gossip and surveillance become more powerful than truth, transparency as opaque as skin colour…. as if you had expected a story to be a sort of office lift with see-through doors to allow you to pre-gauge any trigger warnings represented by the people travelling in the lift … or before you jump out of it above where the last storey reaches.
I reviewed the next story in 2015 (here) when it was first published in Nightjar Press, as reproduced below.
This was two years before the copyright year of 2017 (Peepal Tree Press) shown in this Penguin anthology….
THE WOMAN WHO LIVED IN A RESTAURANT by Leone Ross
“She has been somebody.”
Does that mean she has been somebody special and now just an ordinary woman? Or she is now somebody (or something) else? You need to wait until the end of this story to discover the answer to that. This story, too, develops, from apparent whimsical absurdity towards a meaningful metaphor for existence by means of culinary peculiarities, restaurant politics, the art of love, graphic lust, personal status, adventuring of body parts, the nature of architecture – a surreal truth that, as a gestalt, cunningly seems, at least for a the duration of a brief earthquake, nearer to reality than reality itself. I have heard of women setting themselves up in hotels for their whole lives, but there they at least have an ensuite room of their own, and room service. Here the woman sits at a restaurant table and uses the normal customer facilities for ablutions etc. We are told her backstory and consequent relationships with various members of the restaurant staff, and the deadpan use of smart-tufted words keeps her situation between the margins of a kind reader’s believability. An eventually original experience, worth enjoying. I look up, towards these words, as if making literary decisions. The restaurant has been something.
Copy 11 of a signed limited edition of 200.
My other reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/leone-ross/
This Ross story was also published in BEST BRITISH SHORT STORIES 2016 (Salt Publishing): https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/02/18/best-british-short-stories-2016/
EVERY THIRD THOUGHT by Helen Simpson
“It’s like being in a lift and suddenly it plunges down.”
And this story makes Oyeyemi’s lift above truly transparent, the sudden prospect of one’s own death as here tellingly seen by a near middle-aged, middle-class lady who attends a book club, has an older husband who looks like Picasso, and with children, one of them ‘crazed on Narnia’ as the narrator herself used to be “crazed on Topic”, a chocolate bar with hazelnuts not peanuts, yes, seeing that all her friends seem to be beset by “a plague, we all said, an epidemic, a horrible sticky contagion”, a plague of chance cancers, et al. Her own missing heartbeat accompanies a panoply of hypochondria as she watches folk from a bus, all seen by her as dying but still coping. How do old people live with themselves, so close to death? I wonder that, too, in my seventies, even with my own share of that contagion: lucky it didn’t get me earlier.
Ley lines, or Hallowe’en pumpkin soup, or cremation, actuarial work, even shopping at Waitrose, all part of the ‘mosaic’ class she ends up attending and thus clinching my gestalt as such a pattern from her own words as she arguably gets knocked down by a bus instead of being eaten away from within. This story, entertaining with morbid wittiness, did succeed in summoning diseased carcasses within ‘deserts of vast eternity’ as well as a wry smile of being ‘led up a garden path.’ Crazed on death. Crazed on denial of death by a surfeit of it as literary joy. And no mean feat, that missing third beat of a rolling dice.
“Then she started feeding peanuts into her tea again.”
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Ambrose Bierce Embraced Me
WAR & POLITICS
MOONLIT LANDSCAPE WITH BRIDGE by Zadie Smith
“…to hold his crushed elbow together.”
There are four significant mentions in this story of the Interior Minister’s Elbow… The Elbow is very important in this story, but has anyone mentioned it before! The Epitome of Elbow that fits what has obsessed most of my book reviews over recent months. A leitmotif that works mysteriously. Meanwhile, this modest proposal of a Swiftian fable tells of the Interior Minister escaping a small country after a weather disaster, but he still decides to stop his car going to the airport to distribute needed water to the swarming masses but later he foolhardily stops the car again, ironically for a pee, then being accosted and reminded of his own backstory by a Devil or Devil’s Advocate half-recognised from a shared past — a freedom fighting or idealistic or impulsive past? It is an obliquely prophetic allegory of today’s UK, the animals rescued from Afghanistan and other evacuation problems, or the Interior Ministerial attitude today to the Ukraine refugees, and much else mixed-motive impulsive Prime Ministerial, by comparing the narrow ‘agonising’ now ‘Ungodly’ Christian spirit versus the amplitude of some other creeds. The eponymous Dutch painting and its climate change sky pareidolia globally reflected beneath it, as some sort of subconscious literary trigger of such a prophecy?
Tomorrow, it may turn out to have prophesied something else that has not yet happened.
“Think of that revelation Shakespeare put in the mouth of King John: ‘Now my soul has elbow room!’ “
— Zadie Smith
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THE ROCK OF CRACK AS BIG AS THE RITZ by Will Self
“… to clutch opposing elbows.”
“…as if he were Gulliver, called upon to perform surgery on a Lilliputian.”
Elbows or bowels? A ‘sweet, sweet, sweet’ story “Where your brain is crack”, if not its freehold author’s. ‘Drug-lust’ made from ‘high-lowlife’ words, the reader’s will unselfed, telling of Yardies, one in particular with blurred extended family and blurred spirit of place, even his name, one called Bantu/ London / Danny, a black who mines crack from the walled-in city bowels for their own “milky, translucent white” sake. And his yellow-black brother Tembe, lean and bony, disseminating such harvest of whiteness as ‘human gold’ by bowl of pipe into an apotheosis of almost mindless sex-lust by this and other nations and their peoples, I infer. The Earth’s own whole hot hotel of rock’s fracking crack as Gestalt. All to the backdrop of Danny’s backstory, ex, inter alia, Desert Storm: “He claimed it was ‘back’, but he didn’t exactly know,…” Nor do I, now. Amid my remaindered hardbacks.
“thass the troof”
My previous reviews of Will Self: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/will-self/
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THE FALL OF MR AND MRS NICHOLSON by Gerard Woodward
“…a good old-fashioned fountain pen which Mrs Nicholson fished out of Mr Nicholson’s inner breast pocket,…”
A writer as narrator, a writer who normally deals with ‘gentle metaphors’ in his fiction, is taken in an involuntary fashion to the eponymous Nicholsons who remind me of the Ceaușescus of yore in their palace as the disgruntled masses outside gradually increase their demands and antipathy towards them. It is his job, as Mrs N’s favourite writer, to write a speech that Mr N can deliver from the balcony to the masses so as to ease the situation, despite being a fiction writer who has never written a political speech. A story paralleling that of the Ceaușescus’s flight and end — not the speech itself that is otherwise never written but a sort of Swiftian fable version of it as a rationale for the compelling political lies and convenient concocted numbers in our world today, well, compelling lies and numbers until reading this compellingly written fable in itself. A fable where Mr N’s elbow is mentioned twice, and Mrs N’s elbow at least once. A gentle metaphor to match the button of the conscripted writer’s own fiction metaphor, to open and to shut, and to fasten two halves. A button on legs, if not a zip.
“It was as though a painting in an art gallery had reached out and touched me.”
“Mrs Nicholson took a tissue out of her handbag and, using the glass over an eighteenth-century portrait that hung on one of the walls, dabbed at the blood in her face,..”
“My bowels were chilled,…”
My previous reviews of Gerard Woodward: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/gerard-woodward/
justice for one by James Kelman
A short powerful Joycean monologue, sometime broken by staccato with reported spoken words, about slogans and shoulders, a woman’s sexy shoulders versus a rhyme for soldiers (?), and today, when I was destined to read it, I thought of Mariupol and that this was a mercenary talking there with his thoughts, honourable or guilty thoughts. Slogans borrowed or slogans lent.
My previous review of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/02/17/best-british-short-stories-2017/#comment-11746
CATASTROPHIC WORLDS
FLOTSAM, JETSAM, LAGAN, DERELICT by Lucy Wood
“She stretched out her arm but still there was nothing…”
…and her wrist twisted, but her fall on the beach resulted, for me, in the bathos of a ‘swollen ankle’. My world fell apart. [This story stood or fell for its evident page-turning compulsion to be read and for the instinctive sense that it holds of a different bespoke relevance to any individual who happens to read it, but not necessarily for any reason I could particularly see for why it was one of this book’s relatively few showcased British short stories of the last twenty years.] My own world often threatens to fall apart, too, as in my own personal life of having long retired to the seaside with my wife, thinking mistakenly that we would have no duties but to please ourselves. Our children having grown up, our struggles for wherewithal having become complete, or so it seemed. Here, it is is indeed the world or the shipwrecked earth itself that falls apart and vomits with cumulative accretion its symbolic plastic detritus and containers of human evil that we always knew it contained, now no longer hidden in plain sight — whatever our battles of pointless attrition against such processes.
THE CLEAN SLATE by Hilary Mantel
“I like to imagine cross-connections.”
An inspiring story about inherited lies not just hidden or even buried in plain slight, but now drowned in it. The narrator is a woman who visits her elderly mother under care of nurses, and, alongside her, formulates a family tree with modern genealogical zeal, if not with “gynaecological catastrophes”…
“She has a way of working her elbows that points her needles straight at me.”
A family tree centred on the building of Ladybower Dam and the flooding of Derwent village and the alleged endless ellipsis of its evacuation, and I do not know if any of it is true — and I have positively and conscientiously (by dint of the literary theory of the Intentional Fallacy) left it ungoogled — but I am reminded by mutual synergy of my own ancient vignette mentioning sunken Dunwich (here). But I assume that the counterstory — a counterstory as told in this Mantel work of a “churchyard” (my italics), outside of Derwent, re-burying the complete skeletons of the already dead Derwent bodies — supersedes the ‘lie’ of Derwent’s already dead buried bodies being drowned in the flood for Ladybower Dam… a sort of Elbow Yard of truth, I dare claim with some trepidation. The Elbow Room of the Dead. A mother’s Dam or a woman’s reproductive map inside and outside her.. (‘Dam’, n. — archaic for mother.)
This is a most moving story by Mantel, a story about the frank awareness of a daughter about her mother’s unconscious lies — but what should be said about her own lie that she once wrote a novel with this story’s title as the novel’s title?
A story that itself textually does not, in irony, end with a slate’s erasure by an endless ellipsis…
“After a time, a doctor came out and stood by my elbow.”
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/hilary-mantel/
Ladybower cf ladygarden
“– I wish I could say something else – but the plan of the reservoirs looks very like a diagrammatic representation of the female reproductive tract. […] …through the drowned village of Ashopton to the neck of the womb itself, at Ladybower House and Ladybower Wood: from there, to the Yorkshire Bridge weir, and the great world beyond.”
“…and I spent the night elbow-deep behind the dishwasher, twirling…”
My review of the next story, FEARS AND CONFESSIONS OF AN ORTOLAN CHEF by ELEY WILLIAMS, was issued in 2020 as follows….
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“…this taught him to consider Sophia as a most delicious morsel, indeed to regard her with the same desires which an ortolan inspires into the soul of an epicure.” — Henry Fielding (‘Tom Jones’)
Fears and Confessions of an Ortolan Chef
“, all bloodlust and dirty tricks beneath a cloche.”
What it says on the lid. The well-known shameful facts of songbird Ortolan buntings; their cooking and eating are here extrapolated Eleyly, including the buying and selling, supply and demand in our undercover eating provisions for others, me and you, our relationship, the knives in the kitchen drawers, the dishwasher and the co-vivid if not corvid dreaming…a gross faith.
“As far as I can remember you have only ever appeared in one of my dreams.”
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My other reviews of Eley Williams: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/eley-williams/
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LATER, HIS GHOST by Sarah Hall
“He taped the neck. He taped his cuffs and his ankles, his knees and his elbows.”
This third-person singular narrator, if such is conceivable, seems to use the word ‘buffalo’ as an associational charm, as I have spent my life using the word ‘armageddon’…and here he suffers a land such as ours amid an Armageddon of Wind, a domino rubble catastrophe that you can easily imagine with roofs gone, street-side tethers of rope used to ‘haul’ oneself along and to prevent what? — another ankle injury to match my review bathos above, another world falling down or blowing away, or teetering at a cliff edge or simply flooding over or drowning in this section among delightfully arbitrary sectioned-off sections of this book’s episodes or stories in a gusty gestalt. Junk in the air like Lucy Wood’s. And broken bones. Here he braves such winds to salvage literature, like copies of The Tempest whose pages have hopefully not yet become as tenuous as a ‘ghost’s breath’, as well as more tins of sardine for the woman who bears his baby, who is currently back ‘home’ in the longbarn, a woman who I perhaps wrongly also infer was once his literature teacher at school, even though she perhaps does not realise this. Armageddon and Buffalo and a red stone charm of polished gneiss. Winds ‘ooming’ and ‘hawing’.
“His ankle felt sore, but that was OK, injuries you couldn’t feel were far worse.”
My previous review of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/08/10/6-shorts-2013/#comment-13452
THE PIER FALLS by Mark Haddon
“….there is so little left of his mind that he lets it go as easily as if it were a book falling from his sleeping hand.”
This very morning, by an appointed visit to a venue for my fourth jab as booster, I had time to kill, so I walked up and down the length of a near deserted. Clacton Pier (it was quite early), for the first time doing this since lockdown started in March 2020. I am not sure I would have done it had I read this story first! It tells, with no holds barred, of a similar pleasure pier’s collapse, subjected to a another domino collapse prefigured by the previous story, but it is a crowded pier this time — a collapse from an initial broken rivet, into a ‘cat’s cradle of iron and wood’, deploying a no holds barred description of body-spearing and all manner of many broken bones including in a broken arm and ankle, and indeed many deaths. A descriptive deadpan attrition of this event for its own sake, no moral made, other than perhaps the portrait of a black nurse, the only black person there. And I, too, would have toggled with the fly / jump pendulum dilemma of variable speed, and I would expect, this book, or another book I later happen to read, to fall, before too long, from my mind’s hand as the last book that I ever read (if not real-time review!) But not before whispering the word ‘Armageddon’.
My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/mark-haddon/
There are not many words that end ‘ddon’.
ENVOI
NORTH SEA CROSSING by Helen Dunmore
“On one elbow, leaning, twisting,…”
A father and son sharing a cabin on a boat, the boat itself like a sleeper on a sea’s quilt. A sea that presumably eats the Mooo of foghorns as Carl, the boy, will need to eat as much as possible of the eat-as-much-as-you-like breakfast to justify its cost! His father, trenchant, scornful, knows what is right, even when flaunting himself by sleeping naked. The fog and the resultant collision with a yacht and another man and son, foreign bodies, now consumed by the boat, yet maintaining a more balanced relationship to and fro with each other when compared to Carl and his father’s larger wake. ‘Across the bows’, Carl’s shoulders bowed and crushed against a fatherly cliff. His father, though, a man to whom ‘people turn to.’ Turn to and fro. Joggles to and fro, like a penis. Unless perhaps it is a bruised beam or mote upon a once uncluttered sea, such as “a broken bone makes, poking out.”
end
I shall soon start reviewing the stories here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/04/12/penguin-books-of-british-short-stories/