Thursday, June 02, 2022

The Penguin Books of British Short Stories (7)

 


PART SEVEN OF MY REVIEW OF THE PENGUIN BOOKS OF THE BRITISH SHORT STORY

CONTINUED FROM PART SIX HERE: https://nemonymousnight.wordpress.com/kingsley-amis-masons-life/#comment-937

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Edited by Philip Hensher

My previous reviews of older or classic fictions: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/reviews-of-older-books/

My review of the Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/12/26/the-penguin-book-of-the-contemporary-british-short-story/

When I read the stories in the above two books, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below:

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26 thoughts on “+”

  2. BERNARD MACLAVERTY: Phonefun Limited

    “Some juice tricked on to her chin.”

    A lady who does launderette work and a larger lady who cleans a primary school as dayjobs, with their later-in-the-day creativity, like the suspension of disbelief in fiction itself, of titillating talk on the telephone with men, raising their libidos for money. How they could be assured they got subsequent payment, not sure. But better than the street walking they used to do, and they being not sexy enough for men these days, anyway, in their middle age, I guess. And all this happened in Belfast during the Troubles. But why the ‘Men Only’ mag? And why the plums that gave the juice becoming pumice stones at the end? Amusing, salacious common-speak, but it made me keep tuning the story’s wireless not for better-speak but for short-wave morse code as to such literature’s meaning, as is my wont. ‘Hengy-hee oung.’ Better the fadings-out of Radio Luxembourg and its ‘The World Tomorrow’, I guess. When true love blossomed. And religion, if not religious wars, died out.

    “We should get a pair of bellows for fellas like him. Save my puff.”

  3. E. F. BENSON: The Bus-Conductor

    ‘Why, of course, I like being frightened,’ I said. ‘I want to be made to creep and creep and creep. Fear is the most absorbing and luxurious of emotions. One forgets all else if one is afraid.’

    …spoken at the telling start of this deadpan, straightforward story of one man explaining to another that a ghost can be seen in settings other than classic ghostly ones, and can even be seen by a sceptic such as himself who is now telling his listener about it. Yet, I suppose it is indeed telling that it took place when he was alone at night during a past stay in the house of the man he visited there and to whom he is now telling about such a visitation by a ghost! — a second hidden frisson added to the first overt one of seeing a bus conductor with a mole on his left cheek driving a horsed hearse at night outside on that night of his visit …and, in later days, his seeing the bus conductor’s counterpart in broad daylight when officiating on a real bus. With later chillingly telling events connected to the latter event.
    You see, the conducting of gestalt real-time time reviews of fiction books is tantamount to the lining-up of otherwise unseen pinholes in the two surfaces of life (as happened also to be described in this story by the sceptic teller of the tale within it), with one pinhole being objective and the other wholly subjective, one truth and the other fiction as faith, a lining-up by means of the passion of a reading moment being able to induce the perceiving of these two conducive channels triggering a story’s single hidden-in-plain-sight gestalt. And, by the way, I myself have a mole on my left cheek.

    My previous review of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/29/negotium-perambulans/

  4. SHENA MACKAY: Cardboard City

    “‘Now we look a bit more human,’ said Stella as they surveyed themselves, Goneril and Regan, whom their own father had named Star and Butterfly.”

    A poignant portrait — with all their attractive gauchenesses of stoical intent — of two sisters, 14 & 12, having an illicit trip to central London during the Christmas period, seeing through their eyes the glitz and crude sadness of life there, the expense of just simple things like ice creams, as they trespass into posh hotels for their loos, and they have half a hope of seeing their read Daddy, while scornfully discussing their Step-Father in ironic initial capital letters like God or King Lear. Lear, leer? Till they think they see their own Daddy on the opposite underground escalator to theirs..?

    “Stella was seduced by a gold mesh star and some baubles as fragile and iridescent as soap bubbles,…”

    The Star name that Daddy gave her, again summoned alongside the bubble-bath gin she and her sister Vanessa buy so as to poison Him, not him. An explicit hymn to the much earlier moon over the craters of London in Bowen’s Mysterious Kôr, I feel…

    “Vanessa looked out of the window at the moon melting like a lemon drop in the freezing sky above the chimney tops of Clapham and pictured it shining on the cold frail walls and pinnacles of Cardboard City.”

  5. BERYL BAINBRIDGE: The Longstop

    There’s a silly point hidden away in this wartime story, so silly even my own confident (or foolhardy?) hands can’t grasp it, slipping through my self-maintained literary fingers as it does. Not that Hitler was six foot tall, that was just a throwaway line. It is something to do with the narrator’s father who once thought he was a heroic seaman, but now a commercial traveller, or with his maternal grandfather, hated by his father, a grandfather who has idealistic ideas of the game of cricket, and praises two cricketers, one a ‘black chappie’ according to his father, but an Indian Prince according to his grandfather, a prince with a billowing shirt even when it wasn’t windy when playing cricket. Well, in the park today, where they watch a cricket match, many other things happen there that spin meaning my way. Even a showpiece Messerschmidt that had once been shot down. But who’s to shoot down his father who wanders off to look at it? Time for a night watchman I guess, to ensure the black-out is abided by. And a lounge lizard’s flickering tongue is suddenly OUT, without any stumps being knocked off. Somehow the way I imagined it ending, long beyond its last over.

  6. KATHERINE MANSFIELD: The Woman at the Store

    I reviewed this story as part of my review of all her stories here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2020/03/12/the-collected-stories-katherine-mansfield/, as follows….
    ==============================================
    A wildly mad version of O Henry’s Wilder West here in the New Zealand of yore. With mucho elided dialogue, two men and a woman on horses arrive moseying at this store in the middle of nowhere where a woman and her ‘kid’, a girl who does diseased drawings, and has concupiscence leanings but complains being put in a room with two men, as much as the woman, her mother, yearns, too, for ‘company’, as it were, with her husband often abandoning her here, as now, to go ‘shearing’ as he says. There is a prehensile ominous sense around them of doom and thunder as if the universe is playing with them all.

  7. DOUGLAS DUNN: Bobby’s Room

    “You can keep letters, but you can’t keep phone calls.”

    There’s something sad about that, now. Somehow it’s no longer true – or relevant. This is a another major story-discovery for me to keep from these Penguin anthologies. I feel I shall ever be doing all Penguin’s public hospitality work, bedded down within its onward revelations, having been orphaned here as a breakfast’s blood pudding or kedgeree read from between the lines. And then, there are the attritional memories of boyhood holidays. My parents didn’t abscond to Singapore, but Heaven. But my parents’ best intentions seem now in tune with this narrator’s being boarded out not in a boarding-school but in a boarding-house with the boring Bawdens. I love my parents, still, for their best intentions.. I’ll go to the guest book to see if they have left a forwarding address. And it just remains for me to believe that the rest of my life as I think I experienced it — now left unlived — was just me dreaming not of Bobby’s smile as in this story but of a smile that was mine. Playing tennis not with Bobby’s Girl but with young Louise. Before I forever sing the poor boredom, myself. My body’s ever unbroken fast of Zeno, notwithstanding.

  8. “Then, would you believe, Bobby Gaskell – who knows the answer perfectly well – asked me why the photographer wasn’t there.”

    GEORGINA HAMMICK: Grist

    “…you couldn’t worry about getting cancer when you already had it.”

    And so, I am mimicking Aunt’s “pad to the bathroom time and time again” — but, as a sort of exorcism of such a living death, I lose myself in this story about Babe: a woman of some maturity with previous husbands or lovers, I guess, who was later supposedly loved by man she called The Photographer, a man who claimed ‘a life of happiness’ from her in a supermarket, but then just as suddenly he left her, and Babe’s own legacy from such an affair was being shown as a bedfellow in the photographs that he exhibited in galleries, alongside his now latest bedfellow. And Babe’s long-time friend and mentor was called Aunt who was indeed dying while eating endless carrot soup and, in company with Babe, she drank much whiskey, her own glass being a cocktail of whisky and morphine — and there was a still growing brown nicotine stain above where Aunt played Patience, and Death is her anthropomorphised lodger with whom she offers to share her endless cigarettes. Well, thus, the scene is set for yet another story-discovery I shall cherish. A story whereby its grist is Babe actually exorcising the memory of the Photographer and easing herself into her own Sillitoe-type mimic of acceptance of Aunt’s Death (with cigarettes, whiskey and carrot soup) — and by crying herself to sleep. Or by writing about it. You see, I think Babe was an author, or, rather, she wishfully saw herself as one by mimicking a famous author.

  9. REBECCA WEST: Indissoluble Matrimony

    “It was Evadne’s fat flesh rising on each side of her deep-furrowed spine through the rent in her bathing dress.”

    With a strangely emotionally Lawrencian British version of wordily Lovecraftian gaslighting — ‘leprous light’ upon skin that felt like a slug — this is the battle to the death between a white man (a solicitor’s clerk who thinks he is Napoleon) and a coloured woman, his wife in a ten year childless marriage (a woman fighting against wage-slavery via the era’s socialism, ‘over-sexed’, yellow skin, black eyes, black hair and ‘humming in that uncanny, negro way of hers’), a battle as a rite of brutal passage toward the epitome of a tortured stalemate. You will not credit this story could possibly exist but it does! Including the plums from earlier above…

    Just dabble in some of its sinful moments from marital home to lunatic asylum and the weird weir of ‘quarrelling waters’… the rehearsed draft of her speech still in her mouth…

    “she was one of those women who create an illusion alternately of extreme beauty and extreme ugliness.”

    “In the centre, obviously intended as the principal dish, was a bowl of plums, softly red, soaked with the sun, glowing like jewels in the downward stream of the incandescent light.”

    “The secret obscenity of women!”

    “It was smouldering contralto such as only those of black blood can possess. As she sang her great black eyes lay on him with the innocent shamelessness of a young animal,…”

    “She was clad in a black bathing dress, and her arms and legs and the broad streak of flesh laid bare by a rent down the back shone brilliantly white, so that she seemed like a grotesquely patterned wild animal” …as a mighty Swimming exhibition to which he had followed her in carpet slippers!

    “This was the very absolute of hatred. It cheapened the memory of the fantasias of irritation and ill-will they had performed in the less boring moments of their marriage, and they felt dazed, as amateurs who had found themselves creating a masterpiece. […] It was ecstasy; they felt tall and full of blood.”

    “…they saw the universe as the substance and the symbol of their hatred. […] He saw her as a toad squatting on the clean earth, obscuring the stars and pressing down its hot moist body on the cheerful fields. She felt his long boneless body coiled round the roots of the lovely tree of life. They shivered fastidiously.”

    “‘The garish day,’ he murmured disgustedly, quoting the blasphemy of some hymn writer. He wanted his death to happen in this phantasmic night.”

    “Bodies like his do not kill bodies like hers.”

  10. ADAM MARS-JONES: Baby Clutch

    This is a very well-written and witty romcom novelette. I appreciated it, and also empathised with those who would appreciate it more than I do. It had some brilliant moments. But overall I found the self-conscious novelty of being accepted as gay in mid to late 20th century literature a bit irritating, and somehow irritating, too, the novelties of videotapes, a driving instructor smoking when with a customer in a car, hospital TVs, and “the sort of album where each thick page has a thick sheet of Cellophane to hold the pictures down, no need of photo corners,…”.
    Loved, though, the big toe as blood’s overflow spigot, and the soft toy with erotic piercing, and oxtail soup as innards (like black pudding earlier in this review being blood but which is true?)
    The Maps of Health or Hell, notwithstanding. You see, I had pleurisy when I was younger, too.
    Meanwhile, I’m unsure about Armchair and the Vet being rival lovers or ex-lovers or deputy lovers to the lover that the narrator visits, man to man, in hospital only an hour and a bit from Cambridge…
    Honey π
    Do not cry

    “If dirty looks were radiotherapy he’d have lost a lot of hair by now,…”

  11. GEORGE MACKAY BROWN: Three Old Men

    ‘I think we’re in for a real blizzard. I feel it in my bones.’

    “In the slow wavering downward flake-drift their faces were three blurs.”

    “Then they were all in a deep drift, topsy-turvy, a sprawl and a welter and struggle of old men!”

    ‘But what that star was I don’t know.’

    Star kicked from stone, then stable.
    A nifty short-lived fable.
    Mistaken Identity as truth on earth.
    Or a wicked candle of heaven’s birth.

    Yet in this presumably famous work, these three old men on a Scottish Kirk were also in a muddle of self-eschatology and so I joined them a shadowy fourth. Was anyone else fooled, like me, that the animal with which the Queen was having tea at 8 pm last night on Platinum Jubilee TV was in fact supposed to be one of her corgis? You see, I genuinely had no idea it was meant to be a representation of Paddington Bear!

    ‘But what that star was I don’t know.’

  12. JAMES JOYCE: An Encounter

    “– Ya! yaka, yaka, yaka!”

    This a story from the same writer who wrote Finnegans Wake (of which my detailed review, over several pages, is here) but this story is more like O Henry and horror or pulp or mystic story writers like H.P. Lovecraft and Lord Lytton (the latter here), all mixed with Richmal Crompton’s Just William. Except HPL has his own Finnegans Wake elements, too, see my review here. 

    This is the story of a boy ‘miching’ off school here mimicking Mark Twain, if not O Henry. …
    “The mimic warfare of the evening became at last as wearisome to me as the routine of school in the morning because I wanted real adventures to happen to myself. But real adventures, I reflected, do not happen to people who remain at home: they must be sought abroad.”
    And he and another truanting boy venture towards the docks in Dublin to view the ships on which they may stowaway for real adventures, but meet a man who pesters them with talk of whipping and turns the story “queer”, with insidious qualities fit for those hidden in Finnegans Wake. Read it and see and it will make you shudder and even have a slash yourself, with its honestly perfect pitch of accessible and stylish prose. Leakers and Swaddlers, notwithstanding.

  13. A. S. BYATT: Racine and the Tablecloth

    “You can do without a paranoid narrator.”

    “It was a world in which the artist was in unusual collusion with the Reader, his art like a mapping trellis between the voyeur and the terrible writhing of the characters.”

    It was timely to read, by chance, this story straight after this cross-referenced Alexander Zelenyj one HERE. Both deal with young people, being drained or dried, and the latter work has a Down syndrome character and Byatt’s central character Emily Bray endures an atheistic girlhood within this strangely God-concocted story for a gestalt Reader, a story travelling from her childhood in the Potteries via to being a girl student prodigy at boarding-school under a malevolent headmistress called Martha and then to her own motherhood grappling with her own daughter’s education — and she had a Mongol brother, which is an older equivalent term for the same condition as Down.

    “When was it clear that Martha Crichton-Walker was the antagonist? Emily found this word for her much later, when she was a grown woman.”

    There is something intrinsically nightmarish about this story, for its own sake, towards the dupped or tupped tic-tac of a mental breakdown at school during the A Level exams, a texture of text like Emily’s Aunt Florence’s embroidered tablecloth versus the obsession with Racine and his plays. Starting when Emily was a loner, with Abacus body and mind at school, the odd one out in a musical chairs game or in a crocodile of girls walking in town, or a party to some silly April Fool joke at church where the boys’s school and the girls’ school swapped their sides of the church when sitting in the pews, and Martha Crichton-Walker’s Halloween ghost story somehow created herself as a naked image of IMMACulate conception swinging on a swing within the girls’ minds. And it was Martha that had accused Emily of being ‘depraved’!

    “You may be amused that Miss Crichton-Walker should simultaneously ban ladies’ razors and promote the study of Phèdre.”

    “They were all creatures of excess, their secret blood burned and boiled and an unimaginably hot bright sun glared down in judgment. They were all horribly and beautifully interwoven, tearing each other apart in a perfectly choreographed dance, every move inevitable, lovely, destroying. In this world men and women had high and terrible fates which were themselves and yet greater than themselves.”

    This story is a revelation and no amount of description or attention to detail will do justice to its rite of passage. I feel each individual Reader was the torturer, not Mother-Martha-Author (with anaesthetic mothballs and ‘marathon’ of exam writing) and it was somehow allowed to write itself as a nightmare of deluded effort AND as an immaculate conception of styled semantic and syntactic words, if with aggressive blots of dirty ink.

    “…Phèdre’s devious and confused passion and looked up to see creatures gesticulating on the fringed edge of her consciousness like the blown ghosts trying to pass over the Styx. She saw Miss Crichton-Walker, silvery-muddy, as she had been in the underwater blind-light of the nursery, gravely indicating that failure had its purpose for her. She saw Aunt Florrie, grey and…”

    My ellipses, not the woven or blotted text’s.

  14. MARTIN AMIS: Career Move

    A tale alternating between Alistair, insanely obsessive, whose screenplay submission is dealt with cursorily by a dilatory system in the snail mail post by a coughing man called Sixsmith, and Luke a poet whose submitted Sonnet entails a flight to Los Angeles for immediate development by several people with names like Jeff. Continuity problems regarding a character called Chelsi in the screenplay, and debates as to where a caesura will go in a line of the sonnet or converting it to an ode. It is not just childishly satirical as to arty narcissists but also crammed with contrived jokes : and it simply seemed to me to be the Martin Amis story that should have been rejected, but was in fact published, after much enforced editing, in a stapled small press mag specialising in alternate-world fiction. 

  15. CANDIA MCWILLIAM: The Only Only

    “The impression of a deserted, frozen harlequinade was emphasised by a pair of red heavy-duty gloves lying on the weed next to a single yellow seaboot.”

    Fingers and toes thus seen to be have been snatched from their human-shaped garments, snatched away along with any plans or hopes, too, in the heads of those who wielded those fingers and toes, amid the colours and passion of each moment in the business of life and death. This poetically vivid description of a sparse island community where, inter alia, to see blubber spilling out from inside a dying seal is compared to glimpsing flesh above stocking-tops. The teacher of the near handful plus footful of children she teaches, including her own only child (the island’s only only child), and she is planning that her husband Davie — who is paid, just on the island’s ship days, to exercise duties, with decorum and confidentiality, in offloading and loading and mooring and unmooring when a ferry arrives — that he should actually offload this job itself and help her teach, and the whole community, not only the children, watched the ferry today leave amid the grey ice. And any intentions are abruptly deadpanned… that thus any shock is without warning as tempered by mannered stoicism. Only life and only death — whatever the once poetically colourful words that are suddenly snatched away, then coldly slipped out almost unnoticed, as undertowed, in a decorum of chilled-out choreography, by the ending’s numb whiplash of words, sealing the fate of each head’s spilled thoughts before they are actually thought! — even while still bobbing upon the sea. And this is the sort of story that encourages anyone describing it to meander on and on till the description is longer than the story itself! — till the only way out becomes the only simplicity that is death. So there I end.
    Only cancelling out only like algebraic negatives.

  16. JANICE GALLOWAY: last thing 

    An effective horror story that also should be anthologised as such. A short work sort of in dialect, but it is more the enjambment between Martin Amis’ Sonnet and his living sketch for a chilling Screenplay…. Maybe a physical or mental life finished or damaged, or a career move into dark street corners? Anyone else of us around too feart to gainsay or know where the cutting caesura was placed. 

    My previous review of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2018/02/18/best-british-short-stories-2016/#comment-12701

  17. ALI SMITH: miracle survivors

    “…and one of the girls has to lean against the wall with her elbow to cover something else, and someone else has to stand on the patch that’s in the carpet?”

    Two separate stories connected only by their shared title. An old man rescued from a hard winter snowstorm, without a name but very chummy to the nurses, proffering advice to them. And two good time girls in the Scottish vogue of the previous story, breaking into a newsagent, with a real telephone to steal calls from and using cameras with rolls of film. The ‘patch in the carpet’ above, as a disguise for Henry James’ ‘figure’ in it? Well, I have a dual choice here for the clinching gestalt of these two brief and otherwise unconnected stories: the Sinking of the Titanic or the I-Ching of those who boarded the World ship itself whereby the crucial connection is what the nurses would have been without an advisory destiny to be nurses? And, oh yes, nobody knew the identity of the old man and nobody owned up to knowing the good time girls when they phoned them. Fiction is full of unnamed or misnamed nobodies with now next to nobody to read about them, except me.

    “Tina phones a thing she calls the itching line…”

    My previous reviews of this author: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/tag/ali-smith/

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