FootSteps Press 2023
My previous reviews of Frances Oliver fiction: https://nullimmortalis.wordpress.com/2010/08/11/my-detailed-reviews-of-the-complete-published-fiction-of-frances-oliver/
When I read this book, my thoughts will appear in the comment stream below…
THE KING OF MAJORCA
“…to spend the night in prayer for the departed soul of her dear dead grandmother,…”
With only a glimpse of alliteration there, I can pull myself together to recall the three versions of a sort of ‘sleeping beauty’ story in reverse by a neuro-diverse girl from America studying in France in the sub-war fifties and she is obsessed with a reclining statue of a mediaeval knight in a cathedral. With various vigils and viewpoints of narration, I, too, am haunted by it all, and yearn with some trepidation to look into that knight’s face, as swaddled by written essays in student-teacher affairs and American versus French cultures, modernity versus antiquity, and today’s dystopia. Any tragic undercurrents, taken as read. Night’s face, taken as red, if you hear this, without reading it.
GRANDMOTHER WOLF
“He suggests a family winter break in Majorca…”
This is the very moving portrait of a centenarian woman steeped in forests and Russian history, one of the early asylum seekers who came to UK and now in a care home, her family vists, with her growing dementia and childhood dreams of a wolf outside (inspired by Heath-Stubbs) and the babies they were said to throw out as buffers against its jaws. There is much more for me to do justice to for this family history versus modern life with electronic gameboys, but I read it and it is hauntingly significant. I watched it happen, you see. My name might as well be Harry Penfold. Luckily, today is not Friday…
THE SARACEN GIRL
“Grandmother might have said it was a vision sent by God…”
A sad ghost story effectively distilled from TAKING THE WATERS that I described: HERE.
This is how, some years ago, I reviewed DANCING ON AIR, the title story from Frances Oliver’s 2004 book –
“Not being a Stockhausen fan…”
This memorable story represents, for me, intentionally or serendipitously or synchronistically, a spinning waltz of the book’s accretions, hospices, relational dysfunctions, ‘tongues’, consequences in what I see as a ‘snow-shaker’ globe of dancers. Some avant-garde (like Stockhausen – or Schoenberg, earlier, in ‘Cyprian’s Room’), some weird like Aickman or Sarban, others dense and textured (like Elizabeth Bowen fiction), others more traditionally ghost-story. And, as I foreshadowed (by retrocausality earlier?), we indeed have express retrocausality in this story (!): “…you heard the story, but your brain makes you remember it as something you saw before.”
A female protagonist — attending a weirdly framed business conference in an Austrian city — emotionally / sexually tempted and shifted by fate with implications of experiment and potential viral as well as spiritual infection.
This seems to be linked to – but quite separate from – the next unashamedly beguiling story…
PERIPHERAL VISION
About a woman who, during her day to day life, sees some living people’s real skulls from beneath the skin, and this happens after being shown a mediæval ‘trompe l’œil’ picture in a museum, and she tries to cure this by modern social media via a friend, also doctors and quacks and Freudian specialists, and indeed religion (including a monastery on an island!)
After my seeking and finding (over the last few years due to a phenomenon first spotted in ELizabeth BOWen) significant elbow-moments in literature, I found another one here: “Then she became aware of a wheedling voice at her elbow.” Leading to a devastating thought to end the story.
Also, it seems DANCING ON AIR and PERIPHERAL VISION were both written before the onset of the Covid pandemic.
LYCANTHROPE HOUSE
An engaging story, but strangely pointless unless it is merely to point out our ‘cultural decline’, as a couple, a Goth girl who is seemingly homophobic and her boy friend touring Cornwall in a car, finding a terraced house with the eponymous name, and meeting inside an older man whose male partner is upstairs, and they all three sink into ‘drinkie-poos’ and hypocentral drugs…
I reviewed the next story in 2010 as part of my review of the ‘Dancing on Air’ collection, exactly as follows IN ITS THEN CONTEXT…
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Prester John
“It began from one day to the next. John simply opened his mouth and spoke, loudly and at length.”
A truly fascinating treatment of an autistic man who is eventually discovered (not expressly in the story’s words) ‘to speak in tongues’ – and we are led to believe that he becomes, perhaps, a living embodiment of the Prester John myth (Cf. John Buchan’s novel entitled ‘Prester John’).
A tale about exploitation and contrasting psychological approaches – and a crime mystery of cause & effect in more ways than one.
This story and the book’s three previous stories (reviewed above) have something in common: the accretion of themes towards a core stituation that transpires often over a sizeable span of time – comprising a display of clues in real-time without pre-empting hindsight.
The book itself somehow has a knack of instinctive ‘speaking in tongues’, fiction tongues within ordered internal texts (Cf those earlier concocted ‘reviews’ in ‘Cyprian’s Room’).
DISPENSION ISLAND
A very strange story, but in a naive way, a Henri Rousseau of a post-Global Warming ‘utopia’ on a sort of tropical island with bosses and girl fridays and antique typewriters and grass skirts and cots and hammocks, with the ‘Me Too’ movement shrugged off amid attention from thin pallid AI servants. Elements of some the more eccentric Daphne du Maurier short fiction? A whiff of cannibalism, too.
A prize from me to anyone with the best raison d’être for the island’s name.
THE AFTERTHOUGHT
“Man of Black don’t touch my back! Man of Black don’t touch my back!”
Worth the price of this book alone! A wondrous tale of wonder matching my own period of the very early days of TV as a child, but enticed into books. And then more books. Books that now, in hindsight, supposedly need mis-‘correction’. I was not an ‘afterthought’ child born after two much older siblings, like the boy in the story, but I was an ‘only’ child, but the effect was the same. Nor did I suffer from a cough, nor sent away to an uncle in a large house as a cure in a lonely forest to be looked after by his housekeeper. But I can fully empathise with this boy’s surreptitious games of a sort of hide-and-seek with intriguing rules in a forest clearing with local ‘children’… and the way the world has gone since then, as the boy grows as old as me. And the ghosts of hindsight or, indeed, afterthought that still abound.
I SAY GOODNIGHT BUT NOT GOODBYE
“…it’s a whole – like a collage – or installation -“
And here is ‘my’ shifting collage for this author, triggered a few weeks before even owning this book and now re-triggered after reading this book! – https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/2023/06/25/frances-oliver/
This final story is a well-characterised rom-com, almost ‘chick-lit’ story that initially hides a haunting, eventually disturbing story involving an old church and what is scattered within it, something to be sought and discovered and then cohered as an ‘art’ gestalt, perhaps as a modern blasphemy to attract visitors to a church dying without money in its collection boxes.
With a nod to Walter de la Mare with the stories as elicited by inscriptions on gravestones. A theme and scattered variations that seem somehow to define the imputed power behind this book.
A book that still resonates with me, and worthy of this still underrated icon of such literature.
And I, too, say goodnight, but not goodbye.
Whatever pandemics or climate changes ensue!