Review: The Rental Heart - Kirsty Logan

In her debut collection, The Rental Heart, Kirsty Logan mixes a steampunk aesthetic with magical realism and a raw sexual energy. The stories move backwards and forwards through time, taking in modern Scottish estates, fin-de-siecle Paris and medieval castles, offering multiple viewpoints and narrative styles. Above all, The Rental Heart is characterised by an audacious imagination.

Logan’s prose is filled with vivid descriptions. One character is introduced as ‘dreadlocked, greeneyed, full of verbs. She smelled of rain and revolution’. Lovers have ‘mouths red and round like quims’. There is life in everything. A radio ‘coughs’ and ‘shouts music’. A sycamore tree ‘gently vomits leaves’. The Rental Heart is obsessed with the tools of writing; a husband, feeling hemmed in by family life, secretly binges on words, while a lonely wife, her husband working away on an oil rig, constructs a lover from paper.

Like Angela Carter, Logan borrows from mythology and folklore, using traditional storytelling techniques to explore present-day dilemmas, explaining the everyday through the fantastical. In The Better Angels of Our Nature, the academic Stephen Pinker used the content of nursery rhymes and fairy tales as a way of illustrating the endemic violence of the seventeenth and eighteenth century societies which created them, a valid point rendered unintentionally comic by Pinker’s pedantic style, as he argued (amongst other things) that the crying girls in Georgie Porgie Pudding and Pie were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (an assertion simply not supported by the text). Fortunately, Logan is adept at using these forms to explain the possibilities and dangers of the adult world.

In her best stories, Logan takes a traditional fairy tale motif, and spins the narrative viewpoint around, re-exploring familiar stories from an unexpected viewpoint. Thus, we have Matryoshka, the tale of a young servant girl who enchants a prince at a fabulous party, seen through the eyes of a spoiled young princess who expected the story to be about her, and an empress in a castle who sets tigers on her would-be rescuers. An early story, Underskirts, concerns a female variant on the Bluebeard character, examined from multiple perspectives, including those of her husband and the servant girls.

Many of these stories feature characters on the cusp of adolescence, and take place in appropriately liminal surroundings. Logan is a fan of the carnivalesque, both in traditional forms such as circuses and balls, and more modern settings, like drunken nights in children’s playgrounds. Her characters exhibit a reckless hunger for discovery; these are not meek Red Riding Hoods, but adventurers who race into the forest to find out what is lying in wait for them. What they find there might not be what we would expect, either. In The Witches, a teenager is dared to go looking for Baba Yaga, by a girl she has been fooling around with. Already heady with adolescent experimentation (‘she had been plying me with her mum’s stolen booze and sucking my tongue on the roundabout in the children’s playground. Everything was spinning so fast’), the narrator marches into the woods, where she loses her bearings, and is aroused by the sight of a couple fucking in the bushes, before stumbling upon the reputed witch’s home. Instead of finding a child-eating old crone, she encounters a woman who can offer her much more than the girl in the playground.

The narrator of The Witches is certainly no naif (‘at sixteen it was very important to be louche’). The same is true of the adventuress in Tiger Palace, a ‘once upon a time’ story of a woman travelling into the jungle, braving reports of alligators and tigers, to try to rescue an empress imprisoned in a palace. The young woman here is far from defenceless. Nature may be red in tooth and claw but so is she, armed with her ‘ten inch machete’ and with ‘no qualms about eating every part of the birds she catches’.

Elsewhere, Logan plays with the idea of technology as a solution to emotional problems. In the title story, a young woman is able to hire a new heart at the beginning of each relationship. At first, they are returned in pristine condition, securing the return of her deposit every time. Later experiences leave her hearts increasingly battered. The story also allows Logan to satirise the fetishisation of gadgetry – each time she visits the rental store, she sees ‘hearts sleeker and shinier than I remembered… as smooth and seamless as a stone’.  In Coin-Operated Boys, a woman is able to rent a robotic companion, with the aim of deterring over-enthusiastic suitors, before coming to love the automaton’s deference and vulnerability.

If there is a drawback to The Rental Heart, it is that the collection is not entirely cohesive. Many of the stories have appeared elsewhere, and whilst the range of styles is admirable, it stops the book from becoming a completely immersive experience. Four of the stories were originally broadcast on radio, and are maybe better suited to being heard than read. A couple of other stories, including The Broken West, tone down the magic in favour of a grittier realism, which appealed less to me.

At her best, however, Logan deserves comparison to writers like Jeanette Winterson and Jess Richards for the vividness of her imagination. The Scottish literary scene has produced a series of highly original voices in recent years, such as Jenni Fagan and Kerry Hudson, and The Rental Heart certainly suggests that Logan can stand alongside them.