In 1919, Sherwood Anderson published Winesburg Ohio, a collection of 22 short stories. Each of the segments focused on an individual resident of the fictional town, isolating one character trait which had come to dominate their psyche, rendering them ‘grotesque’. The denizens of David Gaffney’s More Sawn-Off Tales are similarly marked – within these 150 word vignettes, we see snapshots of disconnected couples, unsatisfying jobs, the ideas which form in people’s heads without ever being ready to be released. This is a dark, urban world, for the most part, punctuated with flashes of understated surrealism and irony.
As you’d expect from Salt, what’s important in More Sawn-off Stories is often what’s left unsaid – Gaffney’s writing can be mysterious and wistful, and he avoids bringing his stories to conclusions – but there is a fierce and surprising imagination firing these brief pieces. The most successful make bold opening statements, before going on to occupy the same uneasy territory between surrealism and mundanity that Chris Morris explored in Jam.
One story, for example, begins with the words ‘The frenetic gut-filth roar from DJ Stinger next door was seriously disturbing my alpacas’, immediately parachuting the reader into unfamiliar territory. Relationships become imbued with sinister qualities; in It Happens Inside, a radiologist breaks into a neighbour’s flat repeatedly in order to x-ray his belongings, getting to know him from the inside out. Everywhere’s West of Somewhere is more playful, providing a novel insight into trust issues: ‘Time slowed down as the vase arced through the air. You can discover everything about your girlfriend by tossing a breakable object towards her. Is she poised? Confident in her judgements? Does she seem willing to take responsibility for someone else’s actions?’ Elsewhere, the ironic tone gives way to bitterness: 'there is a place called Hope, and people live there. Hope is a town where you can rot away from the inside and no-one notices'
There is a lot of sex in these stories, but it is rarely erotic. It is either rigorously planned, as it is for Izzy, who was ‘willing to have sex with me only if it was in an empty property that we didn’t own – that was just the way she was, terrified of permanence’, or something to be engaged in for revenge, in the case of Hilary, who decides to seduce her mother’s ex-boyfriends one by one. Everyone over-analyses: ‘precise calibration was important to our relationship… we were continually striving to quantify the length of time we’d been a couple’.
At times, reading More Sawn-Off Tales feels like viewing the emergence of a dystopia through the prism of a local newspaper's coverage. In Effective Calming Methods, the narrator opines 'I went home and set fire to the neighbours' shed... All I am waiting for is some intelligence to come out of the mouths of council staff'. Occasionally, things boil over completely into comic absurdity, as in The Listed Bridge, in which a man has become housebound because his penis has grown too large: ‘firemen would climb up on it and sit in a row swinging their legs’, whilst discussing the congestion problems caused by a low listed bridge in Kendal. This story exemplifies the way in which Gaffney combines the everyday with the bizarre.
More Sawn-Off Tales is rich with phrases which will stick in the reader’s memory (‘I keep a ball of tissue under my armpit and drop shreds of it into her food to keep her loyal’) and ideas which are ripe for expansion into longer stories, such as the psychiatrists who organise arts activities for their manic patients so that they can burgle their houses. Consumed in one sitting, some of the stories lose their impact under the weight of ideas, but Gaffney's world is an intriguing one to dip into - you just wouldn't want to live there.
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