Read Women 2014

#ReadWomen2014 began when author and designer Joanna Walsh created a series of five ‘cartes des voeux’ to give out as new year presents. The cards featured cartoons of Walsh’s favourite female writers, including Marguerite Duras and Gertrude Stein, with a list of 250 more authors she admired on the reverse. Walsh was encouraged to tweet the names, and other tweeters joined in with their suggestions. From there, the idea snowballed, with readers, journalists and bloggers committing to reading more books by women, to try and challenge traditional imbalances in the way female authors are packaged and reviewed.

While there are more women reading books than men, and there are about as many women writing as there are men, this isn’t reflected in the media, as the annual VIDA reports show. This is particularly true of high end publications, with the London Review of Books being a notable bastion of male privilege. Women have had a good record at literary awards recently, but even then authors have had to put up with sexist coverage (‘natural blonde’ Eleanor Catton at the Booker, for example) and dreadful covers, as any visit to Waterstone’s will testify. The aim of Read Women 2014 is to make people think more about their reading habits, making small individual steps towards a level playing field.

I want to use #readwomen2014 to fill some gaps in my reading history – a mixture of modern classics and contemporary novels that I haven’t got round to yet. I’m challenging myself to read one a month, in addition to the books (by male and female authors) that I normally read and review. So far, I’ve decided on the following: The Years (Virginia Woolf), Wolf Hall (Hilary Mantel), Life After Life (Kate Atkinson), White Teeth (Zadie Smith), The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood), I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou), Americanah (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) and A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (Xiaolu Guo). That leaves four spaces – I’d be grateful for any recommendations / suggestions.

In return, here are a few ideas for anyone else using 2014 to read more female writers – hopefully some of these will be new to you:

Rebecca West is best known for her novels, but her reportage is also stunning. Abrasive and intelligent, her writing is deeply opinionated, almost shockingly so, compared to the modern preference for ‘balance’. A Train of Powder is a fascinating insight into the Nuremberg trials, combined with reports on lynchings in the American South; The Meaning of Treason explores the careers of British citizens who collaborated with the Nazis during World War II. Both are well worth revisiting.

Other non-fiction pics would be Shame, by Jasvinder Sanghera, an account of forced marriages in Britain which mixes the personal and polemical to great effect, and Gitta Sereny’s books Cries Unheard and Into That Darkness, which confront the perpetrators of evil acts, probing to find the psychological reality behind them. Finally, while Angela Carter’s novels are widely read, it’s also well worth picking up The Sadean Woman if you haven’t already, for a fiercely argued essay on sexuality and porn.

If you’re looking for bold, subversive modern novels, I’d suggest Lightning Rods by Helen Dewitt, The Quiddity of Will Self by Sam Mills, or Alice the Sausage by Sophie Jabes; I don’t think there’s much chance of any of them being reissued with a picture of someone looking wistfully out of a window on the cover. Joanna Walsh’s own collection, Fractals, contains glimpses into the lives of disaffected and alienated women, with a very continental feel.  

And a couple of older ones. In The Second Year by Storm Jameson is a powerful and urgent dystopian novel from 1936, imagining Britain as a Fascist dictatorship; Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women is more subtle, but the Austen-like prose conceals a subversive message. Mrs Caliban by Rachel Ingalls, the story of a housewife’s affair with a sea monster named Larry, is also worth a look.

Happy reading, if you're taking part, and let me know what else I should be looking at.
Read more about ReadWomen2014 on Badaude or on Twitter #readwomen2014

UPDATE
Based on recommendations received, the extra four books on my reading list will be Joy Williams: The Quick and The Dead, Evie Wyld: All The Birds, Singing, Germaine Greer: The Female Eunuch and Jeanette Winterson: Written on the Body

Eat My Heart Out - Zoe Pilger

‘Looking into your sarcastic eyes is like looking into the post-feminist whirly-pool itself’.

Beginning in a literal meat-market, before careering its way through Soho restaurants, Cambridge colleges and East London pop-up galleries, Zoe Pilger’s debut novel is a savage and exhilarating read, managing to parody the conventions of romantic comedy whilst also providing an abrasive commentary on the politics of post-feminism, through the eyes of the protagonist, Anne-Marie.

Ann-Marie is directionless since dropping out of university. Her romantic life has been shattered by the revelation that ‘my ex-boyfriend Sebastian was fucking this girl from the home counties called Allegra behind my back’. She shares a flat with her gay best friend, a wannabe director, who films her re-enacting famous literary suicides. Away from the structured life of academia, she feels lost, only able to read ‘terrible comic-style-philosophy manuals, and only one or two sentences at a time’. For want of anything better to do, she works as the ‘reception bitch’ at an awful overpriced restaurant, whose awful patrons say awful things like ‘She’s a paradigm of selfish fucking neo-liberal individualism, Stephanie.’ (shades of William Donaldson’s parody of received opinion, I’m Leaving You, Simon, You Disgust Me?).

So far, the set-up is structurally similar to the standard chick-lit theme of the unlucky-in-love young woman, looking for the right person to come along and help her to get her life on track (albeit an unsanitised, druggy version, more ketamine than chardonnay). Then, the novel goes down the rabbit hole. During what turns out to be her final shift at the restaurant, she meets Stephanie Haight, an icon of second wave feminism who decides to make Ann-Marie her next project. Acting like a radical fairy godmother, Stephanie forces the younger woman to take part in voodoo rebirthing ceremonies, strip-club auditions and Woman’s Hour interviews, whilst attempting to introduce a critical framework to underpin Ann-Marie’s existence. What becomes clear is that there is an unbridgeable generation gap separating the two. Stephanie is happy to hold forth as an observer of ‘this Sadeian generation, raised on internet pornography’, but she never really understands her subject, dismissing anything she disagrees with as ‘childish provocation’.

In one telling scene, Stephanie demands that Ann-Marie take part in a form of primal scream therapy, chanting the lyrics to Beyonce songs over and over until she has no voice left. When Ann-Marie falls to the floor, exhausted, Stephanie thrusts a pen and paper at her, telling her to write, but no words come. Stephanie promptly posts a photo of the empty page to her blog, describing it as ‘a testament to the silence of your generation of women, who neglect to vote despite the fact that your forebears starved to death to win the vote’. The blog goes viral, and the pair are invited onto Radio 4, where Stephanie continues to make ex-cathedra statements about the younger generation. Ann-Marie is anonymous, a bag over her head, a blank slate for the older women to project onto.

Stephanie defines post-feminism as ‘kitsch… the aftermath of true existence’. (‘In the kingdom of kitsch you would be a monster’, Kundera said – a line that would fairly apply to Ann-Marie). The problem of how to construct an identity in a world where equality has apparently been achieved is crucial for Ann-Marie and her social group. They cling to relics of their childhood, like Disney movies, or adopt hipster affectations, talking in Tao Lin quotes. For women, the problem is exacerbated; as Stephanie pithily sums up, ‘you’re caught between the housewife and the whore. That bloody Nigella Lawson has got a lot to answer for’. Images of Amy Winehouse recur throughout the novel like a secular saint, Princess Di for Generation Y. Winehouse has become something of a floating signifier onto which characters can project their own prejudices, turning her life into a celebration of female creativity and myth-making, or the tragedy of a woman who fell for a man and then negated herself by her determination to stay with him; a post-modern icon for a post-feminist culture.

Ann-Marie picks up identities as it suits her, throwing herself recklessly into them in order to test her boundaries. In her first appearance, she appears predatory, an embodiment of raunch culture, full of suggestive chat about adopting pussies, and ‘lounging around on my chaise longue in my red silk kimono’. Later, she demonstrates an equal familiarity with the language of self-help, describing her Cambridge education as ‘a curse and a blessing in a way because when one elevates oneself above the quotidian, one starts feeling terribly lonesome, as though one will never find a soulmate again’. In the absence of a clearly-defined role to perform, she bounces around from one identity to another, ‘trapped in all this freedom’. Her speech rarely rings true, suggesting her own lack of conviction in the characters she adopts.

The sense of identity as a fluid, unfixed commodity is reinforced by Pilger’s magpie style, which borrows scenarios from rom-coms, jargon from academia and stylistic tics from alt lit, such as her way of orientating the reader through constant references to Stuff – 50 Shades, magazines, TV programmes. Also familiar from alt lit is the protagonist’s sense of alienation from the events which surround her, and the stream of mooted projects which never come to fruition. Eat My Heart Out also comes with a hefty dose of satire, as Pilger skewers the cutesiness of ‘post-feminist cupcakes’ and the ‘having your feminist cupcake and eating it’ idiom of London’s nightlife alike: ‘It’s like a neo-burlesque social innovation start-up? It’s a pop-up? It’s not like stripping’.

While there’s plenty of material for readers to get their teeth into, thematically (and the novel clearly encourages this, Pilger inserting a series of closely observed facsimiles of academic literature into the text), Eat Your Heart Out is, above all, a genuinely entertaining read. Propelled along at a manic pace, there are some brilliantly observed set pieces. She might not be at Alan Hollinghurst’s exalted level, but Pilger can write a party, the Samuel Johnson Prize dinner and the opening night of a pop-up art gallery being two highlights. There are castrations, literal and metaphorical, there are scenes of outrageous hedonism and horrific comedowns.

The Telegraph has recently identified and branded a new genre, ‘chick noir’ (please god let it never catch on), in which authors chart the break-up of marriages, rather than the build-up. To continue using cinematic terms, if Gone Girl is noir, then Eat My Heart Out is a video nasty, provocative, cathartic and full of adrenaline-pumping thrills. 

Ich bin ein Dandy

So, what is a dandy? In some respects, dandyism is a form of magic, or at least it requires a certain amount of magical thinking. Many dandyish affectations (smoking a pipe, drinking absinthe, wearing a cravat) involve a ritualistic set of activities, performed largely in private, with the aim of altering the consciousness of the participant. A well-tailored suit, the right pair of shoes or accessory, can confer a profound feeling of calm, confidence or wellbeing in the wearer as much as any concoction of herbs brewed up in a cauldron. Perhaps it is easier to identify dandyism than it is to define it. Sartorial elegance is clearly a requirement; the dandy must dress with a unique twist, develop a trademark, whether it be Oscar Wilde’s green carnation or Gerard de Nerval’s pet lobster, which he would walk on a lead through the Palais Royal gardens in Paris...

Read my essay on Dandyism and the politics of style over at 3am Magazine

News From Nowhere 4

News From Nowhere is pouting coquettishly from the casting couch this month, with our updates taking a cinematic turn. Firstly, we were excited and alarmed in equal measure by the prospect of a celluloid adaptation of Charlotte Roche’s debut novel Wetlands. The film premiered at Sundance on January 18; a preview in Variety promises ‘computer-animated renderings of toilet-seat bacteria’ and suggests that director David Wnendt hasn’t shied away from Roche’s depictions of haemorrhoid treatments.  

Also in the news, Manchester-based authors Chris Killen, Joe Stretch and Socrates Adams have been at Utah’s Slamdance festival promoting their award-winning film Wizard’s Way, set to be remade by Jack Black. Based on a fictional online role-play game, the film was co-written and directed by the three, who also make appearances in front of the camera. With Jenni Fagan also working on an adaptation of The Panopticon, maybe we’ll finally start seeing some movies which live up to the books that spawned them.

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Next, to the Telegraph, where a new literary genre has been tagged, labelled and laid out on the slab. According to that organ of the press, 2014 will be dominated by what nobody is calling ‘chick noir’; books charting the dissolution of marriages, from the female point of view. If Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl is the Bridget Jones of the genre, then Season To Taste by Nathalie Young is it’s Cannibal Holocaust. The story of a woman who impulsively caves her spouse’s head in with a spade, before dismembering and cooking him, the book has been branded in some quarters as ‘the next 50 Shades’. Whether that means the British lit scene is going to end up like that village in Hungary where everyone poisoned their husbands is unclear; if so, maybe even the LRB will have to start employing some female writers. In the meantime, as Flossieraptor the wise points out, we await the day when domestic dramas aimed at a primarily male readership get referred to as 'dick noir'.

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The Bookseller has revealed that former Granta man Philip Gwyn Jones has joined Scribe UK as an editor at large, starting this month.Gwyn Jones was rumoured to have been responsible for bringing Eleanor Catton to Granta, amongst other big names, before leaving as part of owner Sigrid Rausing's restructuring of the business. Now, he is charged with building up a list of prestige titles for Scribe, a relative newcomer to British publishing. In some ways, Gwyn Jones's position mirrors that of Ravi Mirchandani and James Gurbutt, both of whom were let go from Random House imprints before moving to smaller publishers, where they discovered, respectively, White Tiger and A Visit From the Goon Squad. So maybe we should expect big things from Gwyn Jones - meanwhile, the question to ask is why can't big publishers give these editors the freedom they clearly merit?

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Now that the cosy literary prizes are out of the way (and the Bad Sex), it’s time to bang the nails down on 2013’s coffin with the Hatchet Job of the Year award. The award is sponsored by the Fish Society, appropriately, since several of this year’s entries fall in to the ‘fish in a barrel’ category – for example Rachael Cooke on Anne Widdicombe’s ‘lofty and wrong-headed’ memoir, Strictly Anne. Likewise, it doesn’t take a genius to identify Morrissey’s 'pooterish' self-importance, as AA Gill does. Elsewhere, though, some sacred cows at least are taken on, in the form of Peter Kemp’s piece on The Goldfinch and Lucy Ellman’s skewering of Coupland’s wretched Worst. Person. Ever. And at least David Sexton writes with some conviction about The Luminaries, even if he is totally wrong.

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Stung by my Gran’s criticisms of Wolf Hall (she got Thomas Cromwell all wrong, apparently), Hilary Mantel has wisely decided to move away from historical fiction (for the time being) with the announcement of a new short story collection, The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher, due in September. Following on from the controversy over her speech about Kate Middleton last year, we applaud her dedication to winding up the Daily Mail. 

Review: Morphologies - Comma Press, ed. Ra Page

Short fiction has long been a playground for authors to experiment with, sketching out story ideas which will later develop into novels, or playing with styles and genres. The rise of e-readers has encouraged publishers to take a similarly speculative approach to the format, trying out new approaches to bring short stories to the public. Comma Press has played a part in this process with the development of Gimbal, a literary iPhone app which allows users to choose a city and travel through it, using short stories as a guide. Now, their anthology Morphologies (edited by Ra Page) explores short fiction further, investigating the key writers between 1835 and 1935 to get to the heart of what makes the short story work, as well as hopefully ‘pointing readers to texts they might not have considered before; encouraging people to re-read old favourites’.

The attraction of Morphologies for me was the opportunity to read today’s leading short story writers discussing the authors who influenced them; the chance to get Ali Smith’s thoughts on James Joyce, or Alison MacLeod on Katherine Mansfield. In the more exciting sections, we see the contributors getting carried away pressing the claims of their chosen subject. At various points, Sara Maitland describes Nathaniel Hawthorne as a Magic Realist a century before the fact, Ramsey Campbell calls Lovecraft ‘the most important twentieth century writer of tales of terror’, and, best of all, Stephen Baxter declares HG Wells to be a potential saviour of the world, thanks to his 1897 story The Star, which influenced the development of asteroid detection and deflection programmes. Others, though, find themselves bogged down in the minutiae of textual criticism. Stuart Evers, for example, exhaustively analyses Sherwood Anderson’s style without ever conveying to the reader the intriguing oddness of his signature collection Winesburg, Ohio, which makes it so compelling to the reader.

Morphologies celebrates the sheer variety of short fiction. In some examples, such as the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle, the satisfaction comes from the conclusion, in which a mysterious narrative is wrapped up, providing closure for the reader. Another approach is highlighted by Toby Litt, who describes Kafka as wanting to ‘open out possibilities so infinite that the original wanting is entirely moot, and the opening eternally backgrounded’. So disconcerting is this effect that Litt’s essay breaks down into a fractured inquiry into what Literature actually means, making this one of the most interesting sections of the collection.

So what makes certain writers so effective when it comes to short fiction? It may be an issue of temperament. According to Aldous Huxley, DH Lawrence saw life as a series of episodic interludes, with no overarching narrative or closure; he started afresh ‘as though he were newly reborn from a mortal illness every day of his life’. His short stories reflect this attitude; one, Daughters of the Vicar, is even broken down into 15 shorter fragments, with storylines abruptly discarded along the way. For others, it is a question of technique. Martin Edwards argues that Conan Doyle works best in the short story format, as it allows him to keep the fascinating character of Sherlock Holmes front and centre. Longer stories such as The Hound of the Baskervilles see the great detective kept out of the way for long stretches, testing the reader’s patience. Others were simply more playful; Jane Rogers highlights the satirical nature of Dostoyevsky’s short fiction, a quality often lacking from his novels.

The authors who engaged most with the real world have dated somewhat; Brian Aldiss, in his discussion of Thomas Hardy, acknowledges that his readership has waned ‘now we have fewer milkmaids, while scheming barons go under other names’. On the other hand, writers like Chekov, who focus on the psychological, still inspire authors today. In terms of direct influence, few can match the impact of Lovecraft, whose Cthulhu Mythos has been picked up and developed by scores of modern admirers. Lovecraft’s short fiction eschews the detailed scene-setting typical of the horror genre, preferring instead to plunge his readers straight into a world of primal, howling terror. There is a Jungian aspect to Lovecraft’s work, the idea of chaos lurking beneath a veneer of modern rationality in the human psyche; the subconscious language of dreams is also applied to the work of authors as seemingly disparate as Edgar Allen Poe and Katherine Mansfield. In both cases, their short stories seem to be already in progress as we join them, like the experience of dreaming.

The best contributions here offer a fresh perspective on members of the canon; Adam Philips’s discussion of Rudyard Kipling, for example, makes the author sound far more interesting than his public perception suggests. ‘It’s hard being an admirer of Kipling when your political sympathies are like mine’, he admits (a caveat that would also apply to many Lovecraft fans), but the way in which Kipling resists the rush to conclusion that short fiction sometimes encourages, and his ability to heighten dramatic tension by leaving key facts and events unexplained, make Philips an unlikely fan. Martin Edwards chooses to concentrate not on Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, but instead plays up his lesser-known, rather gory sounding tales.

Overall, while the most interesting entries here combine academic appreciation with wide-eyed enthusiasm, the focus on literary technique and close readings of individual stories might mean that Morphologies is slightly more of interest to creative writers than to the general reader. One useful feature, though, is that each contributor has chosen ten key stories by their subject; as all the stories are out of copyright now, these should be easily and cheaply available. It’s always a good sign when you come away from a book with a long list of new stories to read, and Morphologies will provide plenty of inspiration for readers and writers alike.

Review: The Gospel According to Cain - Courttia Newland

Courttia Newland’s seventh novel, The Gospel According to Cain, explores the relationship between a young man who seemingly has no past, and a middle-aged woman who cannot escape from hers. Beverly Cottrell, the narrator, had her comfortable life irrevocably derailed by the theft of her baby from a parked car, whilst in the negligent care of its father. Two decades on, a disturbing presence enters her life: Wills, a sullen, troubled young man who claims to be her son. This confrontation is the starting point for an emotionally raw discussion of identity and belonging.

Newland has written extensively for the stage, and the set-up of this novel is reminiscent of the claustrophobic domestic power-struggles found in Pinter’s plays. Whether he is her son or not, Wills is a brooding, accusatory figure who takes up residence in Beverley’s home, his presence immediately disturbing the balance of her relationships with friends, neighbours and relatives.

Beverly is a socially ambiguous character. Wealthy enough not to have to work, she runs an evening class in creative writing for at-risk youths in her local area; although she forms a close, motherly bond with her students, and is capable of inspiring them, her vocabulary and manner of speech separates her from them. Likewise, she is not an entirely comfortable member of the middle classes; at school, she felt poorer than her classmates, and she is emotionally distant from her sister Jackie, an academic. Her psyche is mirrored by her surroundings. She is close to the markets of Holland Park, where she can browse the organic produce, ‘admiring the peacocks and rabbits’, but she has to walk home through streets where she has heard ‘stories of people being shot for asking the young not to smoke in a public place’.

Subconsciously, the guilt she feels at the loss of her son seems to manifest itself as a deeper feeling of guilt at her ‘privilege’. In her dreams, she returns to the slave colonies of nineteenth century Barbados, where her family ‘sells products of slavery to plantation owners’. After the reappearance of her ‘son’, who she knows has enjoyed none of the advantages she could have provided for him, she begins to see these reminders in her waking life too, in symbols like the logo of a rum bottle, ‘a tan table depicting dark men, fields…’ In her class, she asks her kids to confront their past and the society they inhabit, but she struggles to face up to the same questions in her own life. As she becomes more emotionally committed to Wills, she senses that she may be abandoning the kids who look up to her, further heightening this sense of betrayal.

Wills is similarly complex. In a one-on-one situation with Beverly, he is by turns sullen and needy, manipulating her and playing up her hope of redemption – such is her desire to accept him, she rejects advice to get a DNA test. In more social situations he struggles. His friend, Vicky, tells Beverly that Wills has tried to make something of himself (‘he used to put on events, like rap and poetry nights, positive stuff’), but feels as trapped by the past as his ‘mother’ is: ‘he got into the Black shit… Panthers an Malcolm an all that. Trouble with Black shit is once you got the knowledge you gotta deal wiv the fact you can’t leave’.

Language plays an important role in the novel. While Beverly and the kids from her class have a very different manner of speech, there are efforts on both sides to bridge the gap; the kids open up emotionally, while Beverly playfully uses street slang from time to time. However, the divisive qualities of discourse are illustrated in the confrontation between Wills and Beverly’s family. Her sister Jackie, and brother-in-law Frank, come to the flat while she is out, trying to cow Wills with their academic language and passive-aggressive psychologising. Lacking the tools to fight back on their terms, Wills reverts to the language of the streets. Neither side understanding the conventions of what is being expressed, the argument flares out of control: ‘Wills did say he’d slap her, he admitted, but it was an idle threat. Frank jumped up and tried to manhandle him, perhaps in an attempt to defend his wife’s honour. Wills went into the kitchen, got the big knife, and emerged, pointing it at them. They got up pretty damn quick after that’. His sense of latent violence is picked up by the kids Beverly teaches, who instantly distrust him: ‘you shouldn’t let strange youts in yuh gates, miss… Man’s dodgy’.

As Wills’ presence in Beverly’s life threatens to become permanent, she experiences a loss of agency. While she is self-supporting, and has the economic means to manage her life as she sees fit, her decisions are questioned by those around her, from the counsellor she sees for her anxiety to her family and even her students, who all feel a sense of ownership over her. At the novel’s climax, a series of violent confrontations occur in her own home, in which the participants disregard her presence entirely. It is clear that this black woman’s life is seen as community property, and she is not seen as being capable of acting in her own best interests.

There are flaws in The Gospel According to Cane; for an epistolary novel, there are a few too many literary flourishes, as Beverly meditates on the act of writing itself, and intersperses her narrative with dictionary definitions of pain. Also, while the author can’t be blamed for this, I feel the book is very poorly served by its cover and accompanying blurb, which give the impression that this is a bog-standard piece of misery-lit rather than the visceral exploration of race, identity and power contained within. If I hadn’t known the author’s name I certainly wouldn’t have considered reading it based on first impressions, which would have been a huge shame.

These issues are outweighed by the book’s strengths though; the characterisation is extremely strong, and the narrative has a powerfully dramatic arc. Newland resists easy conclusions, and balances complex themes skilfully without a sense that the action is being manipulated by a need to make points. The momentum of the story means this is a novel to be read quickly and reflected on at length; as with Pinter, there is an unsettling quality to the novel that lingers in the memory.

Review: Unthology 4 - edited by Ashley Stokes & Robin Jones

The latest instalment of the Unthology series from Unthank Books sets out to showcase a ‘variety of styles, voices and visions of what it is to be human’. The publishers are keen supporters of creative writing, through their evening classes and online modules, and the anthology features an interesting mix of new and established writers. There’s no overarching theme to Unthology 4, but editors Ashley Stokes and Robin Jones have exercised good quality control, and put together a collection which is broadly cohesive without becoming stale. Generally, the writing would be called ‘literary’ – there are a couple of entries which verge on the dystopian edge of sci-fi or psychological horror, but generally the ‘genre’ quotient is low.

The collection kicks off with a Rodge Glass story, A Real T.O.A. I was a big fan of his travel-themed 2013 collection LoveSexTravelMusik, and this story treads over similar ground. His characters, a relatively wealthy professional couple, have travelled across the globe, but find their problems have hitched a ride with them. There is a sense of frustration, or guilt, that they are not able to enjoy the pay-off from their work: ‘If this is prison then why is there sand in your cell? Maybe your skull is an open prison’. Travel becomes almost a compulsion, a senseless reaction to stress: ‘you think about whether you’d just crack and end up one morning in Uruguay, nails painted blue, dancing the tango’. Maybe the problem lies in their decision to follow the beaten path, doing typical tourist things, instead of trying to find a deeper connection with their new surroundings; a failure of the imagination which is reflected in the couple’s relationship.

There is a sense of ironic understatement in Glass’s story, and this is also true of many of Unthology’s highlights. Carys Bray’s Treasures of Heaven uses an exhibition of religious artefacts at the British Museum as a launching point for reminiscence about her protagonist’s Mormon upbringing, in particular her experience, at the age of 12, of being interviewed by a Bishop about masturbation and other sins of the flesh (‘you had quite liked yourself up until that moment’). Bray discusses the pains of trying to overcome guilt, gradually coming to terms with your own desires (sexual and social), and the lingering effects of childhood influences. The story may well appeal to fans of Jenn Ashworth’s The Friday Gospels. Sarah Bower’s Finished takes a similar approach to the lives of upper-middle class women of a certain age. The story focusses on Charlotte, who has ‘a mediocre degree from a respectable university in something like art history or English literature. She has completed courses in cordon bleu cookery and flower arranging… even leaned how to climb out of the passenger seat of a low-slung sports car, wearing a short skirt, without revealing her underwear’. Anger gradually rises from the previously genteel narrative, as the sense grows that Charlotte’s life has been wasted by following the path mapped out for her. Suicide Bomber, by Melanie Whipman, is another interesting piece, which captures some of the everyday cruelty and frustration of school and contains a nicely understated surprise in its ending.

Anger is also a feature of Barnaby Walsh’s Violet. There is an echo of Shane Meadows in Walsh’s account of small-town lives which are seemingly pre-programmed to go down the wrong path. A barely suppressed violence seeps through this account of a school drop-out whose chance of happiness with a girl he meets in a library is put into jeopardy by his uncle’s criminal scheming. If all the stories mentioned so far have a sense of ‘normal people leading normal lives’, elsewhere the anthology heads into more unusual grounds. Eden Dust, by Michael Crossan, and The Murder of Crows by Marc Owen Jones both explore dystopian themes. Of the two, I found Jones’s more interesting; starting with the idea ‘what would happen if all the birds suddenly disappeared?’, his story mixes gentle humour (the first sign of disruption is that ‘Nando’s was switching their menu to ribs and KFC was going out of business’) and insight (the profoundly disturbing effect of the absence of birdsong in public areas). There is a hint of John Wyndham about the way the story mixes the speculative and the everyday. Adrian Slatcher’s contribution, The Cat, is a creepy, unusual story, in which the ‘black dog’ of legend is replaced by a mysterious feline. Rather than being oppressive, life with the cat becomes something comfortable, easy to slip into. There is a pleasingly whimsical side to the writing which leavens the account of depression and squalor. Less whimsical, Sarah Evans’s The Angel is an effective psychological horror story, in which cracks in a couple’s relationship, heightened by differences over religion, are bought into the open by a horrible discovery on Christmas Eve.

A couple of contributions address current issues. Burning Man, by Rowena MacDonald, is an opposites meet story; a beggar, horribly disfigured following a friendly fire incident during the first Gulf War, does a favour for a drunken city-boy, and is invited back to his flat in return. Gradually, the beggar reveals more of himself, describing the way that his injuries dissolved his sense of self, leading him to embrace Buddhism and become a sort of ‘holy mendicant’, a public reminder of the impermanence of possessions and the physical body. The title is an interesting play on words, referencing both the beggar’s physical change, and the festival held each year in Nevada, at which hippies come together to find spiritual solace through rituals, workshops and drug taking, while the way in which MacDonald focusses her attention on the beggar, providing him with a rich and surprising back-story, is an inversion of the attention normally paid to upper and lower class individuals.

Meanwhile, Administration: An Intern’s Guide by Joshua Allen is a surreal take on the hoops job-seekers need to jump through to find employment. Allen creates a Chris Morris-esque parody of corporate-speak, creating adverts which read ‘We require a seething intern, who knows there is no ‘I’ in salary, to implode our nest of dust-busters’. Over the course of the whole story, the cumulative effect is a little wearisome, but Administration is a reminder of the benefit of including some humour in anthologies – the story immediately stands out, and has a refreshing effect. Finally, The Laundry Key Complex by Aiden O’Reilly goes deeper in its attempt to analyse the human condition, using residents’ misuse of the system of signing out the key for the laundry room in a student dormitory building as an indicator of a malaise in our social structures and attitudes. There is something almost Selfian in the way O’Reilly psychoanalyses wider cultural problems through a seemingly absurd microcosm, making this one of the most satisfying stories in Unthology.

Overall, Unthology 4 is a good read. Its varied focus makes it hard to draw conclusions, although in terms of the modern short story, there are some common threads. The contributions are largely third person narratives, and generally eschew verbal pyrotechnics or unusual occurrences in favour of understatement and the slow reveal. However, there’s enough diversity in terms of theme and style to keep the reader interested - my own preference would be for more stories along the lines of The Laundry Key Complex, but I enjoyed sampling stories like The Angel too. The authors themselves are a mixture of the established professional, the up-and-coming, and the hobbyist, but the editors maintain a good standard of writing throughout; some stories interested me more than others, but there were none I would call badly written. The news is that short stories are enjoying a resurgence, and Unthology 4 backs this up – there are clearly lots of good ones being written. If you’re a fan of the form, or you’re starting to get interested, I’d recommend it. 

Review: A Girl Is A Half-Formed Thing - Eimear McBride

Review by Jayne White

I can’t help feeling I’m a bit late to the party with my review of this book; it was released last January after all. Published by the small independent Galley Beggar Press, it received good reviews and its reputation has been building gradually through the year up until it won the Goldsmiths Prize last November and really got a concentrated dose of media attention. The Goldsmiths Prize has been set up to "recognise published fiction that opens up new possibilities for the novel form". You only have to look at the first chapter of this novel to see why it was a contender, as the style is quite extraordinary. I don’t want to say too much about the storyline in this review; I’d like anyone who reads this book to discover it in the way I did.

The entire book is written in a stream of consciousness narrative which has drawn comparisons with Beckett and Joyce. In the first chapter the narrator is an unborn baby girl who is sharing and relaying her mother’s thoughts and feelings as her young son is operated on and receives treatment for a brain tumour; as her husband leaves her on realising that the child is going to live on damaged rather than die soon: and as she gives birth to the narrator, whereupon her link with her mother is broken. It’s an emotional start and the style of writing communicates emotion directly to the reader in a way that is extremely rare.

“Gethsemane dear Lord hear our prayer our. Please. Intercession. Night in hospital beds. Faces on the candlewick. Lino in the knees. Please don’t God take. Our. Holy Mary mother of all, humbly we beseech thee.”

“There’s good news and bad news. It’s shrunk. He’s saved. He’s not. He’ll never be. So like it lump it a short breath’s what you got. Jesus in her blood that minute. Rejoice sacred heart of Christ. But we’ll never be rid do you understand? he says. Shush now she says shush.”

As you can see from the quotations above, punctuation is non-standard. As an attempt to convey the rhythm and significance of particular words and phrases within thoughts I think it’s effective. The story is set in Ireland and the religiosity of the language where the brain falls back on traditional catholic prayers and biblical phrases continues through the book. In moments of particularly severe pain and confusion, the words themselves begin to disintegrate.

The story spans 20 years and the author places the characters, none of which are named, in settings that will resonate with all of us. There are the early memories of the toddler, classroom stories, playground stories, a family funeral, the first kiss. She tries to stay in keeping with the maturity of the narrator character at each stage and the thoughts are generally uncensored. As far as I could see she broke each of these rules once. Her grandfather visits when she’s very young, but the description of his pious malignancy is in the adult voice, fittingly I think, as it’s important that we understand why this little family unit is so neglected by the wider family.

“Under the thumb of him. Under his hand. Movie star father with his fifteen young. His poor Carole Lombard fucked into the ground. Though we don’t say those words. To each other. Yet.”

On another occasion the story we’re told first is what the character wished had happened: how she was strong and protected herself: before she admits the lie and gives us the awful, painful truth.

The book is rather bleak about human nature. We learn about the characters from seeing the way they hurt or are hurt by others. The only caring is that which the damaged siblings find for each other. If there was light in the darkness for these children, we see very little of it here.

I offered to review this book for the Fop a while ago, some weeks before I found time to sit down and read it. When I mentioned I’d read it, he asked me the standard question, ‘Did you enjoy it?’ I found myself rather stuck for an answer. It’s a dark book, an intense book, and it took me to places I’d never normally go. In fact, it’s a book which should carry one of those ‘If you’ve been affected by any of the issues...’ statements that you get after soap episodes which might be deemed ‘trigger-y’ for abuse victims or the recently bereaved. In the end I had to say that I appreciated the book rather than that I enjoyed it. However, I don’t want to put you off it; I would sincerely urge you to take the time to appreciate this book too. After all, how often, as a well-read adult, do you find a book which is so distinctive and effective that it expands your view of what a writer can achieve?

Thoughts on the Costa Book Awards

There’s only one hair colour that matters in the literary world this year, as the Costa Book Awards followed the Man Booker by giving their ‘Best Novel’ gong to a blonde, in this case Kate Atkinson for Life After Life. Other category winners were Nathan Filer for First Novel, Lucy Hughes-Hallet for Biography, Chris Riddel for Children's Writing and Michael Symmons Roberts for Poetry.

Kate Atkinson’s victory follows her success in the Guardian’s Not-the-Booker Prize – the fact that she was able to carry both shows how well she blended literary merit with popular appeal (it should be noted that Life After Life didn’t pick up many of the public votes in the Guardian’s prize, but that probably just indicates that Atkinson didn’t spend much time pestering her friends). In light of her great year, it’s maybe a surprise that she was missed from the Booker longlist. Perhaps her background in crime fiction is held against her? And it’s a case of ‘always the bridesmaid’ for Evie Wyld, whose second novel All the Birds, Singing received a great reaction on publication, and featured on a number on longlists, but came up short each time.

I would have been happy to see either Nathan Filer or Sam Byers win the First Novel award; both are extremely strong debuts, with idiosyncratic worldviews and plenty of dark comedy. Pitched somewhere between Vernon God Little and We Need to Talk About Kevin, The Shock of the Fall makes important comments about the treatment and perception of mental health, propelled along by protagonist Matthew, an extremely memorable narrative voice. Filer’s debut was the subject of a major bidding war between publishers, and the novel has proved itself strong enough to justify the hype.

It may be surprising that a lengthy biography of an obscure Italian fascist should pick up a literary award that focuses on entertainment value, but this is testament to the great ability of The Pike’s author, Lucy Hughes-Hallet. Her book is equally confident discussing intimate biographical details and wider cultural movements, and a wealth of background detail is incorporated without the text becoming dense. Again, there was great competition for the prize, with Olivia Laing’s study of alcoholism and American literature, The Trip to Echo Spring, being especially impressive.

Unfortunately not having read any of the shortlisted authors, I can’t comment on the poetry or children's categories (though I do like the look of Goth Girl). Overall, though, I think the Costas deserve praise for balancing the virtues of readability and literary quality very well. Clearly, none of the award winners belong to the dusty world of literary elitism, but all show great merit, and no-one could pick holes in the writing. All have shown an ability to connect with an audience without relentless marketing pressure, or superstar status. In terms of the overall winner, the bookies' favourite is The Pike, but for me it’s hard to see beyond Kate Atkinson. If I was on the judging panel, I would be championing Nathan Filer, but I’d argue that any of the books I've mentioned would be worthy of the big prize; whatever happens at the end of the month, we’re likely to get a deserving winner. 

Read more:

Nathan Filer on his debut novel, and experience of working in mental health

Sam Byers on becoming a published author