John Wyndham – The Seeds Of Time

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Book Review, John Wyndham, Sci-Fi, Short stories, The Seeds Of Time

The rich world of literary SciFi short stories

John Wyndham’s short story collection The Seeds of Time is a masterclass in how unformulaic any genre might be in the hands of someone who is a crafted, imaginative literary writer who happens to write in the Sci-Fi genre, as opposed to someone who is a Sci-Fi writer. Yes, I know my prejudices are showing, but I do believe it must be the writing, the craft itself which comes first, and the mastery (or not) of that, rather than the field in which someone chooses to write.

Here, Wyndham has laid out something of a smorgasbord of different genres of writing, with a theme which might loosely be described as SF – so, if you like, he is sewing together genres, so that we get SF Romance, SF Humour, SF philiosophy, an examination of racism through the lens or disguise of SF, etc.

The short story structure itself is something which demands precision and craft to be successful. Often, short story collections rather disappoint, because the reader may very quickly realise the writer’s particular tricks and tics, especially if the short story writer is basically writing in a very fixed groove – fairly recently I read an example of this, where had I just read one such story, perhaps, published as it was in a magazine, it would have been a superb example of the craft. Unfortunately gathering dozens and dozens of such stories, published over many years, individually, together, was just too much same old.

But that is definitely not the case here, because of Wyndham’s splendid variety.

Inevitably, there cannot but be variations in excellence, and I can only concur with a fellow reviewer, – Fiction Fan – see her review, with added jolly media enjoyment, in picking out the particularly stellar 3. It is not that the others are poor, only that these are superb

Perseid meteor shower 2007 Wiki Commons

Meteor is a short and telling story which shows what might happen when the inevitable supposition of what intelligent life from another planetary system might look like, remains viewed through the lens of human size as well as shape. This was horrid, poignant and funny, all at once

Survival is a shocking and absolutely plausible story which, written in the 50s, shows the danger of underestimating women. A proto-feminist SciFi fable

Pillar To Post is an extremely clever story involving a couple of protagonists fighting through time and space for possession of the same body.

I also thought Dumb Martian, which examines racist and sexist attitudes under the guise of Sci Fi, was particularly fine, and Opposite Number, which looks at ‘alternate realities’ the intriguing idea of a kind of bifurcating universe where the choices an individual didn’t make, are playing out – and then what happens if a couple of these bifurcations collide. It’s the story of ‘What If………I had done this rather than that’

10 short stories – not one is poor

The Seeds Of Time Amazon UK
The Seeds Of Time Amazon UK

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Patrick McGrath – Ghost Town: Tales Of Manhattan Then and Now

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Book Review, Ghost Town, Manhattan, Patrick McGrath, Short stories

New York has become a place not so much of death as of the terror of death

Patrick McGrath’s magnificent Ghost Town is a triptych of novellas about Manhatten. The opening story, ‘The Year Of The Gibbet’ written by a man as he waits to die of cholera, in the epidemic of 1832, looks back more than 55 years, to the Revolutionary War of Independence, when he was a small boy, and his mother a Revolutionary fighting against the hated British oppressor, hanging these revolutionaries as subversive traitors.

The opening sentence, in my header will do a circular to the final story (more later)

The central character in ‘The Year Of The Gibbet’ has been haunted by the horrific events around his mother’s life and death, and, indeed, haunted by her ghost, and inhabited life of the margins of poverty

There is little left to tell. Half a century has passed since The Year of The Gibbet, and the war has been transformed in the minds of my countrymen such that it now resembles nothing so much as the glorious enterprise of a small host of heroes and martyrs sustained by the idea of Liberty and bound for that reason to prevail in the end.

But I am haunted.

The second story, Julius, recounts the rise and fall of the wealthy Van Horn family from roughly the end time of the previous story to a period some 50 years later, and shows how class and race prejudice, can damage the lives of both oppressed and oppressor. The narrator of this story looks back at her family history, and the story she wormed out of her mother, when she was still small, about Julius, his sisters, and her grandparents.

The ghosts in this story are the ghosts of ‘what might have been, if only’ which haunt all lives, and the ghosts of former lives, wasted lives, memory, real and imagined, and history itself, pressing on the present.

The women in the middle story live in a time where women for the most part were without power.

For the story of Julius, so painstakingly assembled by means of the fading memories of those who knew him, and the ghosts now clustered on my walls and sideboards – do they not all clamor the same sad warning?  That love denied will make us mad? I think so

The third story, Ground Zero, relates the story of September 11 through the effect on the lives of a female psychotherapist, her male client, and his obsession with a very powerful, very damaged woman who uses and is used by her predatory sexuality. The lives of the three, and indeed the lives of all others in the city, are haunted by the before, the during, and the aftermath of the events of September 11. The terror of death, and the confrontation with mortality become conscious and unconscious forces. Sex and death are woven together in this final story.

I wonder about the woman from Battery Park, the one who wanted a funeral for her husband but had no body to put in the coffin…….. Did she find closure? Did she,…?

This is a short, and sombre book, beautiful, melancholy and violent

It is part of a series by Bloomsbury, subtitled The Writer And The City, where different writers explore particular cities as jumping off points for fiction

I came to this book as a recommendation from one blogger (Fiction Fan’s weekly TBR round-up) of this book from a review of it on another blogger’s site – Mrs S.W’s World Of Books

Thanks, o bloggy ones!

Ghost Town : Tales of Manhattan Then and Now Amazon UK
Ghost Town : Tales of Manhattan Then and Now Amazon USA

Dan Chaon – Stay Awake

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Book Review, Dan Chaon, Short stories, Stay Awake

Fragile, disappointed lives, examined using strange perspectives

Dan Chaon, a Cleveland writer, was strongly recommended to me, by fellow blogger and writer Jilanne Hoffmann, who was spot on both in her enthusiasm for Chaon, and the sense I would also appreciate his rather quirky, melancholy, lost and confused characters. He is a writer in a sure but minor key, telling stories of people whose lives are quietly desperate.

There is nothing overdone in his writing, though the minds of his characters are sometimes strange.

The image which kept arising was of crumpled, colour faded tissue paper, found at the bottom of some box of forgotten relics in a house being cleared. Some faint aroma, compounded of roses and a breath of disappointment, percolates into the atmosphere as the fragile paper is unwrapped, in order to reveal what it contains – something like an old, pressed flower, or a crumpled hair ribbon – what we have here, clearly is something which was at once precious, something with a story, but what hangs in the atmosphere is a sad mystery, a sense that something was not realised or fulfilled

These indeed are Chaon’s characters. They don’t shout and scream with glaring ‘look at me! LOOK AT ME! Schlock’ We don’t have a writer who overburdens an empty centre with let me stand out from the crowd by being operatic and overblown, smack in the face humour.

Instead, a subtle, quieter vision of the strange foibles of lives, filled with a quiet despair, but also maybe on the edge of when they lost the ability to grasp what could have been better. And the humour is the wry, lightly touched absurdity of life itself, mockingly waiting to be discovered; not signalled with ‘here is a punchline’

Another image, or quality, arising from his writing is the betwixt time, the witching times – dusk, when evening gives place to night, and there is a moment (in nature) of hush. Or, that darkest hour just before dawn, when, yet again, there seems to be a moment between the dark night, and a certain stillness separate from that night, in the moment before the first bird breaks the silence. He is a writer of solstices, of equinoxes, of the ungraspable this turning into that

Each story stands on its own. However there are leitmotifs which make their way through more than one story, and these connect disparate lives, and snag at a subtext in the stories – identity, which Chaon looks at partly in neurobiological terms, creating uneasy responses to brain, mind, body ideas, so that even the reader is left slightly unsure about the ‘I’ who reads :

 Let us say that this, all of this, has a logic to it. We understand each other, don’t we? Are we not, you and I, both of us spirits?

 Reader, do not ask me who at this very moment is dreaming you,

The uneasy images which appear in some of the stories, include an extremely rare birth defect, Craniopagus parasiticus, where a baby is born with one body, but two heads. This unsettling image is dealt with, not freakishly, but to unsettle the reader (and indeed, the father of such a baby, in one of the stories) into wondering who thinks, where consciousness resides and arises. I found myself plunged, by Chaon’s writing into moments of dislocation from myself, inhabiting the uneasy world of his fragile characters, who, again and again find the boundaries between themselves and other lives, their present selves and their past (or imagined future) selves, are not as defined as our left brained, daytime selves sometimes pretends

Stay Awake Amazon UK
Stay Awake Amazon USA

Jessica Keener – Women In Bed

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Book Review, Jessica Keener, Short stories, Women In Bed

9 to 5 or 5 of 9

I had a mixed reaction to Jessica Keener’s 9 short stories in this collection, partly coloured by the fact that I felt the 3 weakest stories, in my opinion, were the opening stories, with plot devices being too obvious – I particularly felt manipulated by arresting images which did not really make sense in the third one . Why would someone want to deliberately pour the contents of a bottle of pills into a drawer rather than keep them in the bottle for ease of access – other than the writer wanting to have an image of someone scrabbling in the drawer – I saw that one coming as soon as the pill pouring happened

Part of the problem with the short story genre, is that there is a tendency, once one or two stories are read, for the reader to ‘get’; the author’s tricks as well as style, and then to be able to predict exactly where the author is going to go. So I thought I had Keener’s measure, and that all stories were going to be the same

I felt the first 3 stories, which were orientated towards sexual desire, were a little superficial and predictable – and clearly, the ‘expected’ subject matter of a collection with the title Women In Bed

As this was an ARC I felt honour bound to read a little further than just 3 stories, in order to write my review, and I’m pleased I did as the fourth of the 9 stories, Woman with Birds In Her Chest, genuinely surprised and drew me in, a story about a woman taking early retirement; and the following story, Recovery, felt genuine, moving and very present.

This more surprising subject matter, and also I felt a delicacy in the layered emotions of those two stories, had me engaged and discovering rather than predicting

The story Shoreline, again disappointed me slightly as there was a clear signalling of a plot device which was going to be used to create a predictable cataclysmic scene, and moreover one which ‘in real’ the protagonist would have been unlikely to have left hanging around to precipitate events. I can’t reveal it because it will spoil the journey the reader makes in this story of a marriage going wrong.

The last 3 stories interested me again. Told in the first person, the narrator is ‘Jennie’ a name not a million miles from the author’s own – so they may or may not be semi-autobiographical, or the author may be deliberately wanting us to think so, and there is a trajectory which connects them. The titles, Bird Of Grief, Forgiveness and Heart clearly also show stages in a Heart, Life, Journey. The first and last stories in this trilogy, a journey for ‘Jennie’ with men in her life, is particularly well knitted together with the glue of a childhood, familial story, and the 3 almost form a novella.

Most of the stories end on a downward, melancholic note, although the shape of those last three, is a little different, showing themselves like 3 Acts in a play; I found the sense of self discovery and resolution across the 3 stories to be particularly well crafted.

Keenan does write well, and, for me 5 of the 9 were stories which completely succeeded.

It is probably par for the course with a short story collection, that not every story is equally strong and successful.

The ones I did like have inched it into better than Okay. I’m not jumping up and down with you HAVE to read this excitement, but think she is a writer worth reading, and watching

Received as an ARC from the publisher via NetGalley

Women In Bed Amazon UK
Women In Bed Amazon USA

Randy Taguchi – Fujisan

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Book Review, Fujisan, Japanese writer, Randy Taguchi, Short stories

Highly enjoyable, uncomfortable, alienation

Fujisan is a collection of 4 stories with the brooding, beautiful, symbolic and spiritually charged presence of Mount Fuji at its heart.

This is fine, precise writing, clear and often casually shocking. The central characters in each story – the manager of a convenience store, previously a member of a spiritual cult; a group of teenage boys obsessed with the dark side of the psyche – ghosts, the cult of suicide; a beautiful young man with an emptiness and violence at his heart; a nurse working in gynaecology alongside both birth and death, all have a certain similarity, of an almost shellac brittle exterior, through which surges all sorts of repressed and partially repressed violence and secrecy.

The characters are all loners, to some extent, but preserve acceptable veneers. The mountain speaks to each of them, or they use it, in some way, to project aspects of their own nature on to.
It is the casual weaving in of the fascination of suicide, the brutality and sadism of thought or action, the contrast between the delicacy, spareness and refinement of Japanese art, for example, and this expression of an almost matter of fact brutality of certain aspects of the culture – seppuku, for example, and how that has a cult value accorded. It is the difference between the spareness of the writing, and at times the violence and brutality which is being written about which is so alien and unsettling. The stories express loneliness, disengagement, have a nihilism about them – and yet have this strange purity. A fascinating, unsettling read – a bit like pulling on wet clothes, and finding discomfort at the edge of your skin, so that the clothes not quite settling right almost translates to an unsettling feeling in your own skin, so that your own, known, edges, are somehow suddenly revealed to you

Mount Fuji photos – Wikimedia commons
Fujisan Amazon UK
Fujisan Amazon UK

Edna O’Brien – The Love Object

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Book Review, Edna O'Brien, Literary Fiction, Short stories, The Love Object

The inevitable disappointment of love

I received this as a pre-release digital copy for review from the digital publishers, Open Road Media – so firstly, a word on formatting – this was seamless, I had no sense of the medium I was reading from. Sometimes digitising works well, sometimes it is sloppy and annoying. This was excellent.

So to O Brien, and her misty, mournful, wry resignation about the disappointed nature of love. We all yearn for love, in its various forms – sexual, parental/child, friendship, because of the joy and fulfillment love brings, but inevitably the loving relationships are also fraught with misunderstanding, a sense of isolation, and feelings of hurt disconnection from ‘The Love Object’

This is territory O’Brien inhabits. Her focus is often the sense that men and women move in differently mysterious ways, and despite the best of good intentions, our relationships, starting with high hopes, will always contain ambiguity and minor key sourness and sadness. O Brien in these short stories, starts with this short quote from Aristotle:

“As matter desires form
so woman desires man”

However these are more than just the stories of male and female relationships doomed to disappointment. There are generational stories, mothers and daughters, moving away from each other, both geographically and in time, yet still bound elastically and hurtfully together, the daughters both acknowledging and being irritated by the connection to mother, the mothers feeling slapped and betrayed by the daughters who have turned into strangers, when they were once so close and adoring.

The Love Object may not even be a single person. Sometimes, as in one of my favourite stories, The Rug, the object, a mysterious sheepskin rug gift, holds within it a whole collection of reinforcing beliefs about what life is like, its benevolence and its cruel indifference

I also particularly liked ‘How To Grow A Wisteria’ where lovers are shown as missing each other through things happening at the wrong time. Two dissimilar people, in their attitude to solitude and company, find a relationship fails, where perhaps, had they met at a later stage of their development, they might have travelled on the same road for longer

Both the bookend stories, The Love Object and Paradise, are longer stories describing the subtle nuances in the trajectory of an affair, with Paradise also incorporating that other major focus of female Love – the mother/daughter relationship

I always have a slight problem with the short story format, finding it both too much, and not enough. Reading a book of short stories cover to cover, as if it were a novel, satiates me, and in effect the short story collection would probably be best read over a period of months or years, with gaps between stories

However, as I HAVE read it cover to cover, for review purposes, recommended!
The Love Object