Some strange tales from Pu Songling

More strange tales from Pu Songling

By way of followup to my post discussing Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio here’s three examples of the tales, with the accompanying commentaries set out at the bottom of the post. If you like these I really do suggest buying the entire collection, which is excellent.

42

THE DEVOTED MOUSE

Yang Tianyi told this story.
Once he saw two mice come out into his room. One of them was swallowed by a snake. The other mouse glared angrily from a safe distance, its little eyes like two round peppercorns. The snake, its belly full of mouse, went slithering back to its hole and was more than halfway in when the second mouse dashed forward and bit it hard on the tail. Furiously the snake backed out of the hole, and the mouse darted once more to safety. The snake gave chase but was unable to catch the mouse, and returned to its hole. As it entered the hole a second time, the mouse seized it by the tail again, exactly as before. Each time the snake went crawling in, the mouse struck; and each time it emerged, the mouse ran for cover. And so it continued for quite some time, until finally the snake came right out and spat the dead mouse on to the ground. The second mouse approached, sniffed at the corpse and began crying over its friend. Then, squeaking dolefully, it picked it up in its mouth and left.
My friend Mr Zhang Duqing wrote a poem on this subject, entitled ‘The Ballad of the Devoted Mouse’.

 83

THE GIRL IN GREEN

In Yidu County, there lived a young man by the name of Yu Jing. He had taken his books with him to lodgings at the Temple of Sweet Springs, and one night he was sitting there chanting a text when he heard a woman’s voice at his window.

‘Oh Mr Yu, what a very serious student you are!’

He was still wondering what a woman could possibly be doing up there in the hills, when in she came, pushing the door open with a disarming smile.

‘So very serious!’

He jumped up in alarm, and found himself standing before a young lady of the most incomparable delicacy and the most exquisite beauty, clad in a green tunic and a long skirt. He knew at once that this was no ordinary mortal and asked her, perhaps a trifle emphatically, where she was from.

‘I’m hardly going to bite you!’ she replied. ‘Why the inquisition?’

He was instantly captivated, and they shared his bed that very night. When he came to loosen her silken tunic, it revealed a waist so slender that his hands could encircle it with ease.

The last watch sounded and she slipped away, returning to him the following, and every subsequent, night. On one such night, they were drinking together when she made a remark which betrayed an unusual understanding of music.

‘I love the sound of your voice,’ he said. ‘It is so fine and soft. Sing me a song. I am sure it will quite carry my soul away…’

‘I’d rather not,’ she replied, smiling as ever. ‘I wouldn’t want to carry you too far away…’

He pleaded with her all the more.

‘I am not trying to be unkind,’ she said. ‘It is just that I do not want others to hear. Oh, if you really insist, I’ll sing a song. But quietly, just for you.’

She tapped her ‘Golden Lotuses’, her tiny bound feet, lightly on the edge of the bed and began to sing:

Jackdaw singing in the tree
Tricks me away before the light;
I’ll gladly wet my pretty shoes,
If I can stay with you tonight.

Her voice was light as silk, and barely audible. Yu Jing listened intently, and his whole being vibrated to the haunting, lilting melody.

The song ended. She opened the door and peeped outside.

‘I must make sure there is no one at the window.’

She searched the whole length of the building.

‘You seem so frightened. What is the matter?’ asked Yu Jing, when she returned.

‘There is an old saying,’ replied the girl, with her ever-present smile. ‘A ghost that steals life must forever live in fear. Such is my fate.’

She lay down to sleep, but she seemed restless and ill at ease.

‘This idyll of ours is fated to end,’ she finally said to Yu Jing. He begged her to explain.

‘My heart beats strangely. I know my end is close at hand.’

‘Strange movements of the heart, flutterings of the eyes, such things happen to us all from time to time,’ he protested. ‘You must not be so gloomy!’

She seemed a little comforted by this, and they united once more in tender passion. As the last watch of the night came to an end, she threw on her dress, descended from the bed, and walked as far as the door. There, instead of undoing the bolt, she began pacing back and forth.

‘I do not know why, but something fills me with dread. Come outside with me, I beseech you.’

Yu rose and went out with her.

‘Stay there and watch me,’ she said. ‘Do not go in again until I am beyond that wall.’ ‘Very well,’ said Yu, and he watched her walk silently down the outer wall of the cloister and round the corner, until she was out of sight. He had already turned and was on his way back to bed, when he heard a desperate cry for help. It was her voice. He hurried out again, but though he gazed all around him he could see no trace of her. The voice was still audible and seemed to be coming from up above him, from the eaves over the door. Looking up he saw a huge spider, like a big black bolus, holding in its clutches a little creature that was making the most pitiful noise: it was a green hornet, in the throes of death. He carefully disentangled it and carried it back to his room, where he placed it on the table. Soon it recovered sufficient strength to move, crawled slowly up on to his inkstone and down into the ink. Presently it emerged again, clambered down from the inkstone and began dragging itself across the table, tracing the words

thank you

on the wooden surface. Then it shook its wings several times and flew out of the window. He never saw it again.

88
LUST PUNISHED BY FOXES
A certain man bought a new house, only to discover that it was haunted by fox-spirits, who constantly spoiled his clothes and other belongings and dropped dirt into his noodles.

One day, one of this gentleman’s friends dropped by to visit him. Unfortunately he was not at home, and that evening, since her husband had still not returned, his wife prepared dinner for the guest, before eating separately with her maid.

Now, her husband was a somewhat dissolute character who made a hobby of collecting aphrodisiacs of one sort or another. At some time or other that day the resident fox-spirits had secretly slipped one of the drugs from his collection into the congee. While the wife was eating her dinner she noticed a strange taste that resembled camphor and musk and asked her maid what it might be, but the maid said she knew of nothing. After dinner, the wife began to experience an overwhelming feeling of sexual arousal, and the more she tried to suppress it, the stronger and the more urgent it became. There was no available man in the house other than the guest, her husband’s friend, and so she made her way to the guest-room and knocked at the door.

The guest asked who it was, and the woman gave her name. He asked her what she wanted, and when she remained silent, he guessed her intentions.

‘Your husband and I are friends and treat one another decently. I could never behave in such a bestial manner with my friend’s wife.’

The wife remained there standing at the door and refused to leave. ‘Your husband,’ he protested angrily, ‘is a man with a reputation in the community! Are you determined to destroy it?’

With these words he spat at her through the window-lattice, and finally in great embarrassment she left. As she went she began asking herself how she could have done such a thing. Then she recalled the strange taste in her congee bowl at dinner. It entered her mind that it might have been caused by one of the aphrodisiacs from her husband’s collection, and when she went to look, she found that one of the packages had indeed been tampered with, and the contents scattered all over the cups and bowls on the kitchen table. She remembered having once heard that cold water acted as an antidote in such cases, so she drank some water immediately and soon came round. She awoke from her state of drugged confusion to a feeling of intense remorse and shame. All that night she lay there brooding restlessly, and as dawn was almost breaking, unable to face the world, she threw her sash over a beam and hanged herself. Her maid found her and untied her in the nick of time. Although by this time she was all but dead, she gradually recovered consciousness.

The guest meanwhile had left during the night. The following day at dawn, the master of the house returned to find his wife in bed and plainly unwell. No matter how many times he asked her what the matter was, she lay there in complete silence and would do nothing but weep. When the maid informed her master that her mistress had tried to hang herself in the early hours, he pressed his wife with more and more questions, and finally she sent her maid away and told him the whole story.

The husband heaved a sigh. ‘It is my lust that is being punished! This is no fault of yours. Fortunately, this friend of mine is a good man, or I would never be able to hold my head up in the world again.’

After this experience, he became a reformed character, and the foxes disappeared completely.

Commentaries (not all tales come with commentaries, but the majority do):

42 THE DEVOTED MOUSE Zhang Duqing: (1642–?1716), a poet-friend of Pu Songling’s, who like Pu was never appointed to an official position. His ballad, a poem in thirty-six lines, is extant. The contemporary poet and novelist Vikram Seth has retold this tale in verse in his collection Beastly Tales from Here and There (London, 1992).

83 THE GIRL IN GREEN light as silk: Some texts have ‘light as a fly’.

88 LUST PUNISHED BY FOXES The Chronicler of the Strange points out that whereas most people are aware of the danger involved in storing ordinary poisons (such as arsenic) in the house, few appreciate the havoc that can be caused by leaving aphrodisiacs lying around the place. Men have a healthy fear of the dangers of the military battlefield, but are blissfully unaware of the far greater dangers lurking in the bedchamber. For a glimpse of the type of thing our gentleman may have been collecting, the reader is directed to Robert van Gulik’s excellent study Sexual Life in Ancient China (Leiden, 1961), especially pp. 133–4, where the author describes various potions listed in the ancient sex handbook of Master Dong Xuan, such as ‘Bald Chicken Potion’ (‘if taken for sixty days one will be able to copulate with forty women’ – this drug was apparently so named after an unfortunate cock who ate it by mistake when it had been thrown out in the courtyard, and copulated with a single hen for several days without dismounting, pecking her head bald); ‘Deer Horn Potion’ (to cure impotence and involuntary emission); a potion for enlargement of the penis (a mixture of broomrape and seaweed); and a potion for shrinking the vagina (made up of four ingredients, including sulphur and birthwort root). The same text is translated by Douglas Wile in Art of the Bedchamber, pp. 112–13.

Ox-ghosts and serpent spirits

Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, by Pu Songling and translated by John Minford

Over 600 pages of 17th/18th Century Chinese ghost stories and accompanying commentary. Does that sound tempting? Probably not, but it should because Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio is quite wonderful and quite unlike almost anything else I’ve read.

Pu Songling was a mediocre scholar, but a gifted author. He wrote  one of the most comprehensive collections of Chinese fantastic fiction to reach us today. He told tales of ghosts and fox spirits, of odd encounters and peculiar visions. His work was playful, allusive and frequently erotic. He wrote for men like himself, Chinese gentlemen who would read the stories by lamp or candle light in their scholar’s studios which looked out on carefully crafted views of sculpted gardens and artfully placed rocks which brought distant mountains within their walls.

The Penguin Classics edition contains over a 100 of these stories. They’re short, never more than a few pages and many only a page or so long. They come with quite beautiful illustrations in classical Chinese style (and which I wish I could reproduce here for you). On their surface these are tales of the supernatural, of encounters with ghosts (who are often quite unlike our Western ghosts) and fox spirits (a sort of mischievous faery race, foxes who can change shape into human form and are capable of all sorts of mystical trickery). Underneath that there are all sorts of contemporary political and philosophical references that a lay reader like me can’t hope to catch, but doesn’t need to because the endnotes explain many of them and anyway the stories are a joy even at the shallow surface level I read them at.

In Chinese folklore there is no clear demarcation between ghost and fox spirit, both are liminal entities, ambiguous beings that interact with us mortals for their own ends. They are physical entities, save when they don’t wish to be, capable of being mistaken for human and even of becoming human in the right circumstances. They are transgressive, breaking the rules of the carefully codified society of civil service examinations and scholarly pursuits that the human characters here are part of, and which Pu Songling and his audience were of course part of.

In a typical tale (except that there is no such thing, which is why this review is so hard to write), a scholarly youth is visited by a beautiful maiden (or in one a beautiful boy). He falls in love, and is seduced by this vision. He grows weaker, his essential strength being drained by intimacy with the occult. Or perhaps not, perhaps the spirit wishes to protect the man but he insists on seducing it, spending his own life to possess that which wishes to protect him but which cannot resist his insistent charms.

Others are more redolent of Western folklore and experience. In one story “Tiles, pebbles and brick shards [...] fly around the house like hailstones at any moment,” as classic a description of poltergeist phenomena as one could hope to find. In another a sleeping man is frozen in his bed as a bloated hag enters his room and squats upon his chest (google night terrors for that one, it’s actually a surprisingly widely reported form of hallucination).

In one absolutely charming tale a magistrate named Ding Chenghe (Crane Rider) befriends a failed scholar named Ye. Ding helps Ye with his examinations, but despite Ye’s talent Ye still fails and so his career in China’s intricate bureaucracy is stillborn. Ye sets off for home broken-hearted, but becomes ill on the way. Meanwhile Ding is dismissed when he causes offence to a superior, and so retires to the country where he sends for Ye to act as tutor to his son.

Ding’s son flourishes under Ye’s tutelage, and passes his own exams with ease. Ye is consoled that his worldly failure has at least been recompensed by being able to help the son of the man who sought to help him. Time passes and Ding is restored to a position of importance, and so uses it to reward Ye who finally returns home to his own wife and son to show them that he is now a person of rank. When he arrives though his wife is astonished to see him, for Ye has been dead for many years and is buried in a pauper’s grave.

Realising he is dead Ye vanishes, but on hearing what has happened Ding pays for his funeral and for Ye’s son to be properly tutored. When Ye’s son time comes for his own exams, he passes them and so the karmic debt owed by Ding to Ye is repaid.

It’s a beautiful story, and the summary above of course totally lacks the grace of Pu Songling’s language as translated by John Minford. It’s a useful illustration though of how permeable the divide between living and dead, natural and supernatural is. At the same time, the commentary on the tale brings out how it is a parable about a friendship so deep that one friend did not even realise he was dead so keen was he to repay the kindness done to him. “How deep it is, the friendship, the predestined affinity between men of letters who spin out their very hearts in intricate webs of words, how deep the friendship between artists and musicians who share inner visions of mountain peaks and rolling streams?”

Bloggers are of course in their own way our version of friends who spin out their hearts in intricate webs of words.

The immediately following tale is a sadder one, of a scholar who dreams he owes a debt of forty strings of cash and realises it is money owed from a previous life. His wife gives birth to a son. When the boy reaches nearly four years old the scholar’s own fortune of nearly forty strings of cash is almost exhausted. The boy dies, and the scholar uses the remaining funds to pay for the funeral. The commentary makes clear that virtue can be accumulated, as can debts. Virtuous children are the sign of past lives well spent. A childhood death may be the settling of a debt long overdue.

As Pu Songling says elsewhere”A good son is the repayment of a debt due to his parents, the result of good karma; a bad, wilful child is a creditor come for his money, a bad karmic debt. The birth of a child should not be cause for joy, nor should the death of a child be cause for sorrow.” Hard counsel, but perhaps a comfort in a society where death in childhood would have been all too common.

John Minford is a marvellous companion for these tales. He wears his evidently deep understanding lightly, showing how much is buried within them without discouraging the lay reader in the process. His introduction is well worth reading, ideally before reading the tales themselves as he sets the context which here is useful to know, and he includes in a small number of tales notes to show how they would have been read by contemporaries of Pu Songling. Italics in the following quote are mine, to make clear where the commentaries start and end.

Translator’s note: In this longer story, I have incorporated some of the commentaries into the text, to show how this was normally done in the old Chinese editions of Strange Tales. The commentators were constantly at one’s side.
When he asked her where she hailed from, she replied that her name was Lotus Fragrance, and that she was a sing-song girl from the Western District. Dan Minglun: Game Two – enter the fox, as a consequence of Game One. Sang was aware that there were quite a number of houses of pleasure in Saffron Bank, and he believed her tale. The lamp was soon extinguished, and the two of them climbed into bed, where they enjoyed to the full the sweet pleasures of love. From that day on, Lotus Fragrance returned to visit him every few nights. Dan Minglun: The ‘real’ sing-song girl has prepared us for Lotus Fragrance [the false sing-song girl]. What subtlety, what skill! Li’s subsequent appearance is linked to that of Lotus Fragrance. The whole story repeatedly links ghost and fox. They appear together, and the whole is in jest, it happens naturally, without the slightest trace of artifice. This scintillating text, with its strange transformations, grows entirely out of this word ‘jest’. The essence of the writer’s art lies in the playfulness of his conception.

‘Someone’s been saying that you’re a fox-spirit. I don’t believe it myself, but…’ ‘Who’s been saying so?’ snapped Lotus Fragrance, and pressed him for an answer. Sang laughed awkwardly. ‘Oh, I was only teasing…’ ‘And anyway, what makes fox-spirits so different from humans?’ she asked. ‘They cast spells on men, they make them fall ill, even die. That’s why we are so frightened of them.’ ‘No!’ protested Lotus Fragrance. ‘It’s not like that at all! A strong young man such as yourself can restore his vital energy three days after the act of love. Even a fox-spirit can do you no harm. But if you go indulging yourself day after day, then a human lover can do you more harm than a fox. Feng Zhenluan: Wise counsel! Young people, take heed of this!

In the afterword Minton is also excellent at bringing out the plays on words and images which can be difficult to translate (a character says to a fox-spirit girl “It wasn’t your face… It was your tail”, it’s fair to say that tail is meant to make the reader think of certain other lower parts of the woman’s anatomy). He brings out too the Taoist and other philosophical underpinnings of the stories, the obsession with the concept that ejaculation could lead to a loss of spiritual and physical strength, the analogisation of detumescence with death which is quite alien to most Western symbolism.

In the foreword Minton quotes a 19th Century Chinese scholar of the tales, who wrote a guide on how to read them. Two of that scholar’s maxims in particular are worth quoting. “If one reads the Strange Tales just for the plot, and not for the style, one is a fool.” “Every time one thinks a situation weird, it is in fact very real and true to human nature. It contains both pure sense and pure sensibility.”

He’s right. So, when a tale starts “In the southern region of China known anciently as Chu, there lived a merchant who was often away from home on business, leaving his wife much on her own.” one knows the woman will be visited by some ghost or mischievous spirit intent on her virtue, but one knows too that in our own world in which neither ghosts nor fox-spirits appear it’s still not wise to neglect those you love.

These are wise and human stories, rich and strange and quite beautiful. I’ll follow up this post in a day or so by quoting a couple of the smaller ones to give a greater idea of Pu Songling’s style, but in the meantime all I can say is that this is absolutely worth buying and reading. Take the stories as I did, one here, one there, spread over weeks and months as a small comfort to return to that is a joy with every visit.

I’ll end this post with a couple of pictures of a scholar’s garden, the garden of the Master of Nets. I’ve seen this in real life, if anything the pictures struggle to do it justice.

The Locusts

This didn’t fit into my recent review of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. It’s probably the shortest story in that book, but it gives a good feel for Bradbury’s style. I repeat it here in its entirety (it’s short enough that I think I can do so and still remain within fair use):

February 2002: THE LOCUSTS

The rockets set the bony meadows afire, turned rock to lava, turned wood to charcoal, transmitted water to steam, made sand and silica into green glass which lay like shattered mirrors reflecting the invasion, all about. The rockets came like drums, beating in the night. The rockets came like locusts, swarming and settling in blooms of rosy smoke. And from the rockets ran men with hammers in their hands to beat the strange world into a shape that was familiar to the eye, to bludgeon away all the strangeness, their mouths fringed with nails so they resembled steel-toothed carnivores, spitting them into their swift hands as they hammered up frame cottages and scuttled over roofs with shingles to blot out the eerie stars, and fit green shades to pull against the night. And when the carpenters had hurried on, the women came in with flowerpots and chintz and pans and set up a kitchen clamor to cover the silence that Mars made waiting outside the door and the shaded window. In six months a dozen small towns had been laid down upon the naked planet, filled with sizzling neon tubes and yellow electric bulbs. In all, some ninety thousand people came to Mars, and more, on Earth, were packing their grips …

Afternoons, when the fossil sea was warm and motionless, and the wine trees stood stiff in the yard

The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury

When I read Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles as a teenager I thought it was a novel about Mars. Reading it as an adult it was obvious that it’s really a novel about postwar America.

Bradbury is one of the greats of American science fiction. If you read him though you’ll quickly notice that there’s almost no science in any of his stories. That’s because what Bradbury wrote about was people. He wrote about them using science fiction, horror, fantasy, and sometimes using no genre trappings at all but his interest was always firmly in us rather than in imaginary places that we might one day discover.

The Martian Chronicles is a melancholy collection of linked short stories which collectively show the history of the human colonisation of Mars. It opens with our first ill-fated expeditions, each slain by the native Martians, and builds in a macabre retelling of the American West as we wipe them out by sheer force of demographics. As we populace Mars with hot dog stands back home on Earth nuclear tensions build.

For Bradbury our tragedy is our lack of imagination. A few of those who come to Mars do so with the desire to understand. They want to know how the natives lived before the humans came. They want to live free of assumptions about how life should be lived. Most though just want the same as they had at home but with more elbow room. First come the explorers. Then the builders. Then soon afterwards the bureaucrats tidying a new world into old routines. As one early explorer reflects:

“When I was a kid my folks took me to visit Mexico City. I’ll always remember the way my father acted—loud and big. And my mother didn’t like the people because they were dark and didn’t wash enough. And my sister wouldn’t talk to most of them. I was the only one really liked it. And I can see my mother and father coming to Mars and acting the same way here.

Soon after one of his fellow crew-members is doing “target practice in one of the dead cities, shooting out the crystal windows and blowing the tops off the fragile towers.”

The enemies here are fear and conformity. Bradbury’s sympathy is always with those seeking to escape. One of the later tales is set in the American South. The African-Americans are leaving. They’ve pooled their money to buy rocket ships. They’re giving each other lifts to the launchpads in their few cars.

As they make their great progression down the streets of dusty towns the bewildered whites they’re leaving behind look on puzzled and offended. The whites try to stop them, calling on debts and obligations, but where one African-American owes a white man money the rest chip in to pay it. They have cleaned the pans, bathed the children, swept the houses and now they’re going.

As they leave one white man tries to keep at least one from reaching the rockets. He fails, and as the boy he sought to stop departs that boy calls back asking what the man will do with his evenings now. The man is one of the KKK, his evenings will feature no more lynchings to break the tedium of his small existence.

He looked at the silent, empty road. “We’ll never catch them now, never, never.” As far as he could see there was nothing but bundles and stacks and more bundles neatly placed like little abandoned shrines in the late day, in the warm-blowing wind.

Bradbury has a marvellous turn of phrase. His tone here is elegaic. The stories are shot through with compassion but at the same time there’s a dark undercurrent. The early tales show that the Martians are really no better than we are. Not that different at all in fact. They fear us when we arrive, hate us for not being them.

Once they’re safely dead we make myths of them:

The captain shook his head. “There’s no hatred here.” He listened to the wind. “From the look of their cities they were a graceful, beautiful, and philosophical people. They accepted what came to them. They acceded to racial death, that much we know, and without a last-moment war of frustration to tumble down their cities. Every town we’ve seen so far has been flawlessly intact. They probably don’t mind us being here any more than they’d mind children playing on the lawn, knowing and understanding children for what they are. And, anyway, perhaps all this will change us for the better.

What I love about Bradbury is his poetry. Poetry of language and of concept. In one tale a man driving down a deserted desert road late at night meets a Martian driving a strange vehicle the other way. The Martians though are long dead, and this one seems to have no knowledge of what a human is.

They find they can talk, but where the man sees ruins in the distance the Martian sees vibrant cities. Time has come unstuck and for a moment these two travellers have overlapped. The man tells the Martian that it is from the past, that it’s people and cities are gone, but it doesn’t believe him. It knows that when it gets to its destination there will be life and laughter and passion and wine.

Perhaps the man is from the past the Martian argues. What sense does it make to say the Martians are dead when it has family waiting for it just down the road?

No sense at all. They each pass on their way. Both are right. The Martians are gone, but in their own time what mattered was not that one day they wouldn’t be but that while they were they lived. It’s the living that matters. Not the long absence that follows.

In the stone galleries the people were gathered in clusters and groups filtering up into shadows among the blue hills. A soft evening light shone over them from the stars and the luminous double moons of Mars. Beyond the marble amphitheater, in darkness and distances, lay little towns and villas; pools of silver water stood motionless and canals glittered from horizon to horizon. It was an evening in summer upon the placid and temperate planet Mars. Up and down green wine canals, boats as delicate as bronze flowers drifted. In the long and endless dwellings that curved like tranquil snakes across the hills, lovers lay idly whispering in cool night beds. The last children ran in torchlit alleys, gold spiders in their hands throwing out films of web. Here or there a late supper was prepared in tables where lava bubbled silvery and hushed. In the amphitheaters of a hundred towns on the night side of Mars the brown Martian people with gold coin eyes were leisurely met to fix their attention upon stages where musicians made a serene music flow up like blossom scent on the still air.

Later stories are less optimistic (if a story featuring a dead civilisation can be called optimistic). They include for example the originally separately published tale There Will Come Soft Rains which tells of the last day of an automated house continuing to operate long after its human owners have been left as nothing but a nuclear-burnt outline against one of its walls.

It’s a long time since I’ve read Ray Bradbury. As a teenager he was among my favourite authors (a fact I’d long forgotten). The story of his I’d best remembered doesn’t appear here. It was titled The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit and wasn’t science fiction at all. It featured six poor Mexican-Americans who see a beautiful suit that none of them can afford and who put all their savings together to buy it as a group.

Each day one of them wears the suit, and that night tells the others what he did in it. As the sixth day approaches though the first five worry, because the man who has it next is a notorious slob.

I won’t say where that story goes, but it’s full of affection and quotidian miracle. Bradbury could find wonder in dead Martian cities, but he could find it too in the joy a poor man finds wearing a good suit. Bradbury cared for those who found joy in life rather than those who sought to control it. I have a huge fondness for him and for his work. The Martian Chronicles is science fiction, but it’s not about the future. It’s about his present and about human frailty and failure. That’s why it’s still in print after 61 years.

Oh God, I’m going to think, don’t let me think.

La Grosse Fifi, by Jean Rhys

A little while back I wrote a post about my personal canon as it stands today. It was a list of authors whose work particularly resonates with me. I wrote the post on a particular day and the result was a particular list. Another day might have produced a different one. Whichever day I’d written it though it was always a certainty that Jean Rhys’s name would be there.

As I write this the Man Booker International Prize has been in the news. Philip Roth won, which led to one judge quitting the panel in part on the rather odd basis that Roth writes the same novel time and again. I haven’t read Roth yet so I don’t know if he does, but if he does what of it? Many, many highly regarded authors mine the same territory for their entire careers. That fact alone says nothing of their work’s quality.

Jean Rhys has her territory. Hers is the landscape of women not quite doing ok. Her characters are outsiders looking in on a world that doesn’t particularly understand them and doesn’t particularly want to. Men are unreliable and other women offer little support. It’s a lonely world and one in which the existence of a woman on her own can be extremely precarious.

Penguin Modern Classics recently brought out a series of pocket editions in its modern classics range. Each one has a few short stories by an author, or a short novella. La Grosse Fifi features four stories excerpted from Rhys’s 1927 collection The Left Bank and Other Stories and it’s a nice little introduction to Rhys’s style. If you already like Rhys, you’ll like this. If you don’t know her this is a pretty good place to start.

The title story, La Grosse Fifi, is classic Rhys. The narrator, Roseau, is an Englishwoman staying on her own in a questionable hotel in France. She becomes interested in another guest, Fifi, and forms a sort of friendship with her.

Fifi [...] was stout, well corseted – her stomach carefully arranged to form part of her chest. Her hat was large and worn with a rakish sideways slant, her rouge shrieked, and the lids of her protruding eyes were painted bright blue. She wore very long silver earrings; nevertheless her face looked huge – vast, and her voice was hoarse though there was nothing but Vichy water in her glass.
Her small, plump hands were covered with rings, her small, plump feet encased in very high-heeled, patent-leather shoes.

Fifi is not the sort of woman a well bred English girl should be seen with. She’s fat, vulgar, worse yet she is accompanied by a gigolo to whom she is devoted but who like Fifi is both a bit seedy and a bit absurd. Roseau herself though is not entirely the right sort of woman. She says the wrong sort of thing, stays in the wrong sort of place, she’s interesting but perhaps a little too interesting.

‘He’s running off to tell his wife how right she was about me,’ thought Roseau, watching him. ‘How rum some English people are! They ask to be shocked and long to be shocked and hope to be shocked, but if you really shock them … how shocked they are!’

(The ellipses there are in the original text.)

Things rarely go well for women in Rhys’s world. A choice must be made between freedom and respectability. Respectability though is money too. A woman might live as she chooses, but without a husband she will struggle to survive and dependable husbands do not marry undependable women. Fifi is tragic and her love affair with her gigolo slightly pathetic but as Roseau recognises Fifi is also a woman leading her own life on her own terms. Others laugh at her, but Roseau does not.

For God knows, if there’s one hypocrisy I loathe more than another, it’s the fiction of the ‘good’ woman and the ‘bad’ one.

If there’s any quote that summarises Rhys for me it’s that one.

La Grosse Fifi is a strong tale shot through with compassion. The last two, Tea with an Artist and Mixing Cocktails are much shorter mood pieces. Effective enough but limited in their scope. The other story in the collection though is Vienne and that’s worth the price of admission on its own.

In Vienne a young woman is in Vienna with her husband. He plays the currency exchanges and they spend their evenings among the well off and the women who accompany them. Her husband has money, but they came from poverty and she fears they could easily return to it. She loves him, but are his sure investments as sure as he thinks they are? As she reflects “Lovely food. Poverty gone, the dread of it – going.”

Vienne is a dazzling tale. It captures a between-the-wars Vienna caught in a fever dream of money and sex. Most women in the story are dancers who sleep with the rich men who attend their shows; not prostitutes, quite, but not romantics either. Those women are free but depend on men, and when their looks go the men and the money will too. Their best bet is to marry one before their looks fade and hope they’ve made the right choice.

The narrator isn’t a dancer, but her position isn’t that different. Her existence is precarious. Her happiness dependent on her husband’s success. She’s married while she still has her looks. She’s in love. She hopes she made the right choices.

Few authors capture the fear of poverty like Rhys does. I grew up poor myself, my mother and step-father unemployed in a council estate in a grim part of London. It’s impossible really to explain to those who haven’t left a place like that how strong the desire is never to go back to it. Impossible for me anyway. Rhys manages. This is a long quote, but the clarity of Rhys’s gaze makes it well worth setting out in full.

We dined in a little corner of the restaurant.
At the same table a few days before we came, a Russian girl twenty-four years of age had shot herself.
With her last money she had a decent meal and then bang! Out -
And I made up my mind if it ever came to it I should do it too.
Not to be poor again. No and No and No.
So darned easy to plan that – and always at the last moment – one is afraid. Or cheats oneself with hope.
I can still do this and this. I can still clutch at that or that.
So-and-So will help me.
How you fight, cleverly and well at first, then more wildly, then hysterically.
I can’t go down, I won’t go down. Help me, help me!
Steady – I must be clever – So-and-So will help.
But So-and-So smiles a worldly smile.
You get nervous. He doesn’t understand. I’ll make him -
But So-and-So’s eyes grow cold. You plead.
Can’t you help me, won’t you, please? It’s like this and this -
So-and-So becomes uncomfortable, obstinate.
No good.
I mustn’t cry. I won’t cry.
And that time you don’t. You manage to keep your head up, a smile on your face.
So-and-So is vastly relieved. So relieved that he offers at once the little help that is a mockery, and the consoling compliment.
In the taxi still you don’t cry.
You’ve thought of someone else.
But at the fifth or sixth disappointment you cry more easily.
After the tenth you give it up. You are broken – no nerves left.
And every second-rate fool can have their cheap little triumph over you – judge you with their little middle-class judgement.
Can’t do anything for them. No good.
C’est rien – c’est une femme quie se noie!
But two years, three years afterwards. Salut to you, little Russian girl, who had pluck enough and knowledge of the world enough, to finish when your good time was over.

There is a problem with this collection. Rhys wrote assuming a certain kind of audience with a certain kind of education. Characters often break into French, and it’s not translated. If you don’t have at least a memory of school French then there are bits here you’ll just plain struggle with. You need at least a passing familiarity with the language.

My French is weak but managed just well enough that I could follow what was happening and being said. If you’ve none at all that will be an issue. In Vienne it’s worse because Rhys also expects a very basic understanding of German. I really do mean very basic, a handful of words would be fine, but I don’t have any German at all and that meant I had to guess meanings a couple of times and at one key point had to ask my wife to translate a particularly key word.

Perhaps ironically given Rhys assumes a certain level of fluency in the reader Rhys herself gets it badly wrong with the names of some of the characters in Vienne. That story features a number of Japanese investors present in the city, and their names are pretty obviously made up to sound Japanese-ish or are Japanese words that sound about right (one is called Shogun of all things). I appreciate that Rhys couldn’t (as a contemporary writer could) just google some actual Japanese names but it is jarring.

In the end though it’s not the problems I had with languages that stick with me, or Rhys’s problems with Japanese names. It’s these women hoping for the best and knowing they’re not going to get it. Rhys is an extraordinary stylist. She captures an inner world which doesn’t change much story to story, novel to novel. It’s probably her inner world (Vienne seems very close to some real events in Rhys’s life). She’s writing the same thing over and over. But she writes it beautifully. Novelty and literary merit have very little to do with each other.

Silence save for his spoon.

A Good Man, by Edward Docx

Picador Shots is a range of tiny pocket-sized books containing two or three short stories by a writer. A taster of their work. That’s the idea anyway. In the case of Edward Docx’s A Good Man it contains one short story (titled A Good Man) and the first chapter of Self-Help. It’s perhaps petty of me, but I was annoyed to discover that half of what I’d paid for wasn’t actually completed work but an advert for another book.

Anyway, that leaves me with Edward Docx’s short story. I’ll quote the opening, and then discuss some of the reservations I had about it.

Hook-fingered and with clumsy mitten grip, he gropes his way. Veins of ice luminous in the fissures of the rock. The wind is at full roar. Deafens him. Blinds the white light of his head torch in furious flurries. He has no axe. He will be blown to his death if he does not slide to it. Ten years since last he passed this way. Seldom in darkness. Never in a storm.
He can no longer be sure if he is following the wall of the ravine or perhaps a smaller cleft that leads off. He kicks his boots into the snow, triyng to find footholds on the ice beneath. Twice, three times, he has almost fallen. A rock comes loose, hits hard against his knee. He cannot hear his own curses. This is too steep. Wrong. Shards sheer as he struggles for hold. He edges sideways. Another rock wall to his left. He reaches for it. Slips. Hangs on. Conscious of his human weight on the slope. Surely he is climbing the mountain itself, not the low saddle of the ridge. The wind is whipping the spindrift, so that the snow seems to rise more than fall. His hands are stiffening, cold. His mittens saturated. He must up.

He must up? Really? His human weight? Was Docx afraid I would otherwise think he was an android or an alien? Also, “furious flurries”, “shards sheer”, soon after we get “scrambles and struggles” and a page or so later “flitches of frozen fern”. There are other examples. It’s an amazing amount of alliteration.

Docx is being intentionally opaque in this story (though the back cover gives away most of the secrets, regrettably). Who is the man? Where is he? When is all this happening? Why is he climbing this ridge, or if he is unlucky this mountain? It’s all revealed in time but Docx asks the reader for a little faith along the way.

The answers, which I won’t reveal, aren’t bad ones. The story at the heart of this short story is reasonably interesting. The problem is that it’s so self-consciously literary. It’s overwritten. That opening aims for punch, but I noticed the technique so much it prevented it working. This isn’t the sort of story where the reader’s being asked to engage with the text as text, but that’s what I was forced to do anyway.

Docx has a talent for description and for implied content. Here the reader does not know who the “her” mentioned is, but she carries emotional weight all the same.

By the door, chairs are piled on one another. Rows of boots. A camp-bed. A table. An old lamp. A box marked ‘gloves’, another one ‘socks’. A third: ‘baby clothes’. It is not her hand. He does not remember having even looked in here before. Perhaps it had not been fixed up back then. Before the children there was no requirement.

There’s some nice dialogue. All very sparse in proper Carveresque fashion. The problem remains though that it’s literary fiction with a capital L and F. It knows it’s literary fiction. It smacks of workshop (though I don’t believe it came from one). It’s what people who don’t like literary fiction don’t like. Well crafted disappointment with a faint whiff of boredom.

Kevin of kevinfromcanada recently wrote about Docx’s latest novel here. It sounds like it’s not wholly successful but has its moments. Notably Kevin praised Docx’s first two titles and made them sound very appealing. Self-Help was of course long-listed for the Booker. Docx can clearly produce good work.

The point of the Picador Shots is to provide an introduction to an author. I didn’t think this story great and I’m not sure it did Docx any particular favours by way of introduction. Docx here has fallen into the trap of writing what essentially amounts to highbrow genre fiction. His long works look better.

In the interests of full disclosure I should mention that five reviewers spread across goodreads, Amazon UK and Amazon US were basically unanimous in giving this five stars. I disagree, but I thought it worth mentioning by way of counterbalance.

They say it’s a very big stone. They tell me it’s almost two hundred carats.

The Blue Sweetheart, by David Goodis

I wrote the other day about Black Pudding by David Goodis. Unlike it’s culinary namesake it was bland stuff.

Black Pudding was one of two Goodis’ stories that I’d picked up for my Kindle. The other was The Blue Sweetheart. Stranded again recently without my copy of Pynchon’s V handy (my read of the moment) I decided to give it a try.

Like Black Pudding, The Blue Sweetheart is formulaic pulp crime. Both feature a wronged man, a beautiful woman who has abandoned the hero in order to run off with the bad guy, a quest for revenge and a final confrontation. There are no surprises here. The difference though is that where Black Pudding was kind of flat The Blue Sweetheart is just plain fun.

I couldn’t bear posting up the badly computer generated image that’s been used as a cover for The Blue Sweetheart on kindle, so here’s an image of the author instead:

Here’s the opening, and to paraphrase Kingsley Amis in New Maps of Hell if this doesn’t speak to you then you may as well quit this review now:

Thick sticky heat came gushing from the Indian Ocean, closed in on Ceylon, and it seemed to Clayton that he was the sole target. He sat at the bar of a joint called Kroner’s on the Colombo waterfront, and tried vainly to cool himself with gin and ice. It was Saturday night and the place was mobbed, and most of them needed baths. Clayton told himself if he didn’t get out soon, he’d suffocate. But he knew he couldn’t walk out. If he walked out, he’d be killed.

That’s more like it. That’s pulp. We have an exotic location, a man in trouble, a gin joint and the threat of imminent violence. The only thing that’s missing is a beautiful woman. She’ll be along shortly.

I’m not going to talk at length about this story. Clayton has discovered a huge and perfect blue sapphire. It’s not his first find. A while back he discovered some other gems, less valuable than the sapphire but still decent. He had hoped to use them to provide the means to settle down with his girl. A man called Hagen took the gems and took the girl and left Clayton with nothing but the memory of their laughter. Now Clayton has this new find, an unprecedented treasure, and everyone’s suddenly keen to get it off him. Even the girl’s back in the picture…

Goodis still isn’t that amazing a literary craftsman. At one point he uses that hoary old technique of having the hero look at himself in the mirror and size himself up. Does anyone ever really do that outside fiction?

Clayton lit a cigarette and stood staring at himself in the wall mirror. His hair was a black storm on his head and he had a two-day growth on his face and all he wore was a pair of shorts. But then, still focusing on the mirror, he wasn’t seeing his unkempt appearance. He was seeing something beyond the mirror. Again his brain made the tortuous journey along the paths of bitter memory.

When I talked about Black Pudding Lee Monks in the comments said that stories like these should be like neat vodka. He’s right, and here’s the thing: neat vodka is sometimes a little on the rough side. What it lacks in subtlety though it makes up for in impact.

Goodis relies here on stock techniques. There’s that self-examination in the mirror; there’s a beautiful blonde; a seedily corrupt Englishman with an air of menace; a solid friend that money can’t buy; a greedy gem merchant who’ll stop at nothing to possess the stone. None of it is original. It rattles along though. The pacing’s good and there’s a constant air of tension and danger. Yes, it’s formula, but it’s good formula. It entertains, and that’s it’s only goal.

One last quote. Here Clayton takes a gun with him and decides to spy on Hagen even though he knows Hagen has men combing the streets looking for him. He runs into a couple of Hagen’s thugs:

The thugs hadn’t seen the gun, they were concentrating on their own target. As they lunged, Clayton sidestepped and brought the gun-butt crashing against the skull of the man nearest him. The man went down like a toppled statue. The other man let out a curse and forgot Hagen’s orders not to use the knife for killing, and slashed the blade toward Clayton’s throat. Clayton stepped back, wielding the gun so that the butt hit the man’s wrist. There was the cracking sound of splintered bone. The man opened his mouth to yell, and Clayton rushed in and used the gun like a hammer on the man’s mouth. The man went to his knees, spitting blood and teeth and choking on more blood. Clayton gave him a rap on the temple that knocked him flat and put him to sleep.

It’s ugly, it’s violent, it’s arguably all a bit ludicrous. It’s pulp. Pulp is the doughnut of the literary world. You eat it not because it’s good for you and certainly not for the quality of the ingredients or the craftsmanship. You eat it because it’s an indulgence. I wouldn’t recommend to anyone that they have doughnuts all the time, but sometimes it’s nice to kick back with something sweet, sticky and probably not at all good for you.

One final note. Black Pudding and The Blue Sweetheart are both published by Wonder ebooks as part of their “Noir Master Series”. Let’s be blunt here, even for pulp they’re not masterpieces and they’re not noir either. This though was a fun story and if Wonder ebooks’ descriptions are a little hyperbolic given the actual quality of these stories, well, that’s pulp too.

The young man with a scenic cravat…

The Sexes, by Dorothy Parker

I always expected Dorothy Parker’s writing to have a sort of arid intelligence. I knew there would be clever lines, but I thought they’d come with an overpracticed quality and a rather brittle cruelty.

Parker then was a writer I’d decided not to read. What changed my mind was the current Penguin Modern Classics pocket editions. I saw the range in Waterstones on a three for two offer and there were five that I really wanted. The deal meant that a sixth one was free. I saw the Parker and thought I’d give it a try. If nothing else I thought it might have historical interest.

I haven’t heard any explanation of the logic behind the Penguin Modern Classics pocket editions but my guess is that the idea is to tempt readers into trying writers they might not otherwise take a risk on. If that is the point then for me it succeeded. Parker’s a delight and I’m a convert. I wouldn’t have read her but for these pocket editions. The way I figure it I owe the team at Penguin a drink (probably a cocktail in the circumstances).

The Sexes is a collection of five Dorothy Parker stories. The first and title story is exactly the sort of thing you might expect of Parker. Here’s how it opens:

The young man with the scenic cravat glanced nervously down the sofa at the girl in the fringed dress. Sher was examining her handkerchief; it might have been the first one of its kind she had seen, so deep was her interest in its material, form, and possibilities. The young man cleared his throat, without necessity or success, producing a small, syncopated noise.

What follows is the smallest of incidents. It’s an argument between a young couple. There’s no great metaphoric weight to it. It’s just brilliantly observed. Literature as cameo portraiture. Here’s what follows that opening:

‘Want a cigarette?’ he said.
‘No, thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you ever so much just the same.’
‘Sorry I’ve only got these kind,’ he said. ‘You got any of your own?’
‘I really don’t know,’ she said. ‘I probably have, thank you.’
‘Because if you haven’t,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t take me a minute to go up to the corner and get you some.’
‘Oh, thank you, but I wouldn’t have you go to all that trouble for anything,’ she said. ‘It’s awfully sweet of you to think of it. Thank you ever so much.’
‘Will you for God’s sake stop thanking me?’ he said.
‘Really,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know I was saying anything out of the way. I’m awfully sorry if I hurt your feelings. I know what it feels like to get your feelings hurt. I’m sure I didn’t realise it was an insult to say “thank you” to a person. I’m not exactly in the habit of having people swear at me because I say “thank you” to them.’

It goes from there. Him trying to mollify her and work out what he did. Her making him work for his apology. Like I said, it’s nothing world changing but it’s very neatly done.

The next story is The Lovely Leave. It’s well chosen because it’s an immediate change in tone. It’s a wartime story of a woman whose husband is coming home on a 24 hour leave. She wants it to be perfect. Last time he was home she was so conscious of how brief his visit was that she got too anxious and messed everything up. They ended up rowing. When he left they were barely speaking.

This time she’s determined that their time together, however short, will be lovely. She buys a new dress that she can’t really afford; makes all kinds of preparations. When he arrives though they almost immediately start to quarrel. He even tells her how much he always liked that dress on her…

There’s something very adult about The Lovely Leave. It’s impossible not to sympathise with the woman. She cares so much that she can’t stop herself from being angry at how little time they’re given and she can’t understand either why he doesn’t seem to feel the same way. As the story progresses though Parker shows that both of them merit sympathy. It’s not as simple as it seems. When is it ever?

Their problem isn’t unique to wartime. Anyone who has ever planned a special evening only to have their partner come back tired and preoccupied and barely noticing all the work that’s been done has been there. So too has anyone who’s ever come back home just wanting to unwind and turn off for a little while only to discover that their partner has made all sorts of elaborate plans. Parker here is exploring the mismatch between love and everyday life that can sometimes be so painful. It’s domestic fiction, but in the main we all live domestic lives.

From there the collection goes on to The Little Hours which is the only story I didn’t like. It’s a nightime monologue by someone who can’t sleep and involves a great deal of quotation and namedropping. It’s clever but for me it’s not more than that. In truth it’s what I expected from Parker but the good news is that it’s only one story of five and no doubt there are others who like it far more.

The remaining two stories return to what I saw as Parker’s strengths. Glory in the Daytime is about a little mouse of a woman in love with the theatre who gets a chance to meet one of her idols at the house of a more sophisticated friend. The woman’s husband is a sour man and when she shares her excitement at meeting a celebrity he sits there and snips away the joy from her, undramatically but effectively.

‘It – it isn’t so awfully nice,’ she said, ‘to spoil somebody’s pleasure in something. I was so thrilled about this. You don’t see what it is to me, to meet Lily Wynton. To meet somebody like that, and see what they’re like, and hear what they say, and maybe get to know them. People like that mean – Well they mean something different to me. They’re not like this. They’re not like me. Who do I ever see? Who do I ever hear? All my whole life, I’ve wanted to know – I’ve almost prayed that some day I could meet – Well. All right Jim.
She went out, and on to her bedroom.

Naturally the encounter isn’t all she hopes, but there’s a chance here for something more in her life than she has. It’s a chance her husband has no interest in. Parker doesn’t beat the reader over the head with the point but she captures the way some men can suffocate their wives without ever raising a hand against them. There’s many a disappointed man has taken vicious solace in ensuring that his wife’s life is no better than his.

Lastly comes Lolita (no relation). It’s the story of an aging southern Belle (“Seen from the end of a long, softly lighted room, Mrs. Ewing was a pretty woman”), her dowdy daughter and what happens when the most eligible man ever to visit their town takes an interest in that daughter. It’s a bitter chocolate of a tale with a distinct sting in its final sentence. It’s funny, but it’s back on what now seems like Parker’s territory of the way people can be cruel to each other in ways too small to easily complain of but which are no less damaging for that.

While writing this review I had to type out the various quotes I’ve used. As I did so it struck me how deceptively simple her prose is. The dialogue is all he said, she said – nobody asseverates here. Descriptions are flat and to the point, nobody is discalced. The language seems just there, transparent and unadorned.

Sometimes when I go to a new restaurant I order something very simple. Grilled chicken say. It’s hard to hide with something like grilled chicken. The quality of the ingredients and of the chef can’t help but show through. There’s no room for distracting the diner with sauces or unexpected flavours. The best chefs, a Daniel Boulud or Gordon Ramsay (back when he cooked instead of making tv programs) can make grilled chicken as fine a dish as ever you’ll eat. The mediocre ones just grill a chicken.

What makes Parker so good is her observation, her wit and (surprisingly to me) her compassion. She uses language in what seems a very simple way, but with tremendous precision. Here’s one final quote, chosen partly to demonstrate those skills but mostly just because I liked it:

Miss Noyes’ living room was done in the early modern period. There were a great many oblique lines and acute angles, zigzags of aluminum and horizontal stretches of mirror. The color scheme was sawdust and steel. No seat was more than twelve inches above the floor, no table was made of wood. It was, as has been said of larger places, all right for a visit.

There’s a recurring debate sparked by the growth of ereaders about what publishers contribute in an age where authors can self-publish electronically and readers can directly download their books onto their Kindles. Whenever it comes up some ebook advocates always argue that what’s happening today is the death of the publisher as gatekeeper and that this is a good thing. I’m not persuaded by those arguments for a number of reasons.

I’m mentioning this here because I think publishers are much more than gatekeepers. Publishers are also highlighters. They hold out a book from the vast mass of works out there and say hey, read this, we think it’s good. When a book gets chosen for the Penguin Modern Classics range that doesn’t mean I’ll like it, it doesn’t even mean I’ll think it’s any good, but it does mean I pay some attention to it. Penguin, and publishers like them, aren’t standing across a gate barring me from great books. They’re standing at the gate welcoming me inside.

The Penguin Modern Classics pocket editions are a great idea. With them Penguin effectively stopped me and said Max, we know you’re not keen to try Dorothy Parker, but this is only a little over 80 pages and it costs only £2.99. How about giving it a go? For £2.99 I discovered a new writer that I enjoyed and was surprised and impressed by. I don’t know what the future holds, but I hope it holds a place for publishers in one form or another for a long time yet.

As for Dorothy Parker, I plan to read more. Thank you Penguin.

The Sexes

He was doomed to ambivalence and desire.

Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, by Maile Meloy

One of the joys of blogging is that it makes you part of a community of other bloggers. That’s good for a number of reasons not least of which is the opportunity to talk about books with like minded people. Another one of those reasons is that sometimes it exposes you to books you might otherwise have passed by.

There’s no way on my own I’d have read Maile Meloy’s short story collection Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It. Starkly written tales of quiet emotional desperation set in the American mid-West? That’s not my territory. I leave it to others better suited.

Sometimes though it’s good to read outside one’s normal range. Sometimes it’s good to be challenged. When both Kevin of kevinfromcanada and Trevor from themookseandthegripes praised Meloy as one of the finest writers they’d read in a fair while I had to pay attention. Unsurprisingly they were right. This is a largely excellent short story collection.

I talked above about challenge. The truth though is that this isn’t remotely a challenging read (particularly when compared to writers like Pynchon, Quin or Burn). Meloy writes prose that slips down with deceptive ease. Her stories are like cocktails where you can’t taste the alcohol. They’re smooth drinking but there’s a kick at the end.

Isn’t that a dreadful cover by the way? It makes it look like a life affirming beach read. Ugh. It hugely frustrates me how so many women writers are packaged as light entertainment regardless of their content. I wonder how many great books I’ve missed out on because they were marketed as chicklit. The US cover which you can see at Kevin or Trevor’s is vastly more apposite with its stark imagery of ice and night.

Anyway. There are eleven stories in this collection. Each is quietly and unshowily written. By and large they deal in the gulfs between people. Sometimes as in Travis, B these gulfs are physical. A young man falls in love with a teacher who takes an evening class which he attends on a bored whim. Montana is a big state though and she took the job from desperation. She has a nine hour drive each way to get there.

The problem he has isn’t just one of mileage. They’re separated by class and education too. His loneliness is like a hunger, and Meloy makes it a physical pain. I could taste his yearning. Trevor has some choice quotes from this story in his review so I won’t repeat them here but it’s excellent.

It’s a compliment to the collection to say that wasn’t my favourite tale. I’ll come back to which one was.

In Red from Green a girl goes on a camping trip with her father, her uncle and a client of her uncle’s new law firm. That client is the plaintiff in a lucrative class action lawsuit – a suit that will likely collapse if he pulls out of it.

The client shows an interest in the girl despite her being really a bit too young for that to be appropriate. Her father seems to let it slide, just as he lets slide various breaches of hunting etiquette. Just how far is the father prepared to let things go to keep this guy happy?

In Two Step a woman, Naomi, visits her best friend Alice and finds her distraught and believing her husband is cheating on her. Alice is right. Naomi knows that because she’s the one he’s cheating with. While she and Alice talk he arrives home…

In The Children a man is having an affair with the girl who used to teach all the neighbourhood kids how to swim. She’s young (compared to him anyway) and uncomplicated and vulnerable. His wife is smart and tough. Smarter and tougher than he is. He talks to another local girl with whom he nearly had an affair.

“You’re leaving Raye,” Jennie said.
He felt a surge of adrenaline, and steadied himself on the closet door. “Does it show?” he asked.
Jennie smiled. “I’ve known you since I was born,” she said. “You think that means you know me inside out, but really it means I know you.”
He thought of correcting her: he had known her before she was born. He;d watched her mother, hugely pregnant and happy, floating in the lake with her belly at the surface. Her father so proud you’d think no one had ever knocked up a pretty girl before. The two families had done everything together, before Jennie’s began to disintegrate. Jennie was his daughter’s age, two years younger than his son, and he remembered her at six in just a bikini bottom, darting in and out of the water. Or bundled in a snowsuit in winter, riding a plastic sled on her stomach across the ice. She was twelve when the marriage finally ended, and her father had sung drunkenly, here in the lake-house kitchen, “If you want to be happy for the rest of your life, don’t make a pretty woman your wife,” and then cried over what the divorce might do to Jennie.

He’s caught between them all. Between the safety of home and a wife who does still love him. Between the escape of a younger woman and the fantasy of the life he had when he was younger. He wants it both ways. As he bitterly reflects: “What kind of fool wanted it only one way?”

That question was answered earlier of course in Travis, B. There’s plenty of folk here would be fine with it one way. There’s plenty too who want it both though.

Meloy has a knack for the simple yet telling sentence. Lines like “Children were experiments, and his had failed.” have an almost visceral punch. I loved too “She was so young and untroubled by guilt, she could tell everything and be forgiven.” It’s a line I understand better than I would wish to.

In a sense of course that’s what this kind of fiction is often about. That beautifully crafted sentence on which a story turns. It’s a style of writing that tends not to appeal to me because it can often become technique over content. What I think takes this higher than mere form though is a knack Meloy shows for putting discomfort on the page.

Several stories feature encounters between young women and old men. There’s that daughter with the important legal client I mentioned above. There’s a man talking to the youthful girlfriend of his own daughter’s murderer. There’s the man in The Children pursued by a friend’s daughter and pursuing in turn his own children’s former swim teacher. In each of these the situation is awkward, but who it is awkard for varies.

Not everything is perfect. Spy vs. Spy, a tale of two warring brothers, I found obvious and even trite. The otherwise polished story Liliana contains a massive infodump detailing who the narrator’s grandmother was. It’s needed because she turns up at his door after her funeral, not dead after all. It’s still pretty blatant though and sticks out in a collection which is otherwise so polished. By contrast this is as clean a piece of writing as I could wish for:

Jennie Taylor sat at the kitchen table with her legs crossed, in jeans and a sweater. Her dark hair was brushed straight and smooth. Fresh air and her mother’s looks had served her well.

Unusually for me I spaced these stories out over a period of weeks. The benefit of that is that I gave each one space to breathe – something I often fail to do with short stories. Being absolutely honest when I came to write this piece up I found that I didn’t actually remember all of them. Some I had to reopen to recognise. Not every story is as good as the next. That said, different readers could easily differ as to which were best.

In the end this collection to me was about the quote I’ve used to title this review – ambivalence and desire. With its quiet desperation and middle class angst this is classic literary fiction territory. Thankfully it’s good though, and in the end that’s all that really matters.

Kevin’s review is here. Trevor’s is here. I strongly recommend both.

Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It. If you’re curious, The Children was my favourite.

Its edge was bright as new chrome.

Burning Chrome, by William Gibson

William Gibson was made famous by his 1984 novel Neuromancer. Before that though he was already well known on the SF scene, and he’d had a number of short stories published.

1986 saw those short stories gathered together into one volume, Burning Chrome (also the title of one of the short stories). It’s an interesting collection to read today. Gibson’s short stories aren’t as good as his novels, but they are interesting historical documents and there is a certain pleasure to be had in seeing the seeds of the ideas that would later prove so influential when put in novel form.

The first story, Johnny Mnemonic, is probably the most famous of the collection, due to a frankly terrible film adaptation starring Keanu Reeves. Here’s the first couple of sentences from it, which give a good idea as to the style:

I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude. I’m a very technical boy.

Johnny Mnemonic is set in the milieu that would later be used for Neuromancer, and indeed Molly Zero who is a key character in Neuromancer makes her debut here. Already there’s casual violence, criminality and interestingly a brand reference – Adidas. In Gibson’s future brands matter and this will prove a recurring theme in these stories and in his work generally (most notably in the relatively recent Pattern Recognition). Gibson’s future was consumerist, and writing this in 2010 on that front he looks pretty accurate.

Johnny Mnemonic and Burning Chrome itself are both essentially crime stories. The characters may be hackers or have surgically altered brains, but in the end what they do and how they live would be recognisable to Chandler. These stories are fun and they’re interesting as a demonstration of how Gibson’s ideas were developing, but they’re not the best in the collection. The best oddly enough are those least typical of his later work.

In Fragments of a Hologram Rose a sleepless man contemplates a failed relationship and the debris of it remaining in his apartment and his memory. Published back in 1977 it’s a strangely elegaic work, about the impossibility of really knowing another person and the unreliability of recollection. There are elements of what’s to come later (“In the bedroom, Parker prods the brushed-aluminum face of his Sendai Sleep-Master.” – there’s those brand names again), but the mood is very different to what was to follow.

Other stories are more straightforwardly traditional SF. Hinterland is a solid tale of humanity’s first contact (of sorts) and of how alien aliens could be. It’s good stuff, but it’s not genre defining. Many feature what will later be almost standard Gibsonian elements such as capsule hotels, temperfoam slabs for beds. hostile corporate extractions and an awful lot of chrome (seriously, a lot of chrome). Again, most are fun but if it wasn’t for his later works these wouldn’t be remembered now.

There are exceptions though, and this collection includes what is probably my favourite story by Gibson, The Gernsback Continuum. Here’s the first paragraph:

Mercifully, the whole thing is starting to fade, to become an episode. While I do still catch the odd glimpse, it’s peripheral; mere fragments of mad-doctor chrome, confining themselves to the corner of an eye. There as that flying-wing liner over San Francisco last week, but it was almost translucent. And the shark-fin roadsters have gotten scarcer, and freeways discreetly avoid unfolding themselves into the gleaming eighty-lane monsters I was forced to drive last month in my rented Toyota. And I know that none of it will follow me to New York; my vision is narrowing to a single wavelength of probability. I’ve worked hard for that. Television helped a lot.

This is nothing like the other stories. Here there are none of the femme-fatales Gibson is so fond of (a lot of the stories feature women seducing men to get what they want then betraying them, Chandler again) and there’s no vision of the future. Well, that’s not quite right. There is a vision of the future but it’s not Gibson’s. It’s a previous generation’s vision of the future which now seems both absurd and vaguely threatening.

The Gernback Continuum is the story of a photographer in the then modern day who is given an assignment to photograph surviving remnants of the futuristic architecture of the 1930s. As he does so, he starts to see it around him for real – as if he’s falling into the shining future that was once imagined.

When I first read this story as a teenager I took it literally, as a tale of an alternate timeline intersecting with ours. It’s not though. Reading it as an adult it’s much more interesting than that. The photographer has clearly lost his grip on reality. He’s seeing the articles he’s read about his subject matter and their illustrations as if they were real. He’s seeing a future that never happened, something people once thought would be in place of the dull reality of what is.

It’s a great story, and there’s a huge irony in having it here. The Gernsback Continuum is a paean (and challenge) to an outdated form of science fiction and because it’s not about an imagined future (but about memories of a future that really was once imagined) it’s not dated at all. The other stories though feature Soviets in space, cold war politics continued, and now they’re as quaint as Edwardians with their dreams of frock-coats on Venus.

The only story in this collection which isn’t now a historical artefact is the one about how science fiction futures can become irrelevant and dated. There’s something splendid in that.

Otherwise, Gibson’s prose isn’t always stellar but it definitely has its moments. Gibson isn’t a master of dialogue and his characters are generally straightforward (though that’s often an issue with short stories). Gibson, like most science fiction writers, isn’t primarily interested in describing inner states.

What Gibson is interested in and where his real talent lies is creating and describing worlds. He writes in one story of “legless beggars with wooden bowls under animated holograms advertising French software”, and for me that captures the essence of the cyberpunk genre in one phrase. That right there is a whole brief literary movement in a part sentence.

Elsewhere, I liked a description of a holographic business sign being displayed “over a display of dead flies wearing fur coats of gray dust.” Gibson reminds us that the future is born of the present, and therefore unlike the perfection glimpsed in The Gernsback Continuum wherever we’re going will be much like now. It may have new machines, new vices and new crimes but it will still have rich and poor and in the end what will really matter will not be the technology but the people using it, and they will be much as we are now and much as we always were.

Gibson isn’t a psychological writer, but he doesn’t forget the human element. I think that’s a large part of why his fiction is outliving its period specifics.

Finally, while the part-sentence above encapsulated cyberpunk for me, there is one phrase which is generally seen as being the essence of the genre. It’s a phrase so classic that I used a variant of it for the title of my last blog entry on Gibson. It appears here for the first time, a harbinger of a literary wake up call that would shake the moribund SF scene of the late 1970s and introduce something new and much more interesting: “the street finds its own uses for things.”

Gibson’s stories here draw on a range of different traditions, some more successfully than others. The weakest are the most traditional, the best the least. In between are a handful where Gibson experiments with fusing crime genre concepts onto SF and it was those experiments which helped give birth to the cyberpunk genre (along obviously with writers such as Rucker and Sterling). This is where it began. If you’re not interested in what followed then the only story here worth seeking out is The Gernsback Continuum. If you are though it’s a fascinating insight into the shape of things then to come.

Burning Chrome