Tag: Fiction

Fly and I

You’re bloody irritating, d’you know that?

Today is my lie-in – the only morning of the week that I can call my own. I didn’t even get a good kip; I had to sleep with the window open you see? The sound of traffic and drunken reveling was the price I paid in exchange for tempting a breath of warm, moist warm air into my bedroom.

And now my lazy morning is being disrupted thanks to you. Yeah, you – clever enough to find the crack in the slider window yet seemingly too senseless to find your way back out again. So here we are – you buzzing and thunking against the window pane, not one of your six legs able to gain purchase, and me hunkering beneath the covers, trying to ignore your increasingly frantic attempts.

What are the chances that, of all of the windows in all of the houses in all of the streets in Dundee, you’d choose mine?

And then I think, what are the chances of us being in the same room?

Let’s take it right back. I can remember learning about the reproductive system in Biology. I was one of three-million sperm trying to get to that egg. I faced down some serious numbers. I’ve subsequently avoided meningitis, rickets, polio, bird flu, and any number of scrapes, bumps, and road traffic near misses to take my place under the duvet here.

All of this pales in comparison to what you’ve experienced, of course. Literally born into crap, you had to worm your way around decomposing matter as a maggot. Once you were flying, the fun had just begun. You were fair game for spiders, frogs, birds and wasps, not to mention the cavalcade of pesticides, flytraps and swatters arrayed against you. And the half-opened window, of course.

Which kind of brings me to my point. If my parents, upon seeing me writhing in the maternity ward, were to place a bet on my meeting you they would face infinitesimally large odds. They’d get laughed out of the bookies. I’m not usually one for fate or destiny, but you must admit the maths are pretty compelling. It feels like a benevolent force has nudged you through my window, eager to prompt a meeting that will change the course of both our lives.

Should I usher you outside again? It doesn’t feel a memorable enough finale to such a journey. An owner/pet scenario then? The girl and her fly? That doesn’t seem likely. Perhaps you have entered my room as a muse; maybe you should prompt me into some profound reverie, some sudden…

Thwack.

Gotcha.

 

***As always I’d be delighted to hear your thoughts and comments on this!***

Boarding

I’m delighted to feature at McStorytellers once more courtesy of Brendan Gisby. ‘Boarding’ is described as ‘a large dawd of dry Scots humour’. Just remember to keep your car doors locked…

https://www.mcstorytellers.com/boarding.html

 

If you like short stories, Scots, Scotland, or any combination of these, Mctorytellers is definitely worth a follow. Brendan has a long history of supporting authors with a link to Scotland and really knows his stuff.

 

As always, I’d be delighted to hear your feedback and thoughts!

 

Book Review – Reservoir 13

Reservoir 13

Jon McGregor

Harper Collins

GBP 8.99

‘There were dreams about her walking home. Walking beside the motorway, walking across the moor, walking up out of one of the reservoirs, rising from the dark grey water with her hair streaming and her clothes draped with long green weeds.’

Reservoir 13 is Jon McGregor’s fourth novel. It is extraordinary.

Rebecca Shaw is thirteen years old when she disappears on a family walk on the moors. Walking behind her parents, one minute she is there, the next she is not. Villagers rally around to search for the child, fanning out around the reservoirs and prodding through the undergrowth.

It is tempting for the reader to slip into the whodunnit mind frame, but that would be to miss the point of McGregor’s narrative. The girl is not found, not after a week, not after a month, not after a year. What follows is a forensically beautiful exploration of grief seen through the lens of a small village. The inhabitants move on, as they must; teenagers mature, marriages dissolve, and feuds escalate. All of these events are however set against the backdrop of unresolved tragedy.

McGregor uses beautiful, simple language. Huge, rambling two-page paragraphs do not serve to stilt the pace, but rather build a rhythmic, seasonal repetition. Each chapter starts at the new year bells. We follow a plethora of characters through the rural year, their tribulations interspersed with updates on badgers, foxes, bats, and swallows. This relentless changing-of-the-seasons heightens the tension of the piece and mimics the small-town claustrophobia threaded through the novel. What is left unsaid is as important as what McGregor chooses to commit to copy. Characters’ motives are often left only partially explored, tantalising the reader with the question ‘could it have been him/her?’

The time frame in which the novel is set in allows McGregor ample time to develop his characters. This development is particularly poignant in the case of the four teenagers who were briefly friends with Rebecca. We watch them dream, stumble, and finally accept their differing roles, becoming accustomed to grief and guilt in their own ways. The greatest achievement of the novel is to lull the reader into equating characters’ idiosyncratic worries and tribalisms with an undoubted tragedy. People move on; they must, and as such Rebecca fades into the background of village life, swallowed into folklore like so many other events.

A novel like no other I have ever read, and one which will stay with me.

For other book reviews featured on my blog please see

A Gentleman in Moscow

The Underground Railroad

Clean Lines

Matthew J. Richardson

Clean Lines

When people asked Clement what he did for a living he would say ‘I’m a painter.’ Artist sounded too grand, artiste more so. He was these as well, though.

Clement didn’t believe in labelling. Artists shouldn’t be boxed in; they shouldn’t be categorised. If he were put into corner, Clement would say that he ascribed to the Ligne Claire style. Clear, strong lines directed the viewer’s attention exactly where he wanted it to be.

Not that any serious art critic would insist upon labelling Clement. That sort of nonsense was reserved for the uninitiated, the dour. People like his parents. Lots of money to be made in medicine, they’d remark casually back when Clement had been doodling in his notebook during maths lessons. Have you thought about learning a trade, they’d ask delicately when his grades failed to improve.

This was where Clement belonged. Here, there were always people queuing to see his work. On a busy morning, two thousand people an hour would be ushered past his paintings, each admiring his simple colours, his bold shapes. A shout brought him to. Swigging the last of his coffee, Clement acknowledged his gaffer with a wave. The roar of morning traffic was dulled to a low hum as he slipped his ear muffs back on. Back in the cab, a look out of the window told Clement that he was still in line. Down went the paint lever. Down went the handbrake. To his right, traffic weaved around the bollards, but behind him, straight down the middle, straight as an arrow, ran white rectangles. Like a piece of art.

As always, all comments welcome. See my published work HERE

Book Review – The Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad

Colson Whitehead

Fleet Publishing

GPB 8.99

The_Underground_Railroad_(Whitehead_novel)

‘If you want to see what this nation is all about, you have to ride the rails. Look outside as you speed through, and you’ll find the true face of America. It was a joke, then, from the start. There was only darkness outside the windows on her journeys, and only ever would be darkness.’

 

The sheer volume of escaped-slave narratives available to the book-buying public ensures that it takes something special to rise above the din. In his sixth novel, The Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead takes the sub-genre where no-one has previously, with astonishing results.

Cora is a slave on a Georgia plantation in the 1800s who decides to run alongside her associate Caesar. She follows in the footsteps of her mother, Mabel, who ran years before, leaving Cora to fend for herself. Driven by her hatred of the cruel plantation owners and haunted by her mother’s motives in abandoning her, Cora runs north-east to South Carolina.

Whitehead’s centrepiece is his transformation of the Underground Railroad into physical form. Each station is of different character, as are the various drivers of the engines transporting Cora and Caesar. However, what is at face value a twee idea is given short shrift by the brutality the pair encounter on their bid for freedom. Their footsteps are haunted by the slavecatcher Ridgeway, whose only failure was in not managing to catch Cora’s mother years ago.

This novel’s strength lies in it’s characters. It would have been easy for Whitehead to slip into well-worn stereotypes typical of slave narratives – the innocent runaway, the brave abolitionist ahead of his time. He chooses not to do so, and the results are subsequently more plausible. Readers, quite willing to take a young, pure Cora into their hearts, are shocked by the fact that she is spiky, resentful, and often lacking empathy. She is eventually all the more real and admirable as a result of this. Similarly, Cora’s helpers along the railroad have their motives dissected, from their own racial stereotyping to a hereditary burden reluctantly taken on. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, is the character of Ridgeway. Even though he has freed slaves himself, Ridgeway is utterly committed to finding runaways, his not finding Mabel serving as a useful driving force for the narrative. He works so well as an antagonist because his skill lies in working within a larger system; slavery is not his creation, but he has prospered because of it and as such has no motivation to challenge it. His cruelty is not gratuitous, but rather what he considers necessary to subjugate Cora and her friends, horrifying though it is to the reader. It is in Ridgeway that Whitehead delivers his most damning indictment of anti-abolitionist America – complicit, profiteering, and utterly convinced of white superiority.

Needless to say, there is extraordinary cruelty, treated almost incidentally by Whitehead, as it was in the era of the novel. In particular, the horrendous treatment of recaptured runaways is described in a matter-of-fact way, mirroring the transactional nature of the bond between slave and owner. Likewise, Whitehead disposes of characters just as the reader is beginning to bond with them, discouraging any emotional attachment. This has the effect of encouraging the reader to root for Cora even more as she makes her way northwards to what she hopes will be freedom. A superb and sobering read.

Sweat and Tears

Sweat and Tears

Matthew Richardson

(Adult content)

People can’t help but describe blood. ‘Shockingly red,’ they’ll say, as though the default colour is salmon pink or forget-me-not blue. ‘A fine mist of blood,’ they’ll gush, as if the killer had his thumb over an artery as he might a hosepipe in a garden. Also worthy of comment appears to be the fact that blood pools. It’s a liquid, folks. Can’t we take it as red (sic) that it won’t distribute itself evenly over pockmarked warehouse floors and torn linoleum?

Anyone who’s ever killed will tell you that it’s the smell of blood that you notice. It reaches up your nostrils with red, ragged fingernails and tugs right at the bridge of your nose, making your sinuses contract and your eyes water.

A scent brings a thousand connotations. When I smell blood I see ragged head wounds edged with shocking white bone. I see haemorrhaged scleras; a thousand, thousand burst capillaries surrounding a still-staring pupil with livid magenta. I see rust-red plasma slipping down floorboard cracks, congealing and hardening like cement between bricks. I…

There, now! Do you see how you’ve gone and made me do precisely what I said I wouldn’t?

That is exactly how I lost my temper just a moment ago.

Book Review – A Gentleman in Moscow

A Gentleman in Moscow

Amor Towles

London, Windmill Books

£8.99

A gentleman in moscow

 

‘Who would have imagined…when you were sentenced to life in the Metropol all those years ago, that you had just become the luckiest man in all of Russia.’

 

In A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles takes on a gargantuan task. The culture of Soviet-era Russia might not appear at first glance to be comfortable ground for a former investment professional. Towles, though, has an instinctive understanding of what western readers find interesting about the era and is not afraid of using footnotes to expand upon history. What results is the impression that Towles is genuinely fascinated with the evolution of the Soviet Union, a passion that quickly transfers to the reader.

The eponymous gentleman, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, is not immediately apparent as a heroic protagonist. Privileged, aristocratic, and a member of what his prosecutors describe as ‘the leisure class’, Rostov is sentenced to indefinite house arrest at the Metropol Hotel in Moscow by a Bolshevik tribunal in 1922. As he comes to terms with his confinement, Rostov finds comfort in routine, however mundane. Dining at the same restaurant, keeping the same appointment at the barbers, and rearranging his modest apartment allow the count a semblance of order whilst endearing him to the reader.

In what might seem limiting scaffolding for a story encompassing thirty-two years, Towles progresses his narrative through exquisitely drawn secondary characters, from the forthright child Nina, to the irascible chef Emile. Typically for a hotel, some characters linger throughout the book, whilst others, seemingly integral to the plot, disappear heartbreakingly without trace.

Towles treats the major historical events of the novel with similar disparity. The second world war itself, an obvious set piece, slides by with hardly a mention, whilst the gulag is evoked in all its industrial cruelty and horror. It is in this flux that Towles brings his third novel to life. History leaves its mark on the Metropol, its staff, and its guests. Rostov, though, remains serene. It is only when the Soviet Union threatens someone whom he has grown to love that the Count seeks to change his fate rather than console himself to it.

On spec, A Gentleman in Moscow has the potential to be mawkish. It is no such thing. Towles’ lightness of touch makes the novel warm and rewarding, its characters complex and contrasting.

 

 

 

Taken for a Spin

Taken for a Spin

Matthew Richardson

Taken for a Spin

Accusatory fingers pointed at him from all over the screen. Finger marks to be precise – the smudged signs of hope and despair and salt-and-vinegar grease. The marks drew a map for whoever came to the terminal after him; the leavings of a cartographer desperate to show his bad luck. There were sweaty streaks over red, black, odds, evens, bet, double bet, and add credit. Precious few over cash out though. Not yet anyway.

Spin again.

Oliver tapped and watched as the roulette wheel began spinning, the silvery ball spiralling its way towards black and red stripes. A stream of cold air and a phlegmy sniff told him that someone else had entered the bookies. He could see in the reflection on the screen that it was Gary, in for the horses at four-ten. Oliver pulled his thick jacket around him, hoping that Gary wouldn’t clock him yet. Not that he didn’t like the guy, but he did bloody talk and Oliver needed to at least break even for today.

Spin again.

Thank God. The wet weather outside had resulted in Gary going for a sneaky smoke in the gents before the race started. With any luck Oliver would get a break and be out in ten. He would have to power-walk home; at least he would be warm. He had been sat in front of the machine so long that he felt frozen to the metal stool. His hands were like blocks of ice –the touchscreens didn’t work with gloves. In went the debit card. One last go before heading home.

Spin again.

Oliver hadn’t looked at his watch for a while, nervous at what he might see. Evens, reds. They hadn’t come up for eight spins now. Surely by the law of averages they were due. Surely. If he could just go in a hundred of so down, he could explain it to the wife. The phone went off in his pocket. It was Sheila.

“Hi darlin’…yeah just dropped by the bookies to put a line on…yep, I’ve literally just walked in…”

Spin again.

It was saving the best for last.

Damn. Gary had just come out of the bogs and spied him. Over he came, skipping like a scratched record. This time for sure, though. There was no way, simply no way, that this could not land. Not if the God-forsaken thing wasn’t rigged anyway. Sheila was still wittering away in his ear. He put the mobile down at the side of the terminal.

“Olly!” came the raucous greeting from Gary, bringing with it a slap to the back for Oliver. “Long time no see mate! Got a lighter? Mine’s gubbed. You still stuck on these, mate? It’s a mugs game, ain’t it?”

“Just give me a moment, Gary,” he answered tightly, eyes still fixed on the screen. “Last spin”.

His fingers reached for the screen again. Keep the faith. Evens, red. Sheila’s voice still issued from the phone on the machine, whiny and insistent. One more spin, money back, home, see the kids. That was the plan.

“Horses mate, that’s the way you wanna go. Head home with some dough to feed the weans,” laughed Gary, giving Oliver one more slap on the back and knocking his fingers across the screen where they struck black. Gary gave a sheepish grin. “Oops, sorry mate! Hope I brought you a bit of luck!”

Oliver half-turned to swear at the man, his face beetroot and swollen with rage. He turned back, though. The wheel was spinning, the ball circling, picking out its victim. It hopped onto the wheel like a child onto a merry-go-round, full of carefree abandon.

Red

Black

Red

Black

Red

Black

Red

Black

…

Red

He closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. From beside him came, insistent, the tinny voice of his wife.

“Olly? Oliver? You still there? Oliver?”

He opened his eyes once more and looked at the balance at the bottom of the screen. A big fat zero, round and pulsing.

Swinging off the seat and grabbing the mobile, he flung it as hard as he could towards Gary, who was now engrossed in the racing. Sheila’s voice whined through the air as she spun, falling silent as she hit the bank of televisions.

“Oi! What was that for?” came the reply.

Oliver’s fingers were still like chilled bars of steel as he curled them into fists, but the boiling heat of righteous indignation rose in his stomach as he strode over to his friend.