From reading the description and from the way that the book opens, I had expected The Country of the Pointed Firs to be a sort of American Cranford.  Consequently, I was expecting to love it as much as I did Elizabeth Gaskell’s lovely novella when I read it last year.  To say that I did not is a bit of an understatement: I didn’t dislike the book, I just thought it was ok.  That’s not to say that I thought The Country of the Pointed Firs was a bad book, but it was one that didn’t work for me.  It’s perhaps unfair of me to judge a book based on the merits of another, but the set up is so similar that I can’t help it.  In both books the narrator returns to a small, unremarkable town that holds a place in her heart, and then proceeds to introduce the reader to the town’s residents and all the quirks that come with small town life.  However, there the similarities end.

Although the concept is a lot like that of Cranford, the execution and the mood of the book are very different.  Cranford chronicles the little, but all important, incidents in the lives of the women who live there, whereas The Country of the Pointed Firs is more of a series of character studies: Jewett introduces the reader to characters and more often than not just lets them sit there.  Sometimes there will be an anecdote, occasionally there may be tea, but by and large nothing happens.  This is not in the way that nothing happens in Cranford, where the little, everyday things are made to seem important to the reader because they are important to the characters, infused with Elizabeth Gaskell’s warmth and humour, but in a way that emphasises the slow and sedate pace of life and the reserved nature of its people. Whereas Cranford had a real feel of community to it, The Country of the Pointed Firs portrayed a life that was typified by, if not loneliness, then at least isolation, broken by occasional moments of contact with others.  Most of the characters are widows, widowers, or people who simply never married. Some of them were intriguing (I particularly liked Mrs Todd and the widowed fisherman who sits alone in his cottage knitting) but I find myself failing to remember many of them.

The book starts out so promisingly:

When one really knows a village like this and its surroundings, it is like becoming acquainted with a single person.  The process of falling in love at first sight is as final as it is swift in such a case, but the growth of true friendship may be a lifelong affair.

After a first brief visit made two or three summers before in the course of a yachting cruise, a lover of Dunnet Landing returned to find the unchanged shores of the pointed firs, the same quaintness of the village with its elaborate conventionalities; all that mixture of remoteness, and childish certainty of being the centre of civilization of which her affectionate dreams had told.

I expected to be made to feel all these things as the narrator discovered them anew, but I didn’t.  Ultimately, how much any reader enjoys this book will boil down to how much they like the characters in it, because Jewett gives you nothing else to go on.  As for me, I found the book interesting as a reading experience (particularly given my woeful lack of experience of American fiction), but one that was interesting in an intellectual rather than emotional way.  I found myself unmoved.

If anyone would like my copy of this book, please leave me a message in the comments.  It came from BookMooch, so it’s a bit battered and has occasional marginal notes, but I’d like to see it go to a good home as it’s not one I’m likely to read again.

The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories by Sarah Orne Jewett.  Published by Norton, 1981, pp. 296.  Originally published in 1896.

The Pigeon tells the story of one day in the life of Jonathan Noel, a man whose existence is ordered to a fault.  He lost his parents when he was much younger during the war when he and his sister went into hiding, later went into the army and then moved to Paris where he took a small room and a job as a bank security guard, both of which he has held for twenty years at the beginning of the story.  He is content because of rather than in spite of his solitary, regimented existence, until the day when he opens his door in the morning to find a pigeon sitting outside.  Unable to follow his routine, Jonathan finds himself thrown into chaos as he is forced to leave his sanctuary of order and face the outside world.

The story begins in a way that instantly establishes Jonathan’s character:

At the time the pigeon affair overtook him, unhinging his life from one day to the next, Jonathan Noel, already past fifty, could look back over a good twenty-year period of total uneventfulness and would never have expected anything of importance could ever overtake him again — other than death some day.  And that was perfectly alright with him.  For he was not fond of events, and hated outright those that rattled his inner equilibrium and made a muddle of the external arrangements of life.

This may seem hyperbolic, but is in fact perfectly in keeping with his reaction to the ominously named ‘pigeon affair’.  The seemingly harmless occurrence jolts him out of his secure and ordered regime, and Suskind does an excellent job of showing Johnathan’s deteriorating mental state as his thoughts and actions become increasingly frantic, and fairly mundane occurrences assume augmented significance in his mind.

I don’t want to say any more, as I think this is a book best discovered for oneself, but I definitely recommend it as an effective short story.  Lots of reviews compare it to Kafka and Poe, but as I’m not really familiar with either of these writers I can’t agree or disagree.  Perhaps I should become familiar with them if this story is anything to go by.

The Pigeon by Patrick Suskind, translated from the German by Alfred A. Knopf.  Published by Bloomsbury, 1995, pp. 124.  Originally published in 1987.

The Salzburg Tales is a 1930′s take on Chaucer’s famous Canterbury Tales, following the same pattern of a group of strangers meeting (in this case they are all attending the opera at the Salzburg Festival) and deciding to tell stories to pass the time.  A 1930′s take on The Canterbury Tales?  What’s not to love?  Well, quite a bit if I’m honest.

For a start, Stead’s characters are nowhere near as diverse and interesting as Chaucer’s are, and I think that’s partly due to the set up of her frame narrative.  Chaucer has his characters meet at a pub prior to going on pilgrimage.  Boccaccio in his Decameron which follows the same format has his characters fleeing from the black death in Florence.  Religion and death are both great levellers of men, but Austrian opera, strangely enough, is not.  As a result, Stead’s characters are all the sort of middle class people who might attend an opera festival and so, although she has a keen eye for detail, there are none of the great individuals like the Miller or the Wife of Bath who stand out.  Instead, they’re all much of a muchness.  I enjoyed the character portraits when reading them, such as the Banker:

He would risk half his fortune on a throw, turn head-over-heels in the air in an aeroplane, tell anyone in the world to go to Hell, laugh at princes and throw tax-collectors out the door, but he suffered excessively from toothache because he feared the dentist’s chair: and he was convinced that his luck depended on numbers, events, persons, odd things he encountered; his head accountant was forced to wear the same tie for six weeks because it preserved a liberal state of min in the Government in a difficult time: his chauffeur was obliged to carry the same umbrella, rain, hail or shine, because the umbrella depressed the market in a stock he had sold short. (pp. 39-40)

Or the Old Lady:

She wore a long gold chain and a lorgnette and an expensive hat made of satin, feathers, straw and tulle, all mixed and mummified together: no one could imagine what antediluvian stock of unfashionable materials had been drawn upon to make her hat. (p. 43)

They have enough interesting quirks to make them interesting without making them too contrived, and this was by far my favourite part of the book.  However, the character types are all very similar and so even with these little details it becomes impossible to tell them apart, particularly when they do not behave in any manner distinct to their characters after this introduction.

Because the characters are all very similar, so are their stories.  There was none of the variety of tone, dialect, register, interests and agenda which make The Canterbury Tales so great.  In fact, I didn’t believe that any of these stories was being told by anyone other than Christina Stead herself.  They aren’t the stories of the characters described at the beginning, but merely a short story collection stuffed into an unnecessary framework which adds nothing to the reading and understanding of them.  This would have been less of a problem had I found the stories themselves enjoyable, but sadly they really weren’t my cup of tea.  Very few of them were satisfying on a narrative level, often feeling either tedious and drawn out or as though a large chunk of the middle were missing in order to leap to a conclusion which didn’t make much sense.

I found this book a very frustrating read because I wanted it to be so good.  Has anyone else read this one and had a similar experience?  Or have you read it and loved and can explain what I might have missed?  I’m a bit disappointed really, not to mention rather intimidated by the other Stead books I have lurking malevolently on my shelves, most of which are worryingly chunky.  Are they all going to be like this?

The Salzburg Tales by Christina Stead.  Published by Virago, 1986, pp. 498.  Originally published in 1934.

American Ghosts and Old World Wonders was published after Angela Carter’s death from lung cancer in 1992 according to directions that she left.  The book is a collection of nine stories, four set in the new world of America and five in the old world of Europe.  Part one contains ‘Lizzie’s Tiger’, ‘John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore’, ‘Gun for the Devil’ and ‘The Merchant of Shadows’ and part two comprises ‘The Ghost Ships’, ‘In Pantoland’, ‘Ashputtle, or The Mother’s Ghost’, ‘Alice in Prague, or The Curious Room’ and ‘Impressions: The Wrightsman Magdalene’.  The new world stories have a more defined story to them, while the old world stories are more abstract and bizarre, although nowhere near as odd as I found Fireworks when I read it last year.  The balance between the two halves of the book and the two different styles works well and it forms a good, coherent collection (unsurprising given how specifically Carter planned the contents of the book).

Two stories stick out in my mind from this short story collection and they are, interestingly, the first two in the book.  ‘Lizzie’s Tiger’ is about a young Lizzie Borden, who became famous for allegedly killing her father and stepmother, escaping for one evening from her poverty-stricken home to go to visit a nearby fairground.  Lizzie is depicted as a serious little girl and Carter uses a wonderful phrase to describe her, saying that she has ‘a whim of iron’.  It’s just perfect because it encapsulates the arbitrary nature and forcefulness of childhood desires, and I’m sure anyone who has ever met a child will be able to picture exactly what Carter means.  It is impossible to read the story without it being shadowed by the knowledge that this isn’t an ordinary little girl but one who later possibly commits a double murder with a hatchet, and Carter plays on that to change a story of a girl visiting a fairground and seeing a caged tiger into something altogether more sinister and unsettling.  Although the story follows Lizzie she never speaks, but only observes in a way that becomes increasingly eerie as the tale progresses, so by the time she encounters the tiger there are obvious parallels between the two of them: both caged, whether literally or figuratively, both potentially lethal and both biding their time for now.  I think Carter has written at least one other story about Lizzie Borden, so I’ll definitely be investigating that to see what she does with the interesting character that she has created.

My other favourite was the story which caused me to buy the collection in the first place: ‘John Ford’s Tis Pity She’s a Whore’.  In this contribution, which is part story, part playscript, Carter plays on the fact that John Ford is the name of both a Jacobean dramatist and a maker of 20th century western films, combining the two forms to relocate Jacobean Ford’s Italian play ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore’ to the prairies of North America, using setting and characters more at home in one of 20th century Ford’s westerns.  It’s such a simple idea but so clever and effective and I loved it just as much this time as I did when I first read it sat in that lecture hall.  If you read anything by Angela Carter, read this story.

American Ghosts and Old World Wonders by Angela Carter.  Published by Vintage, 1994, pp. 146.  Originally published 1993.

Saki’s stories are absolutely marvellous.  They remind me a bit of E. F. Benson in their tone and focus on the foibles of the upper middle class, but unlike Benson (who I always feel has a soft spot for his characters no matter how much he may mock them) Saki is merciless in his approach.  The stories are dry, witty and biting and if they were long enough for the reader to get to know the characters at all it would be easy for them to seem rather cruel, but because they are only brief snapshots the reader is able to laugh without any accompanying feeling of guilt.  They may be a little bizarre and dark at times (‘Sredni Vashtar’ for example is the story of a young boy who has a pet ferret that he turns into a god) but, unlike some of the more modern short stories that I’ve read, they always have a proper narrative arc and so they are very satisfying to read.

Although all the stories are entertaining, my two favourites are ‘Tobermory’ and ‘Mrs Packletide’s Tiger’.  ‘Tobermory’ is about Mr Cornelius Appin, who announces at Lady Blemley’s weekend gathering that he has found a way to teach animals to talk and has successfully taught the cat, Tobermory, to talk.  The guests however are less than impressed when it becomes apparent that Tobermory enjoys exercising his new linguistic talents to reveal all the secrets of the guests at the party to the assembled crowd:

An archangel ecstatically proclaiming the Millennium, and then finding that it clashed unpardonably with Henley and would have to be indefinitely postponed, could hardly have felt more crestfallen than Cornelius Appin at the reception of his wonderful achievement.  (p. 17)

I think this comparison is just brilliant in its bathos.  It conveys how ludicrous the guests’ objections are in the face of such an amazing discovery and how bound they are by social convention.  It makes me chuckle every time I read it.  Saki also gives Tobermory a wonderful voice and personality which conveys a sense of relish at embarrassing and shaming his listeners with the things they say and do behind closed doors.  I only wish it had been a longer tale.

‘Mrs Packletide’s Tiger’ concerns a lady who decides that she wants to shoot a tiger in order to outdo Loona Bimberton who has just flown in a aircraft.  Soon a suitable candidate is found:

Circumstances proved propitious.  Mrs Packletide had offered a thousand rupees for the opportunity of shooting a tiger without overmuch risk or exertion, and it so happened that a neighbouring village could boast of being the favoured rendezvous of an animal of respectable antecedents, which had been driven by the increasing infirmities of age to abandon gamekilling and confine its appetite to the smaller domestic animals.  The prospect of earning the thousand rupees had stimulated the sporting and commercial instinct of the villagers; children were posted night and day on the outskirts of the local jungle to head the tiger back in the unlikely event of his attempting to roam away to fresh hunting-grounds, and the cheaper kinds of goats were left about with elaborate carelessness to keep him satisfied with his present quarters.  The one great anxiety was lest he should die of old age before the date appointed for the memsahib’s shoot.  Mothers carrying their babies home through the jungle after the day’s work in the fields hushed their singing lest they might curtail the restful sleep of the venerable herd-robber. (p. 22)

It seems so ridiculous, and yet the task proves much trickier than Mrs Packletide anticipates with humorous results.

It seems that a lot of people have been reading Saki recently, and before writing my review today was treated to reviews from Simon of  Stuck in  Book, Lyn of I prefer Reading and Hayley of Desperate Reader who’ve all been reading Saki’s The Unbearable Bassington. After reading these, I’m now looking forward to reading more Saki even more than I was after reading this short story collection.  What a lovely introduction!

Filboid Studge, the Story of a Mouse That Helped by Saki.  Published by Penguin, 2011, pp. 66.  Originally published in 1911 and 1914.

I was thrilled, then, to receive a free copy of Joseph Jacobs’ More English Fairy Tales, published recently by Pook Press, from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers programme.  This book is a facsimile of the original 1894 edition of the text, complete with gorgeous illustrations from John D. Batten.  It comprises an impressive eighty seven fairy tales, many of which are variations on better known versions of the stories, such as the many different versions of Cinderella which appear, and all of which are quite short in length.  All in all, it is a lovely collection to read, whether as an adult or a child.

Scrapefoot the Fox

I found the selection of stories really interesting, particularly in instances where they followed a basic outline that was familiar but with some subtle differences.  The story that we all know as ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’ appears in this collection as the story of Scrapefoot the Fox, who undergoes similar ursine exploits culminating in his being summarily defenestrated by the irate Bears.  It makes me curious as to how this character was transformed from a male fox into the little girl Goldilocks from the tale more familiar today (apparently by way of being an old woman and then a young girl called Silver-hair, according to the appendix).  Likewise, the well known story of the Pied Piper is altered by moving the setting from Hamelyn to Newtown on the shores of the Solent.  I thought this might perhaps have been a change made by Jacobs, appropriating a foreign tale for his book of English stories, as he does warn in his introduction that ‘I do not attribute much anthropological value to tales whose origin is probably foreign‘ (p. x).  However, Jacobs’ enlightening ‘Notes and References’ section which closes the book reveals that the story aparently made its way over to England with no help from the author, prompting me to wonder once again how this change took place.  I was also delighted to stumble across an early version of what has become one of my favourite folk songs in ‘The Golden Ball’.  A girl is to be hung, but cries out to the hangman:

Stop, stop, I think I see my mother coming!
O mother, hast brought my golden ball
And come to set me free?

She then repeats this, protesting that her father has also come to save her.  However, each time the response is negative:

I’ve neither brought thy golden ball
Nor come to set thee free,
But I have come to see thee hung
Upon this gallows-tree.

Eventually her sweetheart turns up at the final moment with the promised golden ball and saves her.  I first heard this sung while sat in the garden of a pub in Warwick, and fans of the marvellous folk band Bellowhead will recognise this as the song ‘Prickle Eye Bush’, which you can see them performing in all their enthusiastic glory here (seriously, go and watch them).  Although the song tells most of the story itself, it’s still really interesting to find out where it comes from and get a bit of background.

For every old favourite, there are also plenty of new tales.  I particularly liked the Hobyahs and their exploits, a species of interfering fairy folk who were entirely new to me.  The range of different tales and styles is particularly good over the eighty seven stories and I think this would keep the interest of any reader, whether they had a specific interest in the morphology of traditional stories or not.  However, for me it is the appendix which makes this book so interesting.  Here Jacobs explains where all the tales were gathered, any history behind them and how they differ from other know variations.  He strikes the perfect balance between being a storyteller and being an academic folklorist.

It is worth passing comment on the particular edition from Pook Press, as obviously the content of the book hasn’t changed since 1894.  More English Fairy Tales has long since passed into the public domain and you can read the whole thing for free, including the illustrations, on Project Gutenburg and it is available in numerous different versions on Amazon, all of which are facsimiles of the same text and so will look exactly the same as this one.  With that in mind, it’s a shame that Pook haven’t added anything of their own to the book to induce the book shopper to buy this particular version.  It’s a perfectly pleasant little book, but an introduction either from an editor at the company or, even better, from someone who works in the field now or an author who writes modern fairy tales perhaps would have made it stand out a bit more.  Pook state that they are ‘working to republish these classic works in affordable, high quality editions, using the original text and artwork so these works can delight another generation of children’ which is an aim that I find admirable, but I think just a few paragraphs explaining why this work is special, how it fits in with their catalogue and a bit of historical context would have been great.

More English Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs, illustrated by John D. Batten.  Published by Pook Press, 2011, pp. 243.  Originally published in 1894.

Title:

Author: Louisa May Alcott

Published: Honor Books, 1999, pp. 122.  Originally published 1870s

Genre: Children’s short stories

Blurb: “If someone would only come and take me away!  I’m so tired of living here I don’t think I can bear it much longer,” Patty cries.  Patty’s life in an orphanage is a dark world with little hope, beauty or love.  Even after a family finally does come for Patty, it is only because they need a servant.  But there is one person who does care about Patty.  And soon Patty’s life will never be the same!

When, where and why: I have to confess, I actually bought this for someone else as a Christmas gift.  I don’t usually read books before I give them to people (in fact, I never have before) but then my train home was delayed and I finished my other book and so I had nothing to read!  I was in a state of panic until I remembered that I had this book snuggled safely in a padded envelope in the depths of my bag, heading home to be wrapped.  Desperate times call for desperate measures and so I gave in to necessity and read the book.

What I thought: I firmly believe that any book is better than no book, and that if I were to be marooned on a desert island with nothing to read but a stack of Christine Feehan’s terrible vampire books I would plough gamely through them rather than sit around without a book.  Of course, I wouldn’t be able to hold anything resembling an intelligent conversation with normal people if I were ever rescued (although I would have an impressive collection of euphemisms for genitalia), but that’s besides the point.  Nevertheless, while The Quiet Little Woman, a book of three festive short stories by Louisa May Alcott, filled a bored half hour while stuck in a siding somewhere around Basingstoke, it swiftly transpired that I found it only marginally better than having no book at all, disappointingly.

Anyone approaching this book expecting to read something like Louisa May Alcott’s far more famous Little Women is likely to be equally disappointed, I’m afraid.  I found Little Women to be charming and hearwarming yet, although The Quiet Little Woman and Tilly’s Christmas (the first two stories in the collection) follow a similar narrative trajectory of poor but worthy girls finding love, warmth and happiness through their own selfless actions, they never achieved this end and so came across as rather sanctimonious.  I think this is partly because the stories are too short to allow much character development; the March girls may be good at heart but they all have faults which make them interesting, whereas Tilly and Patty are never anything other than perfect and boring.

Rosa’s Tale is a better story, as it deals with a horse rather than a painfully good child and so the rather hamfisted moral message which so irritated me in the first two stories is thankfully absent.  However, it reads like a paraphrase of Black Beauty rather than an original story and feels rushed.  Having read this book, I don’t think that the short story is Alcott’s medium, or at least it is not one which translates very well for a modern reader with modern expections.  On the whole, I found the collection to be sweet to the point of being sickly and moralistic to the point of being trite.

Where this book goes: This book is winging its way to the person for whom I bought it.  I really hope that they like it more than I did.

Tea talk: As this was a train book, there was no tea to be had.

Author: Tim Mackintosh-Smith

Published: Slightly Foxed, 2005, pp. 31.  First edition

Genre: Short story

Blurb: Speaking via its ghost-writer, Tim Mackintosh-Smith, the Arabic manuscript of Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi tells its own true, if admittedly incredible, story. Set in medieval Cairo and Aleppo, seventeenth-century Oxford and 1960s London, it is a tale of cannibalism, a curse, and of an authorial voice from beyond the grave. Ghost Writer not only redefines the meaning of a talking book; it may even make us listen to our libraries.

When, where and why: Slightly Foxed is a book shop on Gloucester Road that I used to walk past every time I went to visit the Old English Thorn when he lived in halls at university but somehow never went in, probably because I found any shop in South Kensington which wasn’t Tesco slightly intimidating, worrying that I would be summarily shooed out of them for being not nearly moneyed enough.  I came across the place again by chance when browsing book websites and noticed that they publish a quarterly magazine and a range of gorgeous looking books.  Never one to let such a discovery go uninvestigated, I ordered this book from their website as it looked to be a good starting point.

What I thought: The idea of reading a book from the point of view of a manuscript will either strike you as unutterably dull or absolutely fascinating.  Given that I’ve had the opportunity to study, poke and prod old manuscripts I was of the latter group even before I read this little gem of a book, but Tim Mackintosh-Smith carries it off so well than I’m sure Ghost Writer could convert even people of the former opinion.  This book is quirky, engaging, amusing and dry and illustrates exactly how a short story should be written, in my opinion.

I think this book holds a special appeal for me because I spent some time a few years ago poring over medieval manuscripts, deciphering the crabbed handwriting, peering at the parchment and examining the coloured inks.  Consequently, I love the idea that a manuscript could be just as critical of itself as of the people who read it, cataloging the flaws and foibles of both with equal insight, and, even though Ghost Writer has a mere 31 pages, there were numerous paragraphs that made me chuckle with recognition or at the new perspective they provide:

I’m not the final copy; that was made for the Caliph, al-Nasir, in Abd al-Latif’s native Baghdad.  I’ve got some marginal afterthoughts, and the odd blob where the nib of the reed snagged on a backward loop; even a wrong verb ending, forced messily into agreement.  But the ink flowed freely through the long fasting afternoons — it was Ramadan, the best month for writers: no cigarette-breaks or coffee-stops — on and on for 140 pages, thirteen lines a page.  Not perhaps a pretty hand; but a handsome one, and so instantly legible that you’d never think it was written 800 years ago, and certainly not by a medic.  (p. 5)

As you can see, the manuscript narrating the story has a very distinctive voice and is highly opinionated.  I enjoyed its somewhat disdainful reference to printed works as ‘clones’ (p. 15) and the way that its statement that it will last ‘until the end of time or the Bodleian Library’ (p. 9) implies that the library will endure the longest.  Mackintosh-Smith also plays cleverly with words in this story, turning perfectly commonplace terms that are used without thought into startling and funny ideas by unpacking their meanings:

If I tell you that for us manuscripts the pleasures associated with the physical act of reporduction are not unakin to those felt by you humans in your own version of this activity, and if I remind you that close to 500 years had passed since my last enjoyment of them, you will have some idea of the thrill I experienced.  (pp. 17-18)

All in all, I found this to be an enjoyable, highly original story.  Not only is the content excellent, the book itself is a lovely object, easy to hold and pleasant to read.  I’m definitely going to be buying future editions of The Christmas Fox if this offering is any indication of the quality on offer.

Tea talk: The manuscript says of the work of one of his owners that, ‘This, his magnum opus, was promptly panned by the critics.  The good doctor boiled his tea-kettle with the greatest part of the impression’ (p. 21).  While I would never dream of burning books, even for the sake of tea, I did feel the need for some tea to accompany this little book, and used it as an opportunity to finish off my Assam.  It took me till the end of the packet to work out how best to brew it (show the tea leaves to the water very briefly and then take them away before they get too friendly) but now I’ve got it just right I’ll have to get some more as it’s just delicious and mellow.

Title:

Author: Angela Carter

Published: Penguin, 1987, pp. 133.  Originally published 1974

Genre: Short stories

Blurb: In each of these mesmerising tales is a search for heightened sensitivity.  Reality is left behind.  Filtering ordinary experience through her hallucinatory imagination, Angela Carter exposes the subterranean desires and obsessive fears lurking in the unconscious.  Her characters are haunting, often sinister: an expatriate Englishwoman who takes a Japanese lover, a white hunter who finds pleasure in killing, a puppet who murders her master.  With a voluptuous and elegant style uniquely her own, Angela Carter evokes atmospheres at once erotic and disturbing.

When, where and why: After I was introduced to Angela Carter’s writing at university, I bought everything of hers that I came across. I started reading this one while I was struggling through Pillars of the Earth as it’s a nice, small book and easy to read on the tube, unlike Ken Follet’s huge volume.  It counts as book 27/50 for my Books Off the Shelf Challenge.

What I thought: Fireworks is a very apt name for this collection of stories: like fireworks, they are short, sharp bursts of concentrated but brief beauty, all with an underlying element of danger.  However, while Angela Carter always writes excellently, this was definitely not my favourite of her short story collections as, although her prose is rich and full it sometimes feels a little stifling in this book and I often caught myself committing the sacrilege of wishing for fewer words and more plot.

In the story ‘A Souvenier of Japan’ Angela Carter’s fictional self says:

But I do not want to paint our circumstantial portraits so that we emerge with enough well-rounded, spuriously detailed actuality that you are forced to believe in us.  I do not want to practise such sleight of hand.  You must be content only with glimpses of our outlines, as if you had caught sight of our reflections in the looking-glass of somebody else’s house as you passed by the window. (p. 10)

This is a fair illustration of how these stories work: they don’t provide full narratives with fleshed out characters, but give tantalising glimpses into worlds where you can never be quite certain of anything.  There is a dream-like quality to the stories which makes them feel uncanny and remote and just a little bit too odd for me, I think.  Carter’s epilogue explains exactly what she was doing in this collection and I found that very helpful, illuminating some of the more bizarre elements of these madcap stories (particularly the incest; I swear incest has been a theme in almost everything I’ve read by Carter now).  I always enjoy it when an author decides to let their readers in on their thought processes, particularly when they are as patently oddball as Carter’s, so this provided a welcome opportunity to help untangle some of my thoughts on the book.

Even though I found Fireworks just a smidgen too off the wall for my tastes, it still bears Angela Carter’s wonderful writing style.  One of my favourite examples in this book is her description of London in the story ‘Elegy for a Freelance’:

London lay below me with her legs wide open; she was a whore sufficiently accommodating to find room for us in her embraces, even though she cost so much to love. (p. 115)

This perfectly illustrates why I love Angela Carter’s writing and will definitely continue to seek out and read her books.

Where this book goes: This book has been slipped back onto the shelf with the rest of my Angela Carter collection.  I’m looking forward to the next time I pick up one of her books, although I like to leave a fair while in between them so that she always seems fresh and new.

Tea talk: As I picked up this book specifically to read on the tube there was definitely no tea drunk while reading.  I’m lucky to have space to get my book out, never mind a travel mug as well.

Author: Darrell Bain

Published: LL-Publications, 2010, pp. 207

Genre: Short stories

Blurb: Oops! is the third collection of stories by Darrell Bain.  When Cupid and a Gremlin bump heads, the sparks fly in a rare fantasy story by the author.  Other stories in the collection include A Simple Idea, and almost ludicrously simple method of eliminating corruption and idiocy from the political process, one that has been around for centuries but gone unrecognized.  Cure for an Ailing Alien finds a nurse who must come up with a cure for an alien, one whose bodily processes are completely unknown.  You’ll be amazed at her cure!  Retribution is the story of unexpected consequences when alien meets human.  Robyn’s Rock is partially based on a happening in the author’s life during a walk with his granddaughter.

There are many more stories in this collection, all written in the individual style that has kept Bain’s readers coming back for more for the past twenty years.  This is a book to add to your collection, stories by a notable, multi-award winning author.

When, where and why: I was sent a copy of this book to review as part of the Goodreads First Reads programme.  I requested it because I enjoy short story collections and the description made this one sound different and intriguing.  I started it at once, as I think it’s only polite to do so when sent a free book.

What I thought:Perhaps I shouldn’t, but I always have very high expectations of short story collections.  The short story is, in my opinion, one of the hardest forms to write because of the restrictions they impose on the author.  In a novel, there can be passages which aren’t as good, and I might forgive a poorly developed story if the characters are fascinating and come alive, or vice versa.  The novel is long enough that I’ll usually find something about it to enjoy even if one or two areas are a bit lacking.  In a short story, however, lapses like this stick out like a sore thumb.  There is no room to hide and no margin for error.  Consequently, I’m in two minds about Oops! because, on the one hand, the stories all had really interesting ideas but, on the other hand, I thought that the writing, though enthusiastic, was a bit weak and so the concepts were let down.

Let me start out with what I liked about this book.  Firstly, I thought that the plot ideas were fresh and interesting, and you can see from the blurb how wide-ranging they were.  Darrell Bain obviously has a very active imagination and I would guess that there are still many other stories lurking in his mind.  I particularly enjoyed Robyn’s Rock, a tale about a girl who has picked up a rock which enables her to predict future disasters, and Samantha’s Talent, a story about a girl who can speak to animals (although chapters have no place in a short story).  I also really liked the little introductions and concluding notes from the author which accompany each story, explaining how he came to write it.  It gives an insight into the author’s way of thinking which is unusual and refreshing.

There were some bits of writing which were well executed, especially Bain’s characterisation of disobedient tractors in Coyote Scare, which:

…I swear were sentient and spent the nights conniving with each other about what kind of trouble they would get me into and how much blood they could make me shed the next day, I had an awful experience on one.  It had nothing to do with any of the tractor’s moving parts, those that spent their time lying in wait for me to come close enough to get bitten or chewed or gouged or gnawed on.  Tractors are savage and evil and should be sold with guards whose duty it is to threaten them with both barrels of a twelve gauge shotgun the minute they get out of line. (p. 40)

Unfortunately, I found this amusing style to be the exception rather than the rule.  I could tell from the writing that Bain obviously really enjoys what he does, but his skills are somewhat lacking.  Dialogue in particular was weak, stilted and unbelievable.  Also, I don’t think I’ve read a story since I was five years old which ends ‘And they lived happily ever after’ in a non-ironic way.  At least two of these do, from what I remember.  I’m all for happy endings, but there are much more elegant ways to express this or indeed demonstrate it so that I can work it out myself without having to be so direct and unimaginative.

The other problem is the editing.  While grammar errors are pleasingly few and far between, there are a few continuity problems which a decent editor should have picked up on.  Perhaps the most glaring was in The Furniture Formula, where cave woman Uga, when her husband dismisses her interior design ideas, says:

All right, but I’ve decided I’m going to sleep on the saber tooth tiger skin for a while.  You can sleep on the bear skin by yourself. (p. 120)

And yet, after caveman Ug agrees for the furniture to be moved:

Uga then moved back to the saber tooth tiger skin and slept with Ug. (p. 120)

How can Uga move back to the saber tooth tiger skin if she’s been sleeping there all along?  The close proximity of these sentences to one another on the same page highlights the issue rather unfortunately.  Nonetheless, with some more careful editing and tightening up of the writing this could be an enjoyable story collection, although probably not one for me.

Where this book goes: I keep all ARC copies that I am sent (well, a grand total of two so far) because I’m very grateful to have received them.

Tea talk: I’ve recently been given an individual coffee filter and some posh ground decaff as I’ve recently lost my long-cultivated resistance to caffeine (sob).  It’s wonderful as, while cheap ordinary coffee is tolerable, cheap decaff is utterly vile, so I’ve been enjoying being able to drink coffee again.