10. Ian Rankin - 'Talk Show' (1991)

'It all seemed a long way from the Light Programme, a long way from glowing valves and Home Counties diction.'

(Ian Rankin, Beggars Banquet, Orion, 2002, p.165)

Rankin deploys an insistently engaging style, straightforward and familiar, in contrast to Hill's rather distancing subtlety. He uses reference points that are easily recognised (i.e. a character's glasses are round, 'NHS or John Lennon' style), whereas I felt that the particular Hill story chosen gave one little to latch onto. That is hardly to say that he overdoes this and things become played-out in the 'look at my empathy with pop culture' Nick Hornby manner. This is an Inspector Rebus story, actually published when the series of novels (which now is up to #17) was only two books in. It is also from the same year that Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King drew inspiration from the similar territory of radio phone-ins and 'shock jocks'.

Rankin makes use of his Scottishness, clearly setting the work in a recognisable Edinburgh - placing himself in the lineage of Scott, RL Stevenson and Muriel Spark, whom he wrote his thesis on, I believe. He writes with humour and understanding of the absurd modern media phenomenon of the talk show, here incarnated within Lowland Radio - represented by the polar opposite shows on the station, of confrontational highlander Hamish MacDiarmid and the more understanding, soothing approach of Penny Cook.

Looking over the stories read so far, there hasn't been a great deal of bona fide amusement; much laughter induced. I would argue this is the funniest I have read, dry humour like the Barthelme, but Rankin's satire here is less stinging - the guffaws tend to be more affable. However unhappy his vision of Scottish life is - the very lifeblood of such phone-ins is human misery, after all - it is conveyed in a manner which says: all is not lost. The grounding is in the bleak ebbing of ordinary lives - 'All these lonely, slightly deranged people out there...' that Penny deals with - but despair does not become the main tone. (p.170) This is certainly not James Kelman's A Disaffection (1989), which is casually and intensely harrowing in its delineation of one human being's disillusionment with society and work and distance from others.

I have the chance to go to Edinburgh and Glasgow next week; will certainly give it some thought. I am looking forward immensely to reading more Scottish shorts; naturally the formidable Glaswegian block of Gray-Kelman-Spence. But also the equally acerbic counter-culturalist Muriel Spark - whom the proprietor of Attica, the vintage clothing / artefacts shop on High Bridge in Newcastle was reading when I was last in there (when I bought a tie, several seventies editions of Films and Filming, a Spanish style shirt which reminded me of the cover of the Associates' Sulk in an entirely unscientific way, and, after a joint utilitarian / aesthetic purpose, an in-house Attica pen).

Rankin's story here impressed me; local observations (city-centre bars invariably reverting to a staple of beer, eg. the solid marker of an IPA pump) mixed with portrayals of people that show how the reality can be different from the perception - e.g. hearing somebody's voice and 'persona' via the radio. Rebus is confounded twice in terms of his expectations of the presenters. The detective himself is hardly explored in great depth in this story, but one gets the sense of a vaguely Columbo-esque operator, occasionally seeming absurd or clownish but gradually gaining an insight into things and then using melodramatic sleight-of-hand to push home his advantage.

Overall, the story subtly questions the assumptions behind phone-in radio; itself a forerunner of reality television and all that that entails. He uses the generic form of crime narrative and police procedural to expose folly - as in how ratings and cheap sensation always dominate over ideals of public service. Rebus exposes the lie upon which MacDiarmid and Cook's current success was founded; one is consigned presumably to 'a croft somewhere', but Penny is implied to be pursuing a more rewarding form of journalism. As thanks to Rebus she drops in at his flat in the curiously ambiguous final passage, nicely complicating this genuinely 'honest copper'. (p.167)

8/10

Can anyone recommend...

I am planning a week of children's short stories in the near future; can anyone recommend some...?

I am probably going to use Robert Westall elsewhere. Alan Garner? Tove Jansson? I'd also be interested in long-established series carrying on past their original era and attempting to 'get to grips with' the modern world, as in the pictured example above (though I am not sure whether that example is one of the JW novels or collections of SS)...

9. Susan Hill - 'Moving messages' (2003)

This one did not particularly grab me; it starts out with the motif of written lines running through the main character's head, 'like moving messages', in contrast to how music or songs infiltrate the consciousness of many. (Susan Hill, The Boy Who Taught the Beekeeper to Read, 2003, p.123) For me, there is not a great deal done with this conceit within the small word-count. (the pages contain much fewer words than any of the other eight read so far)

Two old friends of sorts, Didi and Velma, meeting up at fifty-four, their acquaintance going back to undergraduate days: 'We had been incongruous, unexpected friends from our first day, without anything but English Literature and twenty-three other students in common.' (p.130) As a fragmentary, slight, slice of life, I can possibly give this its dues, but it just is not what I am looking for especially - a subtlety to the point of inconsequence, almost.

I would love to read some of Hill's novels, however, or the Scarborough-set short, 'Cockles and mussels'; this selection would appear to be fairly routine, but there will be much of interest in her work - perhaps not an innovator, but working within existing styles (revisiting key areas such as WW1 or novels such as Du Maurier's Rebecca, 1938).

6/10

8. Michael Marshall Smith - 'This is Now' (2004)

'Forests have a way of making civilization seem less inevitable.'

(Stephen Jones, ed., The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, Robinson, 2005)

'Where were you in '92?' Part 1




Marshall Smith's story sets up a week of shorts provided by Sunderland central library, after a fashion; all of the pieces to be written about this week were purchased from a sale two Saturdays ago at the Fawcett Street library. 26 books for £4 and all that, with a good number providing lifeblood for my short-story craving sensibility.

The first is from a bumper, indeed Mammoth Book of New Horror, containing stories from 2004. Perhaps appositely for the most recent entry so far in ASSAD, it is basically set in the future (2015), but the main focus is upon reflecting upon a dim-and-potentially-distant past (1992).

MMS is an anglo-American writer, born in Knutsford, Cheshire (1965) and who spent much of his childhood in South Africa, Australia and the US, only to return to the UK in the seventies (he is now a resident of North London). This story is set in a north-eastern corner of Washington state, in America, yet seems inflected with a British perspective in certain ways.

The central three protagonists have known each other at least since adolescence; the main framing sees them aged 38, returning to and then reflecting upon the scene of an episode that might be termed a teenage transgression: when they were fifteen they infilitrated an ambiguous military compound. They are also established in their present-day locale; a bar with omnipresent pool table activity, from which the memories arise - if internally.

MMS establishes a subtly uneasy juncture between the everyday and the unsettling, the odd; the current-day reflections and longueurs are juxtaposed with flashbacks to what happened fifteen years ago - the tense and rather primordial transgressions in 1992 contrasted with the languid and uneasily sedate rituals of 2015. The teenagers find a weak spot in the electrified fence and get over into a military installation - epically ambiguous, as MMS leaves it - that was established in 1985.

This is ultimately winning, perhaps, because it does not resort to 'horror' in any generic sense; it is gratifying to come across a story classed as one of 2004's finest horrors that simply does not need any shocks, undue violence or authorial sleight-of-hand to achieve its effect. Marshall Smith's prose is straightforward yet penetrating; revealing average 38-year-olds settling for life as usual, deciding, albeit tacitly, to put the fascination and curiosity awakened by their adventure at fifteen behind them - for better or for worse.

It is all bittersweet without any real sense of the sweet; there is the ebbing memory of their togetherness at fifteen, having got away with the transgression: 'boys who had come triumphantly out the other side. The forest felt like some huge football field, applauding its heroes with whispering leaves.' (p.259) Now, one is settled in a reasonable if hardly fulfilling marriage, one amicably separated, the other - the 'I' narrator, Dave, is seemingly at a loose end: 'I lit another cigarette and wondered why I still didn't really know how to deal with women. They've always seemed so different to me. So confident, so powerful, so in themselves. Kind of scary, even. Most teenage boys feel that way, I guess, but I had assumed age would help. That being older might make a difference. Apparently not. The opposite, if anything.' (p.253)

There is the melancholy in Dave's past reflections on a perceived missed opportunity with a girl called Lauren, who saw herself in Seattle in a few years: 'What I didn't know, that night in the forest, was that she would do this, and I would not, and that she would leave without us ever having kissed.' This along with the eerie, intangible memory of the transgressive night; seemingly abandoned, 'ruined houses' (p.256). This subterranean progress - albeit on the fringes of a town that is on the road to nowhere in particular - leads both everywhere and nowhere, as the final passages detail. The final point seems to be that it is important, sometimes, to leave old haunts behind, even if there is no obviously gleaming future in store.

8/10

7. Katherine Mansfield - 'The Singing Lesson' (1922)

'Oh if I now say that I love you

How will that seem in your eyes?

Oh may my voice fall into silence
If my words

Turn out to be lies'

(Peter Hammill, 'If I Could', 1978)

"I must say I don't approve of my teachers having telegrams sent to hem in school hours, unless in case of very bad news, such as death"

(Katherine Mansfield, The Collected Stories, Penguin Classics, 2007)

To draw the first week of this undertaking to a close is a short from one of the writers most famed for excelling at writing these things. In her extensive introduction, Ali Smith makes great claims for Mansfield as a key figure in modernism, bridging the contrasting literary camps of Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence - aestheticism and utilitarianism fused by this 'gifted social and literary chameleon'. She brought the influence of Chekhov to bear on English prose writing, was a major influence on the feminism of de Beauvoir, Brigid Brophy and others and a chief source for Gudrun in Women in Love (1920) and stories of her youth she told DHL are reflected in 'the more sapphic episodes' of The Rainbow (1915).

Where did the modern world, and modern literature begin? It is a question this venture might seek to answer in time. Was it that crucial decade of the 1890s (the coming of cinema, The New Woman, Jude the Obscure, Pinero, all things Shavian, Wildean and Wellsian), the passing of the Edwardian age, the influence of WW1 or the full flowering of literary, political and cinematic avant-gardism during the 1920s (as entertainingly sent up by Evelyn Waugh in his debut novel, Decline and Fall, 1928)? Or was it even all down to Jack the Ripper? Had it all been instigated long before in France?

This site takes its URL from the sublime slap in the face of a 1887 story from Oscar Wilde; Katherine Mansfield was born as Kathleen Beauchamp a year later and grew up in Karon, near Wellington, New Zealand. Like that Wildean grenade, Mansfield's 'The Singing Lesson' both revels in and incinerates the state of infatuation, of being in love.

The teacher, Miss Meadow, stands in a line of amorous schoolmistresses including Thomas Hardy's Fancy Day (Under the Greenwood Tree, 1872) and Dennis Potter's Eileen (Pennies from Heaven, BBC, 1978). Mansfield expertly introduces the romance after we have been confronted with her at the start - painted as an impatient, tyrannical seeming dictator of her class of young girls. Details are gradually revealed, indeed to flesh out the character as terribly sympathetic; aged thirty, a 'miracle' that she had got engaged to the handsome, moustache-sporting Basil, a man of twenty-five. A tyranny wrought by being rejected for marriage by Basil, which has been disclosed through a letter. Mansfield plays remorselessly with the convention of epistolary as an aid to love's passage, with Basil's crossing out but hardly complete erasing of the word 'disgust', in his estimation of the prospect of settling down to marry.

This story is melancholic, absurd and strangely warming in equal measure, everything hinging in the intangible emotions conveyed through letters and telegrams. Miss Meadow's personal life thoroughly inflects her lesson, and her state of wild despair infects the children, as conveyed in this evocative passage: 'The older girls were crimson; some of the younger ones began to cry. Big spots of rain blew against the windows, and one could hear the willows whispering, '... not that I do not love you....' (p.348) Meadow selects a doleful lament for the girls to sing, and the words and delivery are used as a Greek Chorus-like public commentary on the teacher's private feelings. For me, it anticipates Dennis Potter's use of song - the banalities of the lyrics somehow getting to the truth of matters, which the characters are quite unable to articulate in spoken communication with others.

I will not give away any of the detail about how the story resolves itself - go and read it now! This is a miniature fire-cracker - so bloody much conveyed in a mere seven pages of prose - and a great introduction to Ms. Mansfield's infinitely subtle wiles. I won't be able to stop myself reading more of hers, afterhours.

Whilst it has at times been a struggle to keep up the writing side of this, I have read one short story a day, and due to time off over the next two weeks for the Easter break, there will be no such problems in the coming weeks. Many thanks to the fine folk who recommended these first seven writers; while you may be able to discern some particular favourites, I have greatly enjoyed reading of all these writers - four of them being my first, brief encounters. And none will be the last.

10/10

6. Robert E. Howard - 'The Phoenix of the Sword' (1932)

'But this one is a different,

He knows the pinches of an older hunger,

A greater storm than yours

In his heart rages'

(Jake Thackray, 'The Rain on the Mountainside', 1976)

'the lack of any clear political direction - and who could expect that? - prevents the ballad-outlaw from being a revolutionary; he remains simply a champion of insubordination, and that is already much.'

(A.L. Lloyd, Folk Song in England, Panther Arts, 1967, p.150)

'[...] to drown in the yellow wells of cosmic horror which glimmered spectrally in the formless chaos that was growing about him and engulfing all life and sanity.' (Robert E. Howard, The Complete Chronicles of Conan: Centenary Edition, Gollancz, 2006, p.40)

As his contemporary H.P. Lovecraft states in the inner cover of the leatherbound hardback edition, Howard's stories are 'pure adventure yarns with a touch of weirdness'. This proves to be an intriguing combination, with Howard creating an engaging, semi-Dark Ages world, based around a Europe from time immemorial, establishing political intrigues and rival power centres - and injecting moments of much more inexplicable oddity. Where Atwood's elderly protagonist mirrors nature in his decay, Howard's Conan is instead akin to nature as life-force: 'He seemed more a part of the sun and winds and high places of the outlands.' (p.27) He uncomfortable dealing with 'statecraft'.

There is an interesting reflection upon Conan being at ease battling to gain power, but being almost at a loss now that he has it, installed as King of Aquilonia; a theme that resonates with many leaders past and present in our reality. Conan is not cut out for the machinations and subtleties that go with wielding power, and is an easy target for enemy plotters, as the story relates; for example, the dissident minstrel, Rinaldo in 'jester's garb'. This motleyed japester may not be any different from Conan in being an idealist who dislikes the compromises of the present: 'Poets always hate those in power [...] They escape the present in dreams of the past and future.' (p.25) There is an astuteness also in how the dead King Namedides, defeated by Conan, hardly beloved during his actual reign, is now a rallying point for many on the fringes of Aquilonia.

The key passage which takes this tale into the realms of the Weird is on p.39 where, after the fairly prosaic dispatching of southern dissidents, Conan (and before him his rival Ascalante) is confronted by an unspeakable 'thing', a more physical manifestation of Lovecraftian cosmic horror - although it its form is flexible and hardly solid: 'he twisted his head about and stared into the face of Nightmare and lunacy. Upon him crouched a great black thing which he knew was born in no sane or human world.' This thing is beyond the bestial, and leaves a much more unsettling undercurrent behind at the end of the story than I was expecting.

Conan is strongly drawn as a formidable 'primordial', his great reserves and limitations drawn from his barbarian background. He comes from 'reaver' stock, clearly drawn from the northern border country, along whose borders there was 'continual war' - Howard clearly making some associations with the lawless Northumbrian border reivers, as depicted in the Border Ballads. (p.28)* There is a hint of the Viking and a British northern kind in these decriptions of the northmen: 'They are wayward and fierce. They fight all day and drink ale and roar their wild songs all night.' Geographically, they are shaped: 'A gloomier land never was - all of hills, darkly wooded, under skies nearly always gray, with winds moaning drearily down the valleys. / 'Little wonder men grow moody there'. (p.29)

'The Phoenix...' does not allow me to draw specific political links with 1932 , but, like a strong seventies Dr Who story (penned by Robert Holmes, say) the internal politics are concisely, entertainingly conceived and achieve a simplicity in their complexity, if such a thing can be envisaged. I cannot help but bring to mind Holmes's medieval robber baron Irongron (David Daker) and Bloodaxe (John J. Carney) from 1974's The Time Warrior - real blood and thunder types, melodramatic but played with real feeling and intensity. That sense is evoked by this story; some of the happenings and the descriptions ratchet things up to a nearly absurd level, but you are carried along by the conviction and verve of REH's style: 'The red ax lurched up and crashed down and a crimson caricature of a man catapulted back against the legs of the attackers.' (p.39)

There are no female characters who play any significant part in the Conan saga at this early stage; this story seems to share this gender imbalance with the M.R. James and H.P. Lovecraft I have read - no sense of The New Woman, or indeed, women at all for the most part. It will be interesting to see how further tales in this lineage, from the nineteenth-century to the present-day project women. One certainly imagines the New Wave (Moorcock, Le Guin etc.) of Science Fiction will redress this.

Notwithstanding this, 'The Phoenix of the Sword' is a pleasing mix of what was old and new; from archaism - 'quoth Prospero' indeed - and Border Ballads to the Lovecraftian abyss, befitting its inclusion in the pages of the pulp magazine, Weird Tales.

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reiver
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_ballads

8/10

5. Margaret Atwood - 'In Search of the Rattlesnake Plantain' (1987)

Rich, literary in style - attuned to the minutiae of behaviour and characters in a way not quite seen previously in ASSAD. Description instantly draws attention to itself: 'hard fungi with underlines like dewed velvet sprouting from them.' (Margaret Atwood, Bluebeard's Egg, Vintage, 1987, p.229)

Atwood's story is about as far from pulp genre fiction as possible; the more immediate thrills offered there - or the cosmic, as in HPL - are disregarded. There is even a dig at Agatha Christie - 'when I am re-reading a bad Agatha Christie dating from the war' Albeit a dig at the middlebrow generic*. This is a piece most characteristic of what is popular with the literary praetorian guard today, and with a substantial body of readers; it is sophisticated, focused on human relations and delicate symbolism.

This story was chosen simply as it was the shortest in the book and I am pushed for time today - I have got lesson plan and associated survey results to compile for a final teaching-observation I am undergoing tomorrow. This is all unfair on it, but that can be the way of things; hence, this piece being relatively cursory. I can certainly say that I enjoyed this, in its quiet way; a hushed, doleful study in the transient: humanity going on to mirror the nature that the narrator's father always fears is ebbing. Some of the stuff on memory is not really that far from Beckett-Pinter territory, but dwells longer on the observational side of things. The father could almost be one of Beckett's tormented old men - Henry in that implacable piece for radio, Embers (1959), for example. His influence on the narrator, his daughter, is quietly unsettling: 'I have lived with this list all my life, and it makes me uncertain about the solidity of the universe.' (p.232) The uncertainty of memories and old age are explored with a clear, unsentimental writer's eye; there is a deadpan, absurdis bathos to the presence of Scottish Life magazines at the end, to preface the carefully uncertain resolution.

Overall, nice to have a low-key piece of deliberately literary writing for a change of pace. The crucial concern is to juxtapose mankind and nature as similarly affected by temporality: 'Birches have only a set time to live, and die while standing.' (p.229)

8/10

* I am willing, as is in the spirit of this exercise, to try out any writer at all and give them a due chance. At present, I cannot say I am rushing to read AC; Sayers, Reg Hill and Sjowall & Wahloo will do for the moment, crime-wise, at least in terms of full-length novels.