Somewhere, by Various Authors (A Review by Helen McClory)

£5.99

The curiously-named collection of short stories, Somewhere, is part of Elsewhere, a four-book series of fiction, poetry and essays from Scottish and Scotland-affiliated writers. What endeared me to the series was that it was a collaboration between an American and a Scottish publisher, something I hadn’t seen before. Often it can feel as if Scottish writing has had in the last few years a marginal presence on the world literary stage – in terms of awards, and the visibility of our small presses – this kind of partnership speaks of good health, future hopefulness.

I was immediately drawn to the four small hardbacks. They are both tactilely and visually appealing – if the illustrator, Jack Teagle, and the design team at McSweeneys read this, I’d like to say, fantastic work. I’m so glad you lured me, covetous, in. I chose Somewhere over the other three titles, Here, There and Everywhere purely on the whim of liking its cover best: a gold embossed shadow reaches up to touch the man who cast it. Several other menacing golden figures line the road ahead. I knew I was in for something liminal, imaginative, traveling from legend to dreamscape.

How did this sense of promise play out? Well, unfortunately, Somewhere does contain quite a few forgettable, lacklustre pieces. Worse still, two of these such stories open the book. “A Flash of Blue Light” by Michel Faber was workmanlike against my expectations of excellence from the author of The Crimson Petal and the White, and I wasn’t taken by Jackie Kay’s bland view of the afterlife in “Kindred”. But there are a few pieces that really shine, brittle and fine-boned, and I think more than make up the slack.

In ‘Vanishing Point’ Louise Welsh writes the story of a woman experiencing locked-in syndrome; all the boredom and horror and love she feels as she listens to her mother recounting her news and reading to her from science fiction paperbacks she found in the street.

“Look,” she’ll say, “he either dropped this in the bath or sat with it in the steam room too long. See how the pages are warped? Paper can’t take moisture, especially cheap paper like this.”She delights in PB Bridgestock’s travels as if they’re her own. “He read this on a beach somewhere. I thought that stain might be hamburger grease, but see, some sand’s got into the spine. The mark must be suntan lotion. “And she pauses for a moment as if remembering a world where there are beaches and a sun people oil up for.

There’s a gentle despair that nevertheless permits that life goes on, and that reading, the voice of the loved one reading, can bring a kind of mental escape. If the ending is a little easy, the story still stays as long as it needs to and leaves a melancholy residue when it’s gone.

Another of my favourites was the raw and unsettling ‘South’, by Gillian Philip, which twists and humanises the Scottish legend of the Selkie, or seal-people. It’s good to see an underused myth resurface, particularly one as close to home as this.

Philip shifts the location from Scotland to an isolated island near Antarctica, and the shape-shift species from the puppy-eyed Common Seal to the fierce Leopard Seal. The old story of the young man who takes a Selkie wife, only to suffer heartbreak when she inevitably returns to seal-form and the sea is related in the voice of the protagonist, giving it an immediacy and poignant quality that fairy tales so often lack.

She wasn’t supposed to be there. I’d thought Mal and I were alone at this end of the island, and I thought for a ridiculous moment she’d missed her cruise ship and been left behind. Except that people off the cruise ships didn’t dress like that – half-naked under a silky-fur wrap.

“Are you all right?” I asked.

My gut had tightened with the fear of madness. It was well below zero but her pale skin didn’t prickle with gooseflesh and she didn’t shiver, not once. Her hair was sleek and black and wet, and for a crazy moment I thought she must have been in the water. But that wasn’t possible. not in her skin.

“I’m fine,” she smiled, “I’m grand. Hello yourself.”

The Selkie is neither purely a woman nor purely an animal of frozen seas. She is a hybrid, can cross from one state to another. From somewhere to here. But whoever invites a by nature transient seal-person into their heart invites the possibility of loss. The seal woman becomes a seal wife, and gives birth to a girl. In time, after arguments, drinking, loneliness, or simple need, mother and daughter both return to the sea, leaving a grandson behind. Another parting is inevitable: one day the boy will go, perhaps “turning” with a sudden violence, and the old man will be left empty, alone.

In this, the Selkies are akin to humans – prone to causing suffering in their simple parting. It’s only in the fact of their strangeness that each of their goings shakes the man so much. Such an irrefutable absence, removing oneself from the human race and joining the seal-kind, makes forever an alien of the leaver.

The last work I want to talk about only briefly, ‘From My Vow’ by Jen Hadfield. It’s an essay about a research trip the artist took to Mexico, where she wanted to study ex-votos

This is a votive painting on a small rectangle of tin, reliably possessing a trinity of consistent elements. First, the image of the holy person, generally cushioned by a nimbus of stylised light, occupies one corner of the upper part of the ex-voto. The remaining space is shared by the retablo scene- depictions of a calamity in which a person finds themselves at the moment of the saint’s miraculous intervention- and an explanatory text:

I began to pray your novena, and I hadn’t even finished when he returned…

For having saved me from a Texan who tried to carry me off…

I ask the Lord of the Conquest that he allow them to give me my liberty…

When the bandit struck me with a dagger, I thought for sure I would lose my life…

The retablista, the artist commissioned to create an ex-voto, strives for as faithful and dramatic a depiction of the miracle as possible. He quizzes his customer for specific visual detail, but he may also take liberties with space and time, in order to best convey the vulnerability of the victim, the extremity of the crisis, the potency of the miracle.

It’s a fascinating look at a fusion of folk and religious art, rich with intricate details. It’s good, too, to see Hadfield’s respectful acknowledgement that she is the outsider, that not having grown up with ex-votos, and not being of the Catholic faith bars her from entry into full understanding, even as she is embarking on a project of creating secular tin art of a similar style. As I was reading, something nagged at me: I had seen a thing like the ex-votos before. But how? I’ve never been to Mexico, and Scotland as a stoutly Protestant, now primarily atheist country, lacks that tradition of miracle-art entirely. But I had seen them, on a wall in a gallery space. A footnote in the text informed me that yes, I had seen the results of Hadfield’s research, displayed at Stanza (the St Andrews Poetry Festival) in 2008. It was one of those delightful unforeseeable moments where the written, published word speaks directly into your personal experience. An overlap of There and Here.

For its few strong, memorable stories and perfect design, I recommend Somewhere. I’d like to see how it fits in with the greater Elsewhere set: taken together, the feeling of unity may add a greater weight. Or perhaps I’m just coveting the covers of the other three, and that promise of transportation into otherworldliness, that Somewhere occasionally fulfilled.

Helen McClory was raised in both rural and urban Scotland. She has lived in Sydney and New York City and is currently to be found in the South Side of Edinburgh overlooking a prehistoric cliff face. The manuscript of her first novel KILEA won the Unbound Press Best Novel Award 2011, and publication is currently being sought for it. To keep the wire steady, Helen is working on a second novel about the intersections of love, failure and technology set in New York, New Mexico and Cornwall. Progress on this at: http://schietree.wordpress.com/