Helen McClory

Errantry: Strange Stories by Elizabeth Hand ( A Review by Helen McClory)

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Small Beer Press

286 pgs/$16.00

There’s a sense of wholeness to Errantry: Strange Stories which makes it appear, at first, easy to discuss. The subheading is ‘Strange Stories’ and strange they are. Ten stories make up this collection, ten distinct but obviously blood-related kin. Each populated by wonderstruck onlookers or sinister, eccentric figures. Each set in places – Woodlands, coast, mountains, cityscapes – that are uncertain grounds, warped by mysterious forces, but rich in realistic detail. There is a sense of accrual in each story. But what is being accrued is a sense of long lasting dis-ease. An enthrallment that is hard to shake or find out the edges of.

It’s no wonder that one of the stories in the collection won the Shirley Jackson Award. Like Jackson’s work, there is a claustrophobic creepiness to almost every story, despite the wonders. Hand’s stories here are more expansive, yet have that undercurrent of a formless force closing in, be it weather, or birds gathering in a falling evening sky. For the scope of this review, I’d like to focus mostly on the award-winning story above, my favourite of the ten, ‘Near Zennor’. Continue reading →

The Light and the Dark, by Mikhail Shishkin, trans from Russian by Andrew Bromfield (A Review by Helen McClory)

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Quercus

368 pgs/£14.44

The Light and the Dark is an epistolary novel – as soon as I opened the book and caught on to that, I thought of the 18th, 19th century. I thought, uncharitably, I was in for turgid romance. Or Dracula. But reading was another matter – there was the whiplash to deal with, of being thrown into the claustrophobic heart of the story, and there was the sparking, glorious prose.

The story is a love story of two sweethearts separated and writing back and forth to one another, recounting their happy moments and their present discomforts and biting loneliness. The lovers are Volodenka, a soldier in an unnamed, but clearly not modern conflict, and Sashenka, the young woman who waits at home. Here she recounts their time at their dachas in the countryside, where they met:

And the smells from the garden! So rich and dense, like fine particles saturating the air. You could pour those smells into a cup like strong tea.

And everything all around has only one thing on its mind – I simply walk through the field or the forest and absolutely everyone tries his very best to pollinate or inseminate me. My socks are just covered in grass seeds.

And remember, we found a hare in the grass with its legs cut off by a mowing machine.

Brown-eyed cows.

Little goat nuts lying on the path.

Our pond – murky on the bottom with blooming slush, full of frogspawn. Silver carp butting at the sky. I climb out of the water and pluck the weed off myself.

I lay down to sunbathe and covered my face with my singlet, the wind rustles like starched linen. And suddenly there’s a ticklish feeling in my navel, and it’s you pouring a thin stream of sand onto my stomach out of your fist.

The detail is thick, romantic with both a small and large r, but this feels valid for what lovers, nineteenth century, early twentieth perhaps, would write. They would see the exuberance of nature as a mirror to their own currently unfulfilled desires. And when Volodenka writes of the landscapes of war, he appends them with qualifiers of love. War and distance can only be endured because of the continued existence of Sashenka in the world.  Continue reading →

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

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Cargo Publishing and McSweeney’s

£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. Continue reading →