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The eleven stories in this collection were the winners of the Rhys Davies Short Story Competition in 2001. A competition of this kind, open to all, provides a certain overview of the short fiction scene, though one that is skewed by the fact that any number of the best writers may not have entered.
If there is an overall theme or mood to the collection, it is that a remarkable number of the protagonists are mentally or physically isolated from the world. In Stevie Davies’s 'Woman Recumbent', for example, an old woman who lies helpless with a broken hip contemplates her life and the ant’s-eye detail of her new world on the kitchen floor, as she sinks towards death – only to be saved against her will. In Ruth Joseph’s 'Patchwork', an anorexic teenager, in an interior monologue, creates a quilt out of the clothes of her past life, which she hates. She is a kind of Holden Caulfield, unwilling to face maturity, sexuality, adept at deceiving doctors and parents. She too, in a different denouement, is found on the kitchen floor, bulimic, grasping at the dog’s meat in its dish. These, and Jo Mazelis’s 'The Ghosts of the Old Year', in which a deserted wife obsessively paints the portrait of her husband’s mistress, are among the best stories in the collection.
A few are less convincing and would be less likely to appear in an edited collection. In Brian George’s 'Ten Quid for a Busted Cassio', for example, the narrator, a woman in her forties, Valleys-born and bred, makes easy reference to Heloise and Abelard and says things like 'Somewhere deep, I deliquesse'. There’s a failure of tone here, while in Tristan Hughes’s 'A Sort of Homecoming', an ambitious story and the competition’s overall winner, the style is at times too self-conscious and contrived.
One of the most impressive stories is Debroah Davies’s 'The Point', another first-person narrative, in which a seven-year-old girl explains why she killed her little sister. The plot is perhaps too contrived, but the story captures brilliantly the physicality of a child’s perception of the world, as well as its self-centredness, which in this case leads from spite to an appalling act which the child-narrator does not really understand.
This is an enjoyable sampler of current short fiction by new and established writers.
John Barnie
It is possible to use this review for promotional purposes, but the following acknowledgement should be included: A review from www.gwales.com, with the permission of the Welsh Books Council.
Gellir defnyddio’r adolygiad hwn at bwrpas hybu, ond gofynnir i chi gynnwys y gydnabyddiaeth ganlynol: Adolygiad oddi ar www.gwales.com, trwy ganiatâd Cyngor Llyfrau Cymru.
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