The Turnout – Megan Abbott

Oh no…

That was something I said to myself, out loud, more than once while reading The Turnout. It wasn’t that the terrible things that happened were surprising, but instead that they were so grimly inevitable that it somehow made it all so much worse.

The story of two sisters and a spouse running a ballet school and having issues with renovations might not sound like a recipe for high tension, but believe me, this one turns the screw with excruciating precision. When I told my partner the basics of the plot she thought it sounded like a teen romance. It is not. It’s an adult story, but like most adult stories it carries a lot of baggage from childhood.

Daft Wee Stories – Limmy

Definitely a book for dipping in and out of. I’ve had it for ages and will read 2–3 at a time, although even that might be too many.

The stories aren’t more than a few pages, are often very conversational. If you’re familiar with his TV show or Twitch streaming, then you can hear his voice very clearly.

My favourite so far is ‘The Werewolf’:

Every full moon, he changed. He was a werewolf.

You wouldn’t notice him if he walked past you in the street, he looked like any other guy, but the following morning, he would change back, back into his natural form. A wolf. A wolf in a Travelodge room.

No recollection of how he came to be wearing human clothes. Nor of the newspaper lying under his paw, the crossword complete. Or of the toast crumbs on his chest.

The toast crumbs.

Oh my God, the toast crumbs!

What did he do last night?

The Odessa File - Frederick Forsyth

The Odessa File
By Forsyth, Frederick
Buy on Amazon

Frederick Forsyth is one of those names I remember seeing a lot on bookshelves when I was a kid in the 80s, but perhaps not so much any more. I had never read one, and now I have. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but this caper about catching Nazis went along quickly enough. It’s strange, looking from a modern perspective, to think that there was a time when the atrocities of the holocaust weren’t really talked about or acknowledged in German society. The Odessa File was written in the late 60s or early 70s, I think, and there was clearly a lot of coming to terms with history still to be done.

It’s a historical document, of sorts, not just of Germany’s post-war psyche, but also of the type of Fiction for Men which I’m not sure still exists. There’s lots of technical details about cars (the main character drives a sporty Jag and this is a crucial plot point in the latter half of the book) and guns and just how the Nazis were organised. The main character is a German journalist with a weirdly British name, hunting down a Nazi who ran a concentration camp. Our hero likes the finer things in life, like sports cars, fine wines and making love to beautiful women. His girlfriend is a stripper, hoping to entrap him in marriage and our hero first fell in love with her when he saw how big her tits were.

Amazing.

The plot pootles along at a fair old clip and while reading it I had the image of Freddy Forsyth, happily bashing away at a typewriter while smoking Rothmans and chugging on Johnnie Walker. I don’t know why, but I found it strangely comforting.

Equus and setting out the stage

Equus
By Shaffer, Peter
Buy on Amazon

This description of the set from the front of the script of Equus really made me think about the specificity of production design and how it enhance the text. I tend to think of plays as collections of dialogue - people waiting their turns to talk. This made me think a lot about what can be achieved within a space to enhance and extend the text. 

THE SETTING

A square of wood set on a circle of wood.

The square resembles a railed boxing ring. The rail, also of wood, encloses three sides. It is perforated on each side by an opening. Under the rail are a few vertical slats, as if in a fence. On the downstage side there is no rail. The whole square is set on ball bearings, so that by slight pressure from actors standing round it on the circle, it can be made to turn round smoothly by hand.

On the square are set three little plain benches, also of wood. They are placed parallel with the rail, against the slats, but can be moved out by the actors to stand at right angles to them.

Set into the floor of the square, and flush with it, is a thin metal pole, about a yard high. This can be raised out of the floor, to stand upright. It acts as a support for the actor playing Nugget, when be is ridden.

In the area outside the circle stand benches. Two downstage left and right are curved to accord with the circle. The left one is used by Dysart as a listening and observing post when he is out of the square, and also by Alan as his hospital bed. The right one is used by Alan's parents, who sit side by side on it. (Viewpoint is from the main body of the audience.)

Further benches stand upstage, and accommodate the other actors.

All the cast of Equuus sits on stage the entire evening. They get up to perform their scenes, and return when they are done to their places around the set. They are witnesses, assistants - and especially a Chorus.

Upstage, forming a backdrop to the whole, are tiers of seats in the fashion of a dissecting theatre, formed into two railed-off blocks, pierced by a central tunnel. In these blocks sit members of the audience, During the play, Dysart addresses them directly from time to time, as he addresses the main body of the theatre. No other actor ever refers to them.

To left and right, downstage, stand two ladders on which are suspended horse masks.

The colour of all benches is olive green.

Above the stage hangs a battery of lights, set in a huge metal ring.

Light cues, in this version, will be only of the most general description.

I don’t love the play as a whole, but as an instruction on how to use a stage, it’s quite something.

The Second Cut and unexpected sequels

I’m getting a bit frustrated with publishing’s ongoing love affair with series. I don’t know why it’s so disappointing to get to the end of a novel only to have a preview of the next installment taking up the last thirty pages. It feels like the ongoing push for ‘content’ and making books more like television, where the point is to always have a next installment.

That said, I’ve been pleasantly surprised by a couple of sequels lately, perhaps because they were so unexpected. Louise Welsh’s The Cutting Room was a book I read about fiteen years ago and its mixture of Glasweigan noir with gay subculture was something I hadn’t seen before. I always meant to check out more of Louise Welsh’s work, but never seemed to quite find the time. Anyway, some twenty years after The Cutting Room was published, there’s a sequel - The Second Cut. The protagonist, Rilke, runs an auction house and gets embroiled in a plot that involves an estate sale. It’s both fun and sad and I’d recommend both books to anyone looking for an offbeat crime novel that isn’t about cops.

I’m interested in what prompts an author to go back to work so many years later. Jonathan Coe did it with late sequels to two of his best novels What a Carve Up! and The Rotters Club, both of which were better than I thought they would be (and I wasn’t a huge fan of The Rotters Club). In a weird piece of imagined history, I felt sure there was a similar late sequel to The House of Sleep, but perhaps that one’s best left alone.

Short story collections (Illuminations / Dolphin Junction / Olive Kitteridge)

‘Illuminations’ (which, let’s be clear, is a wanky title) is a collection of stories that showcases Alan Moore as more than just the Greatest Comics Writer ever. It seems that he’s now in a position to do whatever he wants. I don’t know if that’s necessarily a good thing. I have no idea if his first novel ’Jerusalem’ is any good, because it’s over a 1000 pages and it sounds boring as fuck. But a collection of stories seems like a good way to get into his fiction. If nothing else, his early work writing ‘Future Shocks’ for 2000AD showed that he could do great things in a small amount of space. I would have liked ‘Illuminations’ more if that central tenet had been in place. There’s a lot to like in this collection. The story about fantastic creatures infiltrating the groups formed to catch them was quite nice. There was also a section in one of the stories that made me laugh out loud - hard. The novel-length story about the comics industry could have been published as a book and you wonder if the other stories are just there to give it cover. I don’t know how much of “What We Know About Thunderman” is true (albeit fictionalised), but I’ve read a bit about the two main companies and even I recognised some of the stuff that was in there. It really feels like Alan Moore having The Last Word on the industry that betrayed him. There’s stuff in there that is probably true and other parts that feel mainly like settling scores. If it had been published as a novel, it’s possible it would have caused more of a stink. Or maybe not. Perhaps other people don’t care about it as much as AM does. 

In any case, this isn’t a novel, it’s a collection of stories. Some of them are quite good. Most of them are awfully clever, at least in parts. A few of them had endings I didn’t really get, but this didn’t really bother me that much as I felt the main point of the story had come across. One of them felt very much like The First Good Short Story I Ever Wrote, to the point where you can almost read the tutor’s notes in the margins (“Excellent characterisation, Alan!”, “Nice twist!”, “Good use of call-backs”). It’s fine. Like all the stories, though, it goes on a bit. I got it in hardback because it was in the January sale, but it’s an unwieldy volume and I’d recommend getting it as an ebook.

Mick Herron’s collection is more focussed than ‘Illuminations’ and I can’t decide whether that’s a good thing or not. Almost all of the stories are about couples, particularly white middle-class couples, dealing with infidelities of one sort or another. There is a story featuring Jackson Lamb, the recalcitrant farter at the heart of ‘Slow Horses’ (which I am watching on Apple TV+ but have not read). That, too, is about relationships. There are also several stories featuring a pair of married private detectives. All of the stories seem to run on the premise that men are idiots and women are cynical schemers. There’s conscious call-outs to Philip Marlow and the ongoing sense of dames and saps runs through everything. It’s OK, but it starts to feel predictable.

There’s also the reliance on twists that, while I didn’t guess exactly, I could sort of see coming. Things didn’t pan out quite how I guessed from the beginning, but the over sense wasn’t that I was having the rug pulled out from under me so much as shifted slightly underfoot. It felt weirdly unsatisfying, like revealing an answer on the quick crossword and thinking ‘Oh, yes, OK, technically that is that, but still…’.

I suppose I’ve been wondering lately how to go about collecting short stories into coherent volumes. I’m not even convinced it’s a good idea. An individual short story feels like a treat, whereas a bunch of them lumped together somehow adds up to less than the sum of its parts. Perhaps that’s just how I read. I tend to chew through them quite quickly and that works for novels but tends to make short work feel a bit insubstantial.

Although collecting stories on a theme seems like a smart move, the danger is that it seems repetitive. The Herron collection feels like this. I don’t know. Maybe if you write a series of novels with the same characters in the same organisation, you’ve found your groove and there’s no sense moving out of it. This isn’t meant as a criticism, by the way. It’s probably healthy and rewarding to know yourself, what you like and what you’re capable of. I wish I had more of that. But, as a reader, ‘Dolphin Junction’ felt strangely flat.

‘Illuminations’ is the more typical approach to the short story collection, showcasing a range of techniques and talents. It’s fine, but it being Alan Moore, it does go on a bit and everything in it feels a bit flabby. This is possibly just my own preference for short stories. In any case, the Afterword indicates that these stories were written at various different points, for various different outlets and maybe that’s why these two collections feel underwhelming - because they are, essentially, bowls of scraps. Top quality scraps, but they weren’t ever meant to be presented together.

I keep thinking about albums (an increasingly old-fashioned concept in the age of streaming and music-as-content) and wondering if that can be applied to writing and stories. The best albums aren’t just collections of songs, but they cohere in a way that is pleasing and right. Each song has its own identity, but it also exists in a context. I’m wondering how to accomplish that with stories. Is it enough for the stories to be written in the same period of one’s life? Musicians record an album and then tour/publicise it. Can you do that as a writer? I’m sure there are examples of this, but I need to expand my reading to try and find ‘albums’ of writing that work in that way. Or perhaps make them. They must exist, though.

‘Olive Kitteridge’, which I read over several sleepless nights on holiday, had been recommended to me as an example of stories combining to tell a larger narrative. It’s definitely a novel, but a novel of short stories, and it’s really good. I’d be interested to go back to it and see if you can read the stories individually, but as a whole it works really well. It seems so simple, but that’s the trick of good writing, isn’t it? Anyway, that would definitely be my recommendation as to what to read out of the three books mentioned here. 

Or maybe short stories should remain just that - little things that stand independently. I can’t shake the suspicion that they’re collected only so they fit the publishing paradigm of bookshops and shelves full of 250-500 page volumes (which, to be honest, is how I still think of books a lot of the time). I can see that there are economic factors which lead to that working, but we can expand beyond that, surely? I’m not convinced that stories are meant to live together, unless there’s a very good reason for it. That said, I still haven’t come up with one of those very good reasons. Not yet, anyway, but I keep trying and I live in hope.

Invincible by Amy Lawrence

Well, I’m trying to keep track of all the books I’m reading because I’ll do anything to escape the incessant emails from Goodreads (which I have somehow managed to sign up to twice, despite not really understanding what it’s for or how it works) and it helps me to write things in a blog post because it’s such a disposible format. That said, I found myself wanting to self-censor a little bit because this isn’t literary or experimental. But I read it cover to cover, pretty quickly as it turns out.

I am an Arsenal fan, but a pretty weak-sauce one. As a child, my allegiences switched around depending on which shirts I liked. My best friends were Spurs fans and I sort of vaguely followed their lead. Almost everyone in my secondary school was an Arsenal fan and my university years coincided with the arrival of Wenger and I was quite happy to chase that glory, particularly as I was in Manchester at the time and defensive of my Londoner status. Watching Arsenal games was also a way to bond with my youngest sister, who was a bigger fan than me by some stretch. I still don’t know much about the game, but I had eyes and I knew that when Arsenal were on form, they were aesthetically pleasurable to watch.

Truth be told, my favourite way to follow football was by reading about it in the Guardian, both the newspaper and their daily email newsletter The Fiver. The running battles between Arsenal and Man United were an ongoing saga that spanned many years, with untold twists and turns.

The undoubted high was the Invincibles season, when the team went through the league without being beaten. This book looks at how that was done, talking to players and coaches involved in this unprecedented feat of modern football. It doesn’t go game by game or player by player, but instead tries to unlock the philosophy of how it was done. Arsene Wenger became something of a divisive figure at the club in his latter years because he stayed at Arsenal too long, but this was a good reminder of what made him remarkable. Reading about his coaching methods and attitude to player development gave me perspective on what it is to undertake a task, whether that’s winning a trophy or writing a book. Rather than being a harsh taskmaster, Wenger preferred to nourish the whole human, not just the bit that kicked the ball around. It’s tempting to think that it’s all about knucking down and not accepting failure and that’s sort of true, but that comes about through positive reinforcement, repetition of your craft and trust in those around you. Not by locking yourself in a cellar and punching the walls until your knuckles bleed.

There’s also the idea that it’s about calm, which is a stark contrast the Ferguson hairdryer school of management. I don’t know. Maybe winning the Treble and the league all those times is better than going undefeated one season. Logically it probably is. But there’s something classier about the Invincibles that appeals to me more. I guess that’s why I’m an Arsenal fan.