My review of GLISTER by JOHN BURNSIDE is now available to read on FICTION UNCOVERED
CIQ
This week I’ve posted an old story CIQ to the selection I’m archiving here. It was first published in 1999 in Pretext, the University of East Anglia’s now defunct prose journal, and it received a favourable, though brief mention in the TLS. For me, it represents the end of the something, the last moments of a phase.
In 1999, I was 29 and in my first year of teaching creative writing after completing my MA in 1998. In 1991, the year after I’d finished my BA I had worked for a short time in a call centre in Purley, Surrey. CIQ is based partly on something that happened during that phase (the Napier call). Call centres are now ubiquitous, part of the commercial and technological fabric. In 1991, they were new and rather flash. At the company where I briefly worked, the management talked as if they were pioneers, outriders, people from the future, our clean and gleaming, quickfire future. Post-internet, the world of CIQ seems a little quaint now. CIQ is the world of the call centre in 1991 as seen from the vantage point of 1999.
CIQ was the ninth short story I’d written. Prior to this I’d only written short stories as ‘something to do’ between novels. Until quite recently I saw them as calling cards. Before CIQ I’d written seven short stories and one that became the basis for my second novel, Impossible Places. Impossible Places was never published and is roughly approximate to Nathan Flack’s The Mess in Touching the Starfish. Characters from Impossible Places crop up in CIQ.
The other stories were all published in small magazines and anthologies. All of them make me wince if I think about them. They make me wince like sixth-form poetry makes us wince. This is probably unfair on the stories. My sixth form poetry (lower sixth, I hasten to add; the later stuff was better) was like this:
I thank you for the autumn wind
The dry leaves in your hair
The fields are gaunt and dying
The summer leaves the air.
Anyway, I digress.
CIQ: I wouldn’t write in this type of voice anymore. Until CIQ, all my stories were first person narratives. At the time it was fashionable to sound vocally regional and streetwise and I was often scared of sounding like myself, of sounding like I didn’t fit in (I’m no longer sacred of sounding like I don’t fit in). All my stories were either 3000 or 5000 words long. All of my stories were trying to prove something. I’m not sure what I was trying to prove.
What I do remember is that I wrote CIQ with one upbeat and up-yours-call-centre-Nazis ending in mind and then changed it to something more downbeat and thudding right at the last moment. I also remember that the next story I wrote after this had completely different shades and angles and a very different approach to narrative voice. I never went back to the sort of geezerish slang I used in CIQ, at least not very often. It’s interesting for me to put it alongside something like ALL ELSE IS PHOTOGRAPHS because I have recently made a few returns to the sort of subject material that CIQ explores (maybe we don’t change that much after all).
I said to someone recently, as a joke, that every crap job is a short story.
After I was fired from the call centre in Purley I worked until I was fired from the children’s department of a very famous London bookshop (the firing circumstances were not alike; that shop fired everyone after six months; there was a management style based on Stalin’s purges). A little while after CIQ I wrote Man to Man, about working in the children’s department of a very famous London bookstore. I will dig that one up from its sleep sometime soonish.
THE SYLLABUS OF ERRORS
I am delighted to announce that my first short story collection, THE SYLLABUS OF ERRORS: TWELVE STORIES ABOUT OBSESSION, LOSS AND GETTING IN A STATE will be published by UNTHANK BOOKS in October 2012.
THE SYLLABUS OF ERRORS is a story sequence, a mixture of contemporary and historical episodes. A cast of loners and romantics explore how our anxious present is mirrored in the uncertainties of the inter-war period with its crashes and crises. Ultimately it conveys a coded warning from history about what can come to fill the void when universally accepted notions of democracy and liberal capitalism are being questioned as now.
The restless and rootless characters dream of idealized cities or moments in the personal or historical past which they feel could offer their escape. Historically – Sally Bowles and Fritz Lang’s “M” join hands in Weimar Berlin, a faceless soldier wanders through a war-torn city looking for his lost love, an artist high on modernism gets caught up in a political assassination in Fascist Italy. Personally they dream of capturing that unfulfilled promise, that missed perfect kiss, that unresolved moment, that thing that should have lived.
THE SYLLABUS OF ERRORS
includes the stories:
ISLAND GARDENS
STORMING THE BASTILLE
A SHORT STORY ABOUT A SHORT FILM
POST-LEADING MAN
TOMORROW BELONGS TO ME
ULTIMA THULE
THE PRETTIEST GIRL IN BERLIN
THE FIRST SUGGESTION OF NIGHT
MARMARA
THE SYLLABUS OF ERRORS
ABYSSINIA
I REMEMBER NOTHING
Some of these stories have appeared previously in, among others, Staple, London Magazine, Unthology and Fwriction Review. All but two have been written in the past three years since I completed Touching the Starfish.
DAVID ROSE, author of VAULT: AN ANTI-NOVEL kindly agreed to read the manuscript and describes THE SYLLABUS OF ERRORS thus:
Lovers of mitteleuropa period fiction, or of contemporary fiction, or – ideally – both, will love this book. It’s Joseph Roth meets Roberto Bolaño, and it is simply wonderful.
Actually, not so simply. And the comparisons are not hyperbole; I choose them with care.
Roth, writing through the Twenties and early Thirties, wrote exhaustively in his fiction of the slow build-up to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its civilization in the First World War. It wasn’t a case of being overtaken by History – he used the material for its premonitory parallels with the build-up to the Second; the hysteria of fin-de-siècle Vienna (“the laboratory for the scientific study of apocalypse” according to Karl Kraus) foreshadowing the violence of Weimar Berlin and the greater collapse of European civilization.
Stokes now shunts the parallel a stage further: Weimar Berlin, Fascist Rome paralleling present-day London. Many of the stories in The Syllabus Of Errors end violently, on the streets of London as much as of Berlin. Fanciful?
George Steiner, in In Bluebeard’s Castle, described the First War as a willed breaking of the tensions of the enervating ennui of a generation of peace after the Napoleonic era, breeding a “nostalgia for disaster”. Mainland Britain has now had a generation (65+ years) of peace. Maybe the riots, gang war, street knifings, flirtation with terrorism are a similar snapping of tension.
In the first story, Island Gardens, the central character, an English teacher teaching in Berlin, now back in London, cruising around Piccadilly Circus in search of his Russian girlfriend, an ex-pupil in Berlin, remembers explaining to her that German had as many words for anxiety as English does for horrible people. We are beginning, perhaps to need them in English. Ahnen in particular, which is what he is feeling – a vague, unspecified dread.
In another story, Tomorrow Belongs To Me, a history teacher goes to the fancy-dress party of his Head of Department disguised as M, the Peter Lorre character in the Fritz Lang film. An unknown girl dressed as Sally Bowles, “not the one from Cabaret, the original, in the book”, recognizes his disguise, and the need it disguises, the only one to do so. They slink off from the party together to enact a scene from a movie of their own.
So maybe we should add Isherwood’s name to the other two? But Isherwood spent his life as a tourist. The characters in Stokes, all of them, are exiles, exiles from their own lives, trying to reconnect by their search for roots, precedents.
So we are back to Roth, the supreme writer of exile; and to Bolaño, the modern equivalent, his twin themes being exile and violence, and the links between them.
Like Bolaño, Stokes dares his readers to follow him. In one story set wholly in Weimar Berlin, The Prettiest Girl In Berlin, an ex-soldier, mentally and physically maimed, prosthetically-transformed, wanders the streets, winding through the bloody shoot-outs between Communist Spartacists and Right-wing Friekorps in search of a pre-war love. It takes huge risks of obscurity but they are entirely justified; we share the bewilderment of the soldier to the end. It’s an immensely powerful story, a George Grosz painting come to life, to music by Hanns Eisler.
Another, set in pre-Fascist Rome, involves a mural artist and Mussolini supporter so vividly drawn I wondered if he were modelled on the Fascist propagandist artist Mario Sironi, but the links are tenuous, and besides, the character, Dario Inchesa, is too strongly delineated from within for it to matter.
These are a series of linked, overlapping stories, but the links function subliminally. Motifs recur: a metal jaw, for example, transmuted from literality to figure of speech; characters appear as extras in a story, then reappear as leading actors in their own, many of them teachers – of English, History or Art – many with an interest, professional or personal, in Hitler Studies.
But in the last story there is the teasing possibility that there is a stronger link binding them together, as the product of the imagination of its narrator, yet another Hitler Studies academic whose teenage interest in the subject was fuelled by a friendship with a (possible) ex-Nazi.
This, though, is not a reductive “explanation” of the book: the preceding stories are just too powerful, too closely imagined, too fictionally autonomous to be reduced to a “Usual Suspects”-type unravelling. It is, rather, yet another layer of significance.
And this story brings us back again to Bolaño, whose funniest, most inventive book, Nazi Literature In The Americas, The Syllabus Of Errors invokes, perhaps confronts. Stokes more than stands up to the comparison.
There’s a verve and crackling wit throughout, sharp observation and pinpoint characterization lacing the eloquence of loss. There is brilliantly witty dialogue, but there not just for its wit but to reveal depths of the characters, dimensions of their predicaments. And a wonderfully wide range of cultural allusion.
But it’s the eloquence that lingers when you finish the book. In the story Abyssinia, Mellis, an Art Historian facing redundancy describes his first encounter with a soul-mate, Caitlin, whom he later loses to the university’s philistine Human Resources manager. It’s in a small provincial art gallery displaying an installation, The Archive Of Water.
That installation – normally an art form Mellis despises – touches him as it touches Caitlin. It consists in a series of glass tubes containing meltwater from Greenlandic glaciers, some tubes clouded, some sparklingly pure, but in all of them, the “waters are like memory” with “the vanishing point elsewhere”.
This functions as a perfect description of this book.
THE SYLLABUS OF ERRORS
I am incredibly excited about seeing these stories in print and will keep everyone up to speed with all the news.
STORIES
I’ve added last year’s NOBODY PAYS FOR IT to the STORIES page for anyone who may have missed it.
“Two days after his car was found burnt-out near a cliff’s edge her PA handed her a padded envelope. She recognized the handwriting, its unruly loops and truncated stems. There were meetings scheduled that day. Her clients had travelled distances, one from as far as Cologne. She cancelled them all and left Populus, the recruitment consultancy she’d built from a desk in a spare room to a suite of offices on London Wall. She drifted around the City, not looking up or down until she found the restaurant. She insisted on a table not facing the street. At first it seemed he’d sent her nothing personal, no letter or explanation, only J, a manuscript an inch thick. His agent’s statement had said that James Jay’s last masterpiece was either ashes or he’d taken it to the sea.”
IGUANADON
Another new short story IGUANADON appears in INK, SWEAT AND TEARS this month.
“He glanced up and blinked as if he’d only just noticed me.
‘Miss Merton?’
‘There’s a Selima Gayler to see you.’
He threw his pencil so hard onto the desktop that it bounced off and clicked on the rim of the wastepaper receptacle.
‘Jesus of the Tits,’ he said. ‘Not again.’
‘She has shoulder pads,’ I said, spreading out my arms to indicate their width.
‘Still? Do me a favour, will you? Petty-cash it. Take her to lunch. Don’t be too mean.’
I pressed my hand to my heart.
‘Me? Mean?’”
UNTHOLOGY
UNTHOLOGY gets a prominent mention in DAVID WHELAN’s HUFFINGTON POST article on the YEAR OF THE SHORT STORY
ZONE ENDS
I have a new short story ZONE ENDS in today’s EUNOIA REVIEW.
‘The longer you watch the more certain you are that it’s him. He is sat at a table outside a café. He is scanning the screen of a tablet computer. He stabs the screen with this thumb, tilts it to the left and grimaces. A breeze flutters the menus on the tabletops.
You have been walking for hours without doubling back on yourself. You did not intend to walk this far. Your thoughts are no clearer. You have not yet made a decision. You still do not have an exit strategy.
You are thirsty. Some small change hangs in your trouser pocket, but you don’t really want to be seen sliding silver and coppers across your palm, scraping together enough for a juice, not when that’s him sitting there.’
TOUCHING THE STARFISH
There’s a new review of TOUCHING THE STARFISH by Sarah Dobbs on her NEVERENDING STORIES blog: Touching the Starfish
From Sarah’s review:
“So what is Touching the Starfish?
It’s a book for every creative writing lecturer out there. If you ever wanted to write about your experiences in this area, then don’t. It’s been done. And I can’t imagine it being done better than TTS manages to do. There’s plenty of Thank God It’s Not Just Me moments when Nathan Flack, the novel’s protagonist is describing his horrific experiences with his new tutor group. There’s a lot of footnote asides that explain about the Moon-Barkers and Rom-Ts and Wrong-Roomers that inhabit his group.(1) You know what I mean, the ones that would merrily drive you crazy. If you let them.
(1) Put simply, the bonkers, the over-romantics and people who should really be telling it to a therapist type of students.”
FOREVER BREATHES THE LONELY WORD
I have a new story FOREVER BREATHES THE LONELY WORD in this week’s FLEETING magazine.
Forever Breathes the Lonely Word
A week later, when we revisited the abandoned meander and sat face-to-face in the dip and you told me harrowing stories of Bosnia and Afghanistan, I did not tell you that those lunchtimes, when the weather was warm and when we were clear of the building and would hold hands openly and cross the woods and the field and end up here, and you would undress and the sunlight would slither about your bare shoulders and afterwards you would whisper the names of places you wanted to see – Zanzibar, Marrakech – these were the moments I’d brooded on most deeply during the years.
