thisplacehere

‘What Happens When You Wake Up in the Night’ (2009) by Michael Marshall Smith
‘The Safe Children’ (2009) by Tom Fletcher

Nightjar Press is a new venture by the writer Nicholas Royle, specialising in individually-bound short stories. They’ve launched with two titles, one by a well-known writer, the other by a newcomer. These are very handsome volumes they are — and, more importantly, the stories are also very good.

The well-known writer is Michael Marshall Smith, whose name is pretty much a guarantee of a good read, and ‘What Happens When You Wake Up in the Night’ is no exception. It’s narrated by a little girl named Maddy who hates the dark, so (she tells us) made a deal with her mummy that she could keep the light on all night, as long as she didn’t disturb her parents. But tonight, Maddy has woken up in darkness; what’s happened to her light?

The first thing to say about this story is that Smith gets Maddy’s voice pitch-perfect: with all the breathless sentences and repetitive structures, it feels as though this is a small child addressing us. And it’s the naiveté of Maddy’s viewpoint which is key to the success of the story. It becomes clear as the tale progresses that something strange is happening — and, all credit to Smith, it was something I didn’t see coming. But we get some idea of what’s going on, even though Maddy doesn’t; the gap between her knowledge and ours generates great poignancy. It was with something of a wry smile that I closed the book, having read Maddy’s final words: ‘Mummy and Daddy do not talk much any more, and this is why, if you wake up in the night, you should never ever get up out of bed.’ There’s a lot going on behind that sentence which I can’t reveal without spoiling the story — and I’d hate to deprive anyone of the superb reading experience I had with Smith’s tale.

Nightjar’s second launch title is the beautifully harsh ‘The Safe Children’ by a young new writer named Tom Fletcher. Set in western Cumbria, it follows James Thwaite as he travels to his new job as overnight security guard at a factory which makes… well, that’s a secret. The plot leads towards the revelation of the factory’s purposde, which is appropriately nasty — but that revelation isn’t enough, by itself, to make the story stand out.

All of the seats are ripped; all of the tables are black with cigarette burns. Somebody is playing music on some portable device and it sounds like an insect trapped behind glass. The train moves slowly. I just stare out at the sea. Some things haven’t changed at all.

It grew on lattices of minerals, laying its own skeleton and following with cellulose skin. Infrastructure strong and broad, growing and branching, it settled roots deep into the green fertile soil of the Sichuan basin. It drew nutrients and minerals frmo the soil and sun, and the water of the rancid Bing Jiang; sucking at pollutants as willingly as it ate the sunlight which filtered through twining sooty mist.

(‘Pocketful of Dharma’)

It’s occurred to me that, if I’m going to do the occasional random short fiction review (as I did yesterday), it might be more interesting to cover two stories at once, to give a point of comparison. So let’s try that, and see how it goes. The author I’ve chosen today is Tim Pratt, whom I’d heard good things about but never actually read – though I’ve had a story collection of his on my shelves for several months, and really must get around to reading it.

Anyway, the first story I’m covering in this review is ‘A Programmatic Approach to Perfect Happiness’ (2009), published in Futurismic. The story is described by the site’s Pail Raven in his introduction as ‘a little Gonzo, a little retro, but all Tim Pratt’. I can’t really judge the last of those yet (though I suspect, and hope, that it’s true), but the first two are definitely right.

This is a robot story that has an air of old-school science fiction about it, but not in a way that comes across as a tired retread or too-knowing pastiche; it’s more that Pratt knows the area in which he’s writing, and uses its history and conventions as a way in to the story he wants to tell. Our narrator is Kirby, a sentient android who has married a human woman, April. Essentially, the tale is a portrait of familial (and extra-familial) relationships, though there are also mysterious ‘emotional viruses’ in the background (April’s daughter Wynter, usually a moody goth, has contracted a virus that makes her happy – which explains why she’s being unusually civil towards Kirby).

What I like about this story is that it’s deceptively light: it’s humorous, but searching questions are being asked underneath humour. I’ll quote a passage which illustrates both of these points (context: Wynter has just explained to Kirby why she is often difficult with him:

“I understand.” I do. Like most of my kind, I am exceptionally good at running theoretical models of human interior experience, and of constructing self-coherent theories of mind.

There’s humour here in the incongruity between the typical human platitude and Kirby’s robotic literalness (I should add that the over-formal diction Pratt uses for Kirby’s voice is just right); but deeper issues are being explored here: is a model constructed inside a sentient computer truly equivalent to human feelings? There’s more elsewhere in the story: if a robot like Kirby can reprogram himself to feel anything he wants, is a robot emotion equivalent (or less genuine? or more?) than a human one, caused by chemical changes in the brain? Then there are the ethical dilemmas, which I won’t get into, because it would spoil the story for you. Go and have a read.

The second Pratt story I read (I should say, I chose these more-or-less at random) is ‘Her Voice in a Bottle’ (2009) from Subterranean magazine. This is a very different tale from the previous one – more serious in tone, magical realist rather than science fiction – but I can see common characteristics: playfulness and seriousness combined, and a sense of putting a well-worn theme to work. I still haven’t made up my mind about the story – not about whether I like it (I do), but about whether it pushes its luck too far.

You see, the protagonist is a fictionalised version of Pratt himself, yet the story purports to be ‘filled with true stories of my life’ (I say ‘purports’ because I have no way to judge how far that’s true), whilst acknowledging and reflecting upon its own fictitiousness. I’m wondering if the piece is too self-referential for its own good… on balance, it probably isn’t, otherwise I wouldn’t be asking myself the question! And, to be fair, the metafictionality (is that even a word?) is integral to the project of the story.

So, we have our protagonist, Tim (for the sake of clarity, I’ll refer to the character as ‘Tim’ and the author as ‘Pratt’), who tells us about his ex-girlfriend, Meredith, who flits in and out of his life like a recurring dream. I use that phrase quite deliberately: she is apparently able to appear and disappear at will; no one other than Tim actually ever meets her; and nothing else is quite as real to him when he’s in her presence.

All this leads naturally to the assumption that Meredith is a product of Tim’s imagination, made flesh only in his own mind; but Pratt knows this, and addresses it directly – coming to the conclusion (as I read it) that whether Meredith is real or not makes no difference, because the effect she has is the same either way. ‘Her Voice in a Bottle’ evokes a kind of young love that’s like a whirlwind, that seems more vivid in later years than it probably (but who can say?) than it was at the time; and the story asks, would you want to return and find out what it was really like, or are you content with your memories, inaccurate though they may be? A fascinating, thoughtful piece. Go and have a read of this one, too.

These two stories are very different, but I found both to be equally accomplished and a joy to read. I really, really do need to read more of Tim Pratt.

‘Even If You Were Here’ by Angi Becker Stevens is a great little story which appears in the September issue of The Collagist. Essentially it’s a character study of a thirteen-year-old girl who, I realise now I come to think about it, is never actually named. I didn’t notice this when I was reading, and I think that’s because the character is so solidly imagined – she becomes familiar enough to us that we don’t need to know her name, because we know her.

The first-person voice that Becker Stevens creates is pitch-perfect: halting (almost staccato at times), candid, spilling thoughts out almost as they come to mind – it sounds like a teenage girl talking to you, sorting through a confusing time of life as she does so.

And what a time this girl is going through: her younger sister Francie is preoccupied with death; her older brother Peter has gone of travelling to who-knows-where; her mother is struggling to cope; she wonders who her father is (whoever he is, he’s also Peter’s father, but not Francie’s); and she’s exploring her own burgeoning sexuality.

What I particularly appreciate about this story is that, even though we see everything through the eyes of the protagonist, the other characters nevertheless come to life independently. We can sense the whirlwind of emotions that Francie must be feeling, even though we mostly only have her sister’s wry observations of Francie pretending to die every day (‘Some days she freezes to death and the house is nice and quiet so I can pretend I’m home alone.’). The presence of Peter looms large, even though he isn’t there; our protagonist wonders whether her brother is searching or just escaping:

‘I didn’t understand what it meant to find yourself [she says]. I didn’t know how Peter could possibly find himself anyplace we weren’t in. I thought losing yourself was a better phrase for what he was trying to do.’

The girl’s mother is a closed book to her; all she really knows is that she’s ‘very tired’ – but even that is enough to open the character to us as readers. Then there’s Stacey, the girl who – tentatively at first, then less so – is becoming the protagonist’s lover. One gets the sense that Stacey is as much an anchor as a lover for the girl, the only person in her life who speaks plainly – the only person, perhaps, who is there for her.

Through these waters, our protagonist tries to navigate, tries to shake off her family and become herself. Perhaps she can do that; perhaps it’s beyond possibility at the present time; perhaps distancing herself is the wrong approach. ‘Ever If You Were Here’ is a thoughtful, well-written piece at which I recommend you take a look.

What, then, is the purpose of this narrative structure? To answer that, we have to go back to the event around which the text revolves. Roy, Vann’s protagonist, is a boy of twelve when his parents divorce, and not much older when his dentist-turned-fisherman father shoots himself in the head. The first chapter essentially tells the story of this; the others explore how the characters (in particular Roy and his parents) are affected by those events.

Vann pulls off a tricky literary feat in depicting three characters who all have personal qualities that would, in isolation, put one off wanting to know them; yet are still sympathetic, because we see enough of the whole person. Roy’s mother Elizabeth is the one of whom we see the least (the father-son relationship is most prominent, after all); but we nevertheless gain a sense of how profoundly she has been affected by her husband’s actions (his unfaithfulness was what precipitated the divorce). After the suicide, Elizabeth is unable to hold down a relationship for any length of time, actively pushing her lovers away. This is unfair on those men, of course; but, after what Elizabeth has been through, it’s no wonder that she might behave in such a way.

One is far less inclined to sympathise with Jim, Roy’s father; and I don’t think he does ultimately inspire sympathy – nor empathy, for that matter. Acceptance, perhaps. Jim’s character is most fully explored in the novella-chapter, wherein thirteen-year-old Roy leaves his mother’s California home to spend a year with his father in a cabin on a remote Alaskan island. The first part of this story, told from the boy’s viewpoint, establishes the pair’s routine: attempting to live self-sufficiently during the day (though they came ill-prepared, and pay dearly for it), and Jim crying himself to sleep at night. This cycle could have been too repetitive, but Vann maintains his narrative momentum through a combination of careful plotting that shakes things up every so often, and quietly skilful writing which carries a suggestion that all this physical activity is displacement activity, so father and son don’t have to confront the issues between them.

They do so eventually, of course, and Jim confesses his inadequacy – he knows the type of man he ought to be, but not how to become that way. We gain more insight into Jim’s state of mind in the second part of the novella, where the viewpoint shifts to him, and the mood changes subtly. The intensely purposeful activity of the first part now gains a frantic edge, and a sense that Jim is buckling under the pressure of reality. He becomes something of a tragic figure as the tale progresses, and starts to redeem himself in the final sentences – but, alas, by then it’s too late for him.

On the face of it, Roy would seem to have come through things relatively unscathed: his first-person narrative voice is calm, measured, reasonable – which makes it all the more disarming when, in that same voice, he tells of smashing all the windows in his mother’s house. At the age of thirty, Roy returns to the Alaskan island of Ketchikan, where he grew up – an attempt to lay the ghosts of the past to rest, but it turns out to be misguided. By the very end of the book, however, Roy appears to have come to terms with the events of his childhood – but his method is rather drastic. If he has indeed made peace with life, it’s an uneasy truce – which is perhaps the best he could have hoped for.

Legend of a Suicide is an intensely personal book (it is dedicated to Vann’s father, who himself committed suicide); there is a sense of protagonist and author alike working through their experiences – but not in a way that makes the reader feel unwelcome. This is a book that asks for thought and attention, and repays them richly. The title suggests an event which has grown larger than itself, which echoes long after it has finished. One might say something similar – albeit with more positive implications – about these stories.
 

The stories in Cern Zoo are a nicely eclectic bunch; this is true not only of their subject matter, but also of their relationships to the anthologys title, which range from close to non-existent (as far as I could see). Some tales take inspiration from CERN and the Large Hadron Collider, such as ‘Being of Sound Mind’, whose retired narrator finds one day that a young girlk has inexplicably appeared in his house. He tries to work out what’s going on, whilst struggling against the tide of suspicion — and we readers have our own bit of detective work to do, to understand why the narration switches between first- and second-person. I think it’s fair to say that CERN aspect feels a little ‘tacked on’ (though it’s necessary for the story); but the rest is beautifully disorientating — to the very end, we can’t be sure whether all this is just in the narrator’s mind.

Other contributors base their stories around zoos. ‘The Lion’s Den’ tells of strange happenings in a zoo, beginning with a boy throwing himself into a lion enclosure. Of course, he’s set upon and killed — but no trace of him remains, not even a speck of blood. Then the lions are seen outside their enclosure, in places where it would be impossible for them to be — and so on. The zoo-related material in this story is fascinating; if based on actuality (as I assume it is), it reveals aspects of working life in a zoo that I had never really considered. And the events of the plot — and their implications — are powerful, all the more so because they remain mysterious.

Some of the tales use the image of chalk figures like the Cerne Abbass giant. One such story is ‘The Rude Man’s Menagerie’, in which Rebs, working on the remains of her late father’s Michigan tree farm, discovers the chalk figure of a man who appears to have drawn various animals to himself. The man appears malevolent, and Rebs resolves to free the animals — but how? This is a satisfying piece of fantasy that runs on its own internal logic; by the time reality comes gently free of it moorings, one is happy to go along.

In still other stories, ‘Cern Zoo’ (if it features at all) is really just a name. ‘The Ozymandias Site’ takes us to the Moon, where some future species (from the world of Cerne) has travelled to investigate the ‘giant leaping creature that once accompanied [them] in the universe’. No prizes for guessing that we are those long-gone beings; and the expressions of human folly in the story are rather unsubtle. But what makes this talew shine is the way it’s told, as it takes you into the minds of these strange creatures who have five-part personalities in the same body. I don’t think I grasped ‘The Ozymandias Site’ fully (understandable, I think, given the manner of telling!), but the journey was worthwhile regardless.

‘The Devourer of Dreams’ is another story whose voice is the star attraction. A successful writer looks back on his childhood in post-war Suffolk. His father, an innkeeper, suddenly developed a talent for writing, and produced several best-selling books. One day, the boy discovered the macabre secret behind this turn of events — a secret he went on to exploit himself. The plot of this tale is, to be honest, nothing particularly special; but the narrattion certainly is. The author pulls off a difficult balancing-act, creating a voice which convinces as that of someone (albeit elderly) living in the present day, yet has enough of a Lovecraftian touch to give ‘The Devourer of Dreams’ the menacing atmosphere of an old weird-fiction tale.

Last year, I reviewed the previous Nemonymous anthology, Cone Zero (you can read that review here), and thought it excellent. Good as some of the stories are in the present volume, I would say that the overall quality of Cern Zoo is not quite as high — not because there are fewer good stories in the present book, but because a greater proportion (there are 24 pieces in Cern Zoo, as opposed to Cone Zero’s 14) don’t quite have that extra something (that’s my impression, anyway). So, for example, ‘Dead Speak, with its tale of an investigation into the mysteries of CERN, starts off interestingly, but seems to me to stop before it really gets anywhere. ‘Dear Doctor’ is amusing, but essentially nothing more than a shaggy-dog story. ‘Turn the Crank’, which tells of a mysterious organ-grinder, brings a variation of the ‘malign carnival’ trope into the present day; it works, but does seem a little over-familiar.

It’s worth noting that I am being only half-critical with those exampless; that’s because I’m not talking about bad stories as such, but stories that don’t reach their full potential. For all of these, there are other tales in Cern Zoo that succeed more fully: ‘Parker’ is an intense study of someone getting rather too excited about a pen. ‘Sloth & Forgiveness’ starts with a man climing a tree naked and encountering a talking sloth; it gets away with being ridiculous simply because it never loses its conviction. ‘The Last Mermaid’ is about Carlos II of Spain, and has a heady atmosphere; it hovers on the borderline of being nothing but atmosphere, yet it has a unique ‘flavour’, as it were. On the surface, ‘Pebbles’ appears a slight story, of a girl collecting pebbles from a beach and carrying them away in her jumper; but there are subtle clues which, if I interpret them correctly, hint brilliantly at what’s going on behind the words.

I’ll finish with my personal favourite story in Cern Zoo, which is ‘Artis Eterne’. This revolves around an old pub (’The Cerne Abbass’) and one of its fixtures, a strange man called Albert; ‘fixture’ is the right word, because he never moves from his seat. He’s there throughout our narrator’s childhood, and still there when he returns for a work conference many years later. Apparently Albert decided literally to ‘live in the moment’, and to see how long he could make that moment last — and it would seem to be working.

‘Artis Eterne’ is a joy to read because so many of its elements work beautifully together. The prose is wonderful; for example:

I was born in the kind of parochial town whose aspirations held it closer to the nearest big city than mere geography. This same giant metropolis held our status as a smaller cousin in careful equilibrium, maintaining and coveting our local charms while at the same time sending out regular raiding parties of young adults who would drink too much and too loudly, making us feel like aliens on our own streets on summer weekends.

This strikes me as a very sharp observation of life in a satellite town in contemporary Britain. And there’s more to enjoy here than just the writing: Albert’s idea captures the imagination, but best of all is how it acts as a counterpoint to the protagonist’s life, and the gravity exerted by his (or her) home town.

I wish I knew who wrote this story, so I could track down more of the author’s work. But I’ll have to wait a while before I can do that. For now, I can — and do — heartily recommend Cern Zoo to you.

For more on Cern Zoo and Nemonymous, including purchase information, visit www.nemonymous.com.

Serena Alibhai, ‘It Hits Hard’: This explores a different way of telling a story within the 200-word format, and it works well. A first-person narrator (I assume male) goes on about how he’s so much better than his ex-girlfriend.- but quite a lot is implied rather than spoken; and the piece builds into an effective character study.

James Boyt, ‘Coming to God’: A boy looks into a house, misunderstands what he sees and hears – and if I say any more than that, I’ll spoil the effect for you. But Boyt’s narrative voice is spot-on, and his piece is very funny indeed.

Robert Aquino Dollesin, ‘Scratches’: The nicely surreal tale of a boy who gets trapped inside his mother’s dining table, and is stuck there for years, unmissed and undiscovered. Raises a smile whilst still being genuinely unsettling; after all, what if you went missing and your loved ones really didn’t notice?

Jessica Patient, ‘How to Breathe on the Train’: An intense and vivid depiction of claustrophobia, which throws the reader right into the situation. Not pleasant to read, naturally; but superbly effective writing.

Sophie Playle, ‘The Green Fairy’: The tale of a five-inch-high (and shrinking) woman who makes a living dancing in cocktail glasses. Playle’s writing captures the feel of a fairytale, without being overly bound by the expectations raised by that term – and the ending raises a wry smile.

Ian Rochford, ‘Waiting at the Altar’: Put simply, a man waits at the altar for his bride-to-be. But it’s not that simple, and poignantly so. A quietly powerful piece.

Amy Roskilly, ‘Wildfire (Population 66)’: An evocative portrait of a small town destroyed by an unspecified catastrophe. Some striking prose; for example: ‘the townsfolk were following [the evangelist who visited town] like hungry strays, pawing at her floral dress like the very frills of its hem would save them.’ Really brings a shiver to the spine.

Colin Sutherland, ‘No Angel’: A plane is about to crash, but thankfully there’s a real, actual angel on board; so they’re all safe, right? Well, see for yourself; but this is an engaging idea, with a good punchline.

Frances Taylor, ‘Would You Rather?’: A story told mostly in dialogue, as a couple find out more about each other. But what makes this story work so well for me is its final sentence. Quite a few of the tales in this book have twist endings, but perhaps none as effective as this, which casts a whole new light on the situation.

Shot Glass Stories is available to buy or download here.
 

This post is about the second story to be discussed in Torque Control’s weekly discussion schedule. It’s not actually due for discussion until the 30^th of this month; but, as noted in a previous post, I don’t know whether I’ll be online for the next week or so, which is why I’m blogging about it now.

The story in question is ‘A Tiny Feast’ by Chris Adrian, and was published in the New Yorker (and is available to read online: click the story title). After one of their periodic arguments, Oberon presents Titania with the gift of a human changeling. We join them in a hospital, where the child is being treated for leukaemia; the story chronicles how the faeries try to deal with the alien world of mortal medicine.

I think this piece is wonderful, in more than one sense of that word. Adrian does a superb job of working through the ramifications of his fantastical idea. Most obviously, perhaps, there’s going to be humour in the juxtaposition of traditional faeries and modern society – and so there is: witness, for example, the method Titania finds for playing a Carly Simon LP, before ‘[singing] to the boy about his own vanity’; or the times when the faeries’ glamour drops, and the medical staff become dazzled by the very presence of Titania and Oberon.

Yet there’s another, less playful, side to ‘A Tiny Feast’. Adrian makes some telling observations (‘The doctors called the good news good news, but for the bad news they always found another name’), but the heart of his story concerns the emotional trajectory of the characters, and Titania in particular. At first, the boy is just another changeling to her (she never even gives him a name); gradually, though, she comes to care about him – but the story-logic by which the faeries live has the final say. It makes the tale not only a fine piece of fantasy in its own right, but also a striking metaphor for how we may react to the terminal illness of a loved one.

Niall Harrison of Torque Control has announced that, starting this weekend, he’ll be hosting weekly discussions of short fiction. In an attempt to increase the amount of commentary out there (and because I’m unsure of how much internet access I’ll have over the next couple of weeks), I’m going to blog about two of the stories in advance.

We begin, then with ‘The Best Monkey’ by Daniel Abraham, originally published in the third Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, and now reprinted online at Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist (click on the story title above for the link). Our narrator is Jimmy, who works for a news aggregator, but is tasked by his latest boss with doing a little investigation. Elaine Salvaret, a bigwig at a leading technology conglomerate named Fifth Layer, has been overheard saying something that might be a clue to the secret of the company’s strange technology – a secret that might not be ethically sound. This could be a scoop, and it’s Jimmy’s job to bring back the goods. Why him? Because he and Elaine were lovers thirty years ago.

I’m ambivalent about this story. At heart, it’s a story of ideas (perhaps the central theme is the nature of beauty and attraction, and how they relate to biological imperatives), which I found intellectually interesting; but I think the idea that acts as the engine of the plot is a little too abstract to be intellectually gripping – so the story doesn’t quite have that extra zing to turn it from good into great.

Viewing the piece from another angle: Abraham’s depiction of his future is pretty good, with some nice details like the constantly changing fashionable argot of Jimmy’s bosses (and, indeed, Jimmy’s constantly changing bosses). One gripe, though: we’re told that in the thirty years between the present of the story and Jimmy’s younger days (which may not be far off our present), there has been major environmental catastrophe; yet I don’t gain any sense of the effect of this in the story itself.

Quite a mixed reaction to ‘The Best Monkey’ from me, then (though I do feel more positive than negative about the tale); I’ll be interested to see what others think.
 

I’ve just discovered the Sunday Salon and thought I’d join in. What I’m going to do is read and blog about some short stories online. I’ll link to each story so you can read it for yourself. For this first post, I’ve decided to tackle a couple of stories from Untitled Books.

‘Menzies Meat’ by Evie Wyld takes us to the tiny mining town of Menzies in Western Australia; and Elaine, the sixteen-year-old girl who works in her father’s butcher shop there. Elaine is frustrated at being stuck in a rut and longs to get out of Menzies; the story is essentially a portrait of how her frustration builds to a head, until… but that, of course, would be telling. At first, the narrative seems to be going all over the place, but the reason becomes clear in the end: everything — from the stifling atmosphere of the shop to the salt lake that looks the same whether it’s full or dry — is an expression or mirror of Elaine’s feeling of inertia. Wyld conjures that feeling vividly.

Zoe Green’s ‘The Wake’ is narrated by someone (who could be male or female; I’m not certain) who is dying of cancer, and currently planning their own funeral, as they watch Hester (who lives in the flat below) in the garden. The action moves, paragraph by paragraph, between the present moment, the narrator’s own life (as they ruminate especiallyon an ex-lover, Ferdi), and scenes from Hester’s past. There are some quite subtle moments of characterisation, as the narrator tries (not all that successfully) to live through Hester — so the title doesn’t just refer to the ceremony being planned; for the narrator, the telling of the story itself is a kind of wake. As with ‘Menzies Meat’, this tale grows richer the more you turn it over in your mind.

‘It was…a bit of surprise to the judges, none of whom knew they were science fiction fans beforehand,’ commented one of the judging panel. Well, the obvious thing to say to that is that you don’t need to consider yourself a ’science fiction fan’ to appreciate science fiction, any more than you have to be a ‘literary fiction fan’ to enjoy literary fiction (not, of course, that the two need be mutually exclusive). Readers interested in good fiction shouldn’t be surprised to find stories of interest in any given quarter — but apparently some still are.

Anyway, I don’t know the other books, but it’s not hard to see why the judges thought The Turing Test a winning book, because Beckett’s stories are superb. He’s especially good at examining human concerns against the background of a science-fictional future. The title story sums this up nicely. The ‘Turing test’ refers to a means of assessing whether an artificial intelligence is convincing enough in conversation to be indistinguishable from a human being. Our protagonist is a gallery owner named Jessica, who finds herself the recipient of a highly sophisticated ‘virtual PA’. Jessica is feeling rather insecure with life (one of her first acts is to ask the PA to change its avatar to something less attractive, and hence less threatening to her self-esteem), and the real question Beckett asks is not whether a computer could pass the Turing test, but whether a person could — perhaps Jessica’s greatest fear is that she could not.

The theme of artificial intelligence returns in ‘La Macchina’, where a man finds his ideas about robots challenged when he vists his brother in Italy. Robots are now commonplace, but they’re not supposed to talk to humans, except in superficial, rote ways — so when one tries to strike up a friendly conversation with our man, does that alone make it a ‘Rogue’ that could cause havoc, and hence needs to be destroyed? Then there’s the ‘Safe Brothel’ staffed by sinteticas made to look indistinguishable from human women– but sinteticas are more popular, so some human women pretend to be robots. What’s the protagonist to make of that? All adds up to a very different kind of robot story; the experience of reading it is distinctive.

The same could be said of many stories here; Beckett transforms SF staples with the ‘ordinary’ grounding he gives them. ‘Dark Eden’, for example, is a space opera where a small group of people travel to an exotic world — but the ups-and-downs of their relationships are not so different from ours. And ‘The Marriage of Sky and Sea’ puts yet another spin on the form with its tale of a spacefaring writer who makes a living from books about the cultures of more ‘primitive’  human colonies than his own — but his latest trip, to a Viking-style society, makes him question his attitude…

My favourite story in the book (which forms the first half of a pair) is about virtual reality, though with Beckett’s characteristic twist. ‘The Perimeter’ is set in a London where the vast majority of people are ‘consensuals’, living in a virtual world; and the more they can afford to pay, the higher their resolution. Only a few, very rich, individuals remain flesh and blood, inhabiting the ruined ‘real’ world, and able to experience the virtual reality through an implant. This story tells of how young consensual Lemmy meets the physical Clarissa Fall, and has his very sense of self challenged. But the tables are turned in ‘Piccadilly Circus’, where we meet Clarissa again a few years later, and she has to face up to her increasing irrelevance as a ‘physical’. To my mind, these stories — and ‘The Perimeter’ especially –have the best fusion of ideas and human consequences; but many of the other tales are almost as strong.

In his introduction to The Turing Test, Alastair Reynolds makes what has turned out to be a very appropriate comment: that he hopes the book will bring more attention to Chris Beckett’s fiction. He ends by saying, ‘I’m confident that you’ll finish The Turing Test wanting to turn more people on to this singularly underrated writer.’ So I’ll end by saying: yes. Yes, I do.

Tender

The stories in Tender switch (though not in strict rotation) between the viewpoints of Bill and Ali Dax (who meet when he is a footballer and she his physiotherapist), and their children Sean and Rosa (and, for one story, Ali’s brother Frank, who later dies). at different stages in the characters’ lives. Naturally, this structure means that quite a lot is missed out; but the overall effect is of a gradual accretion of detail — not necessarily of plot detail, but of emotional detail — that builds up a portrait of the family.

(One technical gripe: Tender is presented as a single entity — no details of original publication are given, and the author’s acknowledgements page suggest that he has revised at least some of the stories for this volume — yet some later ‘chapters’ describe past events in detail more appropriate to stand-alone stories than the format of the present book.)

One of the most impressive things about Tender is the way that Mark Illis gives equal weight to all four of his protagonists. It wouldn’t be unreasonable, I don’t think, to anticipate the book to portray certain of the Daxes more fully than one or two of the others; but it’s not so — all of them feel equally rounded at all stages of their lives — even Frank, in his brief appearance. It’s fascinating to see the characters from both the inside and outside, and how they change subtly over time.

What sorts of moments, then, does Illis give us? Ali, single, dreaming of swimming the Channel and then, twenty-five years later, discovering it’s not what she hoped, and neither is her life. On holiday for the couple’s first anniversary, Bill tying himself in mental knots over what — indeed, whether — to think about the handsome American that he and Ali have met, and the pretty young woman who flirted with Bill. The teenage Sean wondering what to do with his life, and using a stray horse he comes across as a focus for his hopes. Rosa’s habit of listing three things that she’d like to happen, and how these change poignantly between the ages of thirteen, seventeen, and twenty-two.

I am not sure how well the stories in Tender would fare if read in isolation; but it hardly matters, because they’re best appreciated as a whole. One closes the book feeling that its author has observed and articulated something true about life. Well worth reading.

To take each story in turn: we begin with ‘Crooner’, in which a guitar player in Venice encounters Tony Gardner, a faded American singing star. Gardner enlists the musician to help him give one last serenade to his wife, Lindy, from whom Gardner is about to separate, despite the couple still being very much in love. I don’t follow the logic behind the separation, but this sets up one of the recurring features of the five stories: people (and especially couples) behaving in ways that don’t make much outward sense.

In ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’, the narrator, Raymond, is invited from his life as a teacher in Spain to stay with old university friends in London . The couple’s relationship is strained, but Charlie believes that if, whilst he’s away at a conference, his wife Emily spends time with Raymond (the musical connection here is that Raymond and Emily shared a love of old Broadway songs at university), she’ll stop thinking that Charlie hasn’t made much of his life, because she’ll see that Raymond has achieved so much less.

Eh? I know it takes all sorts to make a world, different people react to situations in different ways; but how many people would really stand for effectively being dismissed like that, as Raymond does? And what sort of person would come up with a scheme like that in the first place? The whole thing gets more and more farcical, as Raymond reads Emily’s diary and tries desperately to cover his tracks. The tale goes so far into absurdity that it comes out the other side and ends up strangely believable; it reminded me of Roald Dahl’s work, which is no bad thing. It’s the absurd humour that makes ‘Come Rain or Come Shine’ one of the more enjoyable stories in Nocturnes.

Next is ‘Malvern Hills’, in which a struggling guitarist leaves London for the summer to help out at his sister’s Herefordshire café. He meets a Swiss couple whose attitude seems to change with each encounter; and discovers that the relationship between his sister and her husband may be more fragile than he thought. This story highlights one of Ishiguro’s weaknesses: his five first-person narrators sound very similar, which he might just about get away with in the right circumstances; but the narrators in Nocturnes are too diverse – the voice that suits middle-aged Raymond doesn’t suit the (presumably) young guitarist, for example. Ishiguro has more success in creating the voices of characters whose first language is not English; though, admittedly, that slightly formal, awkward manner of speaking is not too much of a stretch from (what I assume to be) the author’s ‘default’ style.

In the story ‘Nocturne’, we meet Steve, a saxophonist who’s reluctantly undergoing plastic surgery at an exclusive clinic, the operation being funded by his ex-wife’s new lover (again, this does not make a lot of sense to me). We learn about his dealings with the patient next door, a recently divorced Lindy Gardner (the only character to appear in more than one of these stories). There’s one very amusing scene where Steve and Lindy are trying to return a trophy that she’s pinched to give to him; but the rest – like so much of Nocturnes – feels quite flat.

Finally, ‘Cellists’ relates (at one remove) how a jobbing European cellist met, and became mentored by, the self-proclaimed virtuoso American cellist Eloise McCormack, who never played a single note on a cello in all the time he knew her. Again, I don’t follow the reasoning behind her behaviour, such reasoning as there is.

What does Ishiguro say about music in these stories? To be honest, the presence of music seems almost incidental (pardon the pun). My best guess is that Ishiguro aims to say that a shared love of music can be the glue holding together a foundering relationship, or the only thing left after a relationship is over, and variations on that theme. In which case, fine – but one could say the same about food, or books, or gardening, or myriad other things. I gain very little sense from these tales of what is special about music specifically.

What does Ishiguro say about human beings in these stories? The problem here is that the most significant relationships in Nocturnes are being examined from the outside; the enigmatic characters whom we’d like to know more about stay enigmatic, because the narrators can see no further into their minds than we can. The blurb mentions a theme of ‘the struggle to keep alive a sense of life’s romance’; I can see this in some of the stories, but I doubt I’d have picked it out as a ‘theme’ were it not for that hint in the blurb.

It’s a strange situation when the best parts of a book are the exact opposite of its dominant mood, but such is the case with Nocturnes. I don’t know if Kazuo Ishiguro has ever written comedy, but I’d love to read the results if he did. As for this book, however… aside from the odd hilarious scene in two of the tales, my overriding impression of Nocturnes is of a collection of stories that, rather politely, don’t say or do very much.