A series of nonlinear short stories mingled with a few poems.
Apart from the first story, ‘Cousin Sheila’s Money’, the stories are told from a variety of perspectives which make up the narrative when pieced together. This allows the possibility of unreliable narrators which is seen most clearly in the story 'He Fell and Stumbled'. Here accounts of a violent assault are remembered differently by the victim, by the man jailed for the assault, by another man involved and by an onlooker. Other details are also inconsistent, for example the location of the skateboarder's piercing.
This technique of the creation of a mosaic of monologues is also seen in:
- Belgium, about a man who has oesophageal cancer
- The Waiting Room, which concerns characters in a doctor's waiting room and the mysterious man whom they all half-recognise
- The Greyhound Murder, featuring a very strange half-naked man with devilish characteristics
- An Unimportant Story, one line of which links to 'Belgium'.
Most of these are written in simple declarative sentences which explore the character's interiority. In most cases, these inner thoughts are well-structured, although there is considerable use of repetition in 'An Unimportant Story'.
'Colours' is quite different. Here there is only one character narrating although she seems to have different moods which are characterised by different colours. Her thoughts come in an unpunctuated cascade of words and this gave a feeling that she has an intellectual or emotional disability; in the 'red' section she considers killing her mother. It reminded me of the first section of 'The Sound and the Fury' by William Faulkner, although Picot's version was more controlled and easier to decipher.
The collection also includes a few poems, of which my favourite was 'Heron'
Selected quotes:
- “Sometimes it’s as if Jamie really was stuck in Belgium and I was on a boat watching him dwindle into the distance.” (Belgium)
- “Shining golden bubbles forming a chain connecting you to the surface where it's still bright. You have to drag them in through this big heavy thing in your mouth and push them back out again ... It's like dragging a bright chain through a rusty hole and then pushing it back out.” (Belgium)
- “You look at the clock, and it’s eleven. Or you look at the calendar, and it’s March. Or you look at your life, and you’re middle-aged.” (Waiting Room)
- “Time is your currency. You don’t experience it, you spend it.” (Waiting Room)
- “You’re waiting for something to happen. You don’t know what, but something. This isn’t your real life. Your real life hasn’t begun yet. You’re waiting for it to begin.” (Waiting Room)
- “We all lose our way sooner or later. The world gets too complicated, and we lose our way in the tangles. But the river goes on forever, pouring itself out.” (An Unimportant Story)
- “On the way back from London the train slowed and stopped in the middle of nowhere. They do that sometimes. Outside the window was a bank of brambles, half of them grey and lifeless, the other half tinged with red and starting to bud. There was a kind of architectural quality to them: the pattern they made was infinitely dense and complex, like strap work in the Book of Kells, but because it was early in the year and they weren't yet covered in leaves, you could see that basically it was just an arrangement of arches, arches of many different sizes, criss-crossing each other over and over again.” (An Unimportant Story)
- “The two dragons on it are circling around a pearl, or a disc, or perhaps it's meant to be the sun. I'm afraid I really don't know what they're circling around, perhaps it's an egg, but it gives them their pattern. Do you see what I mean?” (An Unimportant Story)
- “Grey scholar stooped over/ this rippled sheet, scrutinizing watermarks.” (Heron)
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