"Subjunctive Moods" by C.G. Menon (Dahlia Publishing, 2018)

Stories from Bare Fiction, Bridport Anthology, Lonely Crowd, etc. Several competition successes too.

Language

I took a while getting used to the language. It's not pared down in the standard way, the way I've been dutifully employing for years. Adjectives and metaphors abound. They often impress, but they can also collide, repeat, puzzle, or crowd out the meaning. Inanimate objects and substances are imbued with spirit. Light is especially lively -

• "a brassy light slaps the leaves awake" (p.7)
• "The sunlight was filmy, filtering through an immense cloud of mosquitoes that boiled above the patient hills" (p.28) - filmy? patient?
• "Pale spring light filters over the grassy hills to drip onto the hospital" (p.65) - more filtering
• "a gritty dawn banged its teeth against the windows" (p.114)
• "Light puddles out from the hotel" (p.162), "I walk up the crooked path, puddled with light" (p.165) - from the same story, same narrator - which is fair enough.

Here are some other fragments that caught my eye -

• "Dilip grunts with satisfaction as he glides the car into a painted parking space. It's the sort of arrangement he likes; everything laid out with the crusts cut off. Inside there's a hygienic lobby, sliced from the garden by tinted glass" (p.3)
• "There's a faint edge of irritation in her voice, a flicker of pity at the end. She'd rather I answered back, presented a smaller target. Covering so much ground isn't fair on her" (p.17)
• "The verandah gate opens and a bearded fleet of uncles and uncles-by-marriage begin to steam up like full-bellied sailing ships" (p.34) - steam or sail?
• "I'm too old for playing games, the tin of Pledge tells me, and the dust-rag adds that I'm certainly old enough to know better. It's only a favour, I insist, and the room pulls itself together a little, clicks its heels" (p.57)
• "The nurse had booked me in with a cool, watery interest that muscled its way through all my good manners" (p.66) - a cool, watery interest that muscled?
• "A trickle of customers spill out onto the road" (p.70) - a trickle that spills?
• "We'd driven through outer suburbs barnacled with hardware stores and retail parks" (p.76) - "barnacled" is more effective for the small stores than the expanses of retail parks
• "Next to Robert I felt prissy, felt soaped and civilised ... He called me Net instead of Annetta, as though I were a trap spread out to catch him ... I could hear a hiss of steam and muffled, sudsy clatter ... Robert climbed the stairs, landing a jolly, smacking kiss on her slipping smile ... a sort of soaped-clean sickness ... I could see myself in the filmy shadows of a mirror, trembling with a jellyfish frailty ... Marie's onions rolled in the sink like lifebuoys ... Robert and Marie adrift on their little raft of light" (p.76-78) ... "when I was first married and beached safe on the sands of my own life." (p.86) - here the imagery conforms to themes (soap, sea) that aren't related to the Australian setting. "filmy" reappears here. It still puzzles me. "sodden clatter" is on p.120.
• "Market women trudged across it with baskets balanced on their heads and worries nailed to their feet, while schoolboys skimmed back and forth in ragged clumps like swallows" (p.90) - nailed? I can imagine swallows skimming, but not in ragged clumps. Are the boys in rags? I doubt it.
• "It's clean up on those heights. Clean as things that laugh in the night, clean as riddles on an empty hillside, clean as blood on a stone" (p.97) - it's hard getting blood from a stone, easy to clean it off
• "with a make-no-mistake air" (p.114), "a lordly welcome-to-you-all air" (p.116), "in a stretched, make-the-best-of-it way" (p.118) - these all appear in one story with one narrator, which is ok.
• "The curtains were pulled back when I woke again, letting in a shivering daylight. Outside I could see our greyish pocket of lawn licked with frost" (p.116) - shivering daylight? Heat haze? No. And is the "I" outside or the lawn, or both? A pocket is licked?
• "I could see a gleam of a single red stone in her ear. It gave her a lopsided, awkward look, like a bird caught by the leg" (p.121) - that's effective
• "bone-cold water" (p.121) - bones' dryness is usually remarked upon.
• "a smile tucked in at the edges of her round blue eyes" (p.122), "her smile locked, settling taut and wedged beneath her cheekbone" (p.125), "smiles tucked into cheeks" (p.146) - from two stories
• "Annie beats the disapproving wings of her shawl" (p.161), "Her talons cut off my unasked questions" (p.165) - the story contains many birds. The first extract here works for me. The second is more problematic - I think of talons as feet

I suspect I was more distracted by the language than other readers will be.

The rest

I liked the variety of the plots and kept wanting to read on. The tendency towards lyrical, unresolved endings is one I sympathize with. First, some summaries -

• The Ampang Line - A man and a young woman visit their old house, now a hotel. She's beginning to think their relationship won't last (online as Skin deep)
• Subjunctive Moods - A Russian girl, Katya, stays on an exchange visit with a family that includes Sara, who has an eating disorder. She makes Katya move to another family. She thinks she sees Katya for years afterwards in the press, etc.
• Aunty - Leila's ghost haunts, is accused of playing tricks. They should have put her ashes in a better container. Stories about her emerge, are cross-checked. Coincidentally things improve when the ashes are transferred from an ice-cream tub to a glass bottle.
• Watermelon Seeds - An adolescent girl has her first crush on a boy, which causes her to ditch her close female friend, Peony, giving up her role in the school play that she and Peony had rehearsed. Later she moves to the UK and marries. Many years later she'll watch a Cantonese film, but the heroine will never be Peony and besides, she won't understand a word.
• So Long, So Long - Arjun, a hen-pecked doctor whose career has plateaud, sees an escaped prisoner through a window, and decides to escape himself, even if it's only a token rebellion. First he has to accept the loss of his "little god" self image.
• For you are Julia - After a 30 year marriage a woman meets an old flame in Grantchester. He asks her to leave the country with him. She says no, with regret
• Clay for Bones - Another cremated ancestor speaks, first re-appearing when the protagonist miscarriaged. Now she's having another scan. She watches a girl set free a chick. She finds someone's lost ball and takes it home.
• The Name of Things - A female student visits West Australia, stays with a couple who seem to be having difficulties. There are some awkward moments. The husband seems interested in her. She hears later that the wife dies
• Dust and Spices - A boy thinks he's in an old photo. His father recalls doing the same. On a train they stop at the station where the father's father was born. Here's the ending - "The sun slants flat through the carriage and our shadows stretch out along the ground until they're so tall, as tall as our fathers, but nobody gets out and the train begins to pull away"
• Foxgloves - Tracey (single mother) wants to call her new baby Merlin. Sandra, her social worker, tries talking her out of it. Her first child is already in foster care because Tracey liked going out too much. She expects this new baby to be taken away too, somewhere. The ending is "She'll keep watch all her life, while the nights fall and the years rush past, while the foxgloves shake and she slowly grows old"
• I See You in Triplicate - Domestic things remind Caroline of her ex. She meets Ros at Spanish class, hoping that this new friendship will help.
• Peacocks - Young Asha bought expensive earrings for her grandmother, who she thinks was a princess back in India, living in a palace. At the end Asha's mother tells her "It was just like here".
• Daylight Saving - In the extra hour when clocks go back, Sarah writes letters to her ex, Colin. She doesn't send them. She's friends with Colin's wife, Amber, who says that she and Colin made love in that extra hour. Sarah uses the letters to make Amber think that Colin's having an affair with her.
• Farne Island - 2 widows on holiday watch a younger, newly married couple at a nearby restaurant table. Had one of the husband's been unfaithful? The ending is "'I'm sorry, dear,' she murmured instead, and thought hard and brightly about details, about packing and timetables and fog rolling past the Farne Islands to a limitless sea"
• Seascapes - An old, confused woman (originally from Madras?) married to Bill suddenly takes a bus trip to visit a cairn near Middlesborough to deal with the past
• Rock Pools - A woman living by the sea separated from her bird-expert husband soon after the marriage, though he returns yearly for work reasons. This will be his last visit. Lots of bird imagery. Towards the end there's "Jon observes my migration patterns from the living room to the kitchen. I'm being driven by hunger and silence"

There's often a symbolic sub-plot that a lyrical ending returns to. Several stories feature contrasting cultures or life-styles, the protagonist conflicted. Coming to terms with the past (which may have been in another country) is an abiding problem, objectified as wondering how to deal with grandparents - even cremated, they don't go away. Ghosts/ashes features in at least 4 stories. Dealing with the ashes (the right container; the right way to scatter them) matters. In "Subjunctive Moods", "Foxgloves" and "I See You in Triplicate" a person from the past persists as a source of memories or mistaken identity. And there's quite a lot of infidelity too.

I wasn't keen on "For You are Julia", "Clay for Bones" or "The Name of Things". I liked the ending of "I see you in triplicate" and of "Peacocks". I liked the idea of how the extra hour was differently used in "Daylight Savings", though the plot's unconvincing. I liked "Farne Island" most.

Other reviews

• an interview
• Melissa Fu (The collection is a masterclass, showcasing the many elements of a successful short story. ... The initial stories establish a wide geographic and thematic scope ... I found the later stories in the collection to be more subtle, slightly quieter [] By that time, Menon’s writing had earned my trust and I was willing to work a little harder for more complex meanings to arise. )
• Peter Gordon (A detour or two to someplace like Australia aside, the stories are more or less evenly divided between a mostly Indian Malaysia and a musty England; she seems equally at home in either … Menon’s talent is best illustrated when she takes England, Malaysia and India and gives them a mix, as in the book’s virtuoso lead paragraph … in them all, the protagonist has somewhat out of sync with her (and it is usually, but not always, her) situation: hoping that that things aren’t quite the way they seem, or are. “If life were different …”, but it isn’t.)
• Jacci Gooding (CG Menon explores love in all its guises: unrequited love, true love, self-love as well as self-loathing and loss, through different cultures and across cultures, in a way that speaks to every reader. ... Much of Menon’s writing is poetic, with worlds and emotions understated and beautifully constructed.)