Stories from Zoetrope, New Yorker, Missouri Review
- Exotic Animal Medicine - set in Cambridge, UK. A couple secretly marry. The wife, a vet, is called to the surgery in the evening to insert a catheter into a cat. On the way she and her husband are involved in an accident. While her husband gets help she talks to the trapped driver of the other car, chatting about exotic pets. The driver dies. They get their own car going, and continue to the surgery. Some paragraphs are from the cat's PoV.
- Art Appreciation - "The sun came through the window blinds in long tedious slats and time passed outside, far below, with the noise of the road and the joy of boys on bicycles" - a rather emotionless, calculating man decides who he's going to marry. I think the story's long for what it is.
- Mycenae - 2 couples meet in Greece after 40 years. They were students together in England. Tensions emerge. Amy asks to borrow Janet's room for an afternoon - she's met a Greek man. The couples go to Mycenae only because Janet wants to. Amy's husband collapses. It's only sunstroke. It looked worse.
- Man and Bird - Doesn't work for me. A Reverend likes his parrot too much.
- Unnecessary Gifts - Reminds me of Mark Haddon's stories (in particular "The Pier Falls") regarding how time and viewpoint switch. We're lead to believe that the narrator's young son (a friend of Tony) has died in an accident. There are strange asides - "The police report doesn't give the colour of Tony's brother's car; let's say it's blue. My first car was blue - almost navy. It shook on the highways and leaked in every kind of weather". I like it.
- These Americans Falling from the Sky - Set in Australia. Edith's a Baptist who visits narrator Nora's garden, leasing their pond to wash away their sins. Nora's father dies. Her stepfather has trouble putting together the mutilated bodies of 8 plane-crash victims because (as he later discovers) there are only 7 bodies. He's entranced by seeing US parachutists land. Later it's revealed that one is missing. Edith finds him, floating in a pool. The story grew on me.
- Rose Bay - Rose Bay, who lives in Rose Bay, Australia, is having an affair with an older married man. She's briefly visited by her mid-thirties, widowed sister and her 2 young kids. At the zoo the little sister attacks her brother for killing her imaginary friend. A cast of dancers is used to connect the themes (Rose and her lover watched them; they're at the zoo; they're leaving on the same liner to the States that her sister's leaving on)
- Violet, Violet - Chris, staying in lodgings, finally meets the man in the next room, Mr Kidd. He has a strange tale to tell about his parrot. Interesting characters, but not interesting enough given the story's length
- The Movie People - I like this. It's about what happens when a film crew who've take over a town, using the locals as extras, finally leave.
- Cara Mia - Cara (it's her PoV) is the 14 y.o. daughter of Rachel, whose new live-in boyfriend Adam is a lot younger than Rachel. Cara ends up looking after her younger siblings. Suddenly Danny, Adam's 16 y.o. sister, turns up. She's very pregnant, and rather immature compared to Rachel. There's a block of text that jumps out of the frame.
A tear oozed from Danny's left eye. Cara saw it. Ah, then Danny knew Adam might not be back soon. He was out on the road somewhere, walking away, not thinking of any of them. Cara knew he didn't think of them when he was gone. He had a smooth, untroubled mind, he liked ease and cheerful noise, and small things caught his attention: a woman walking away from church in a pair of very high heels, the line of people waiting for tables outside the Chinese restaurant, the body of a baby ibis beneath a palm tree, a man on his tiny balcony, three floors up, pouring coffee from a Turkish pot. And that would remind Adam he wanted coffee. "Please don't be angry, please, please," he begged, and Cara felt for a moment the great holy fury of her mother, the height she stood upon, how easily she was disappointed, how much she was called to forgive, and how she must be spared the noise of life, and left alone, and how she must be loved. Cara realises he's drunk and she could have sex with them, but she doesn't. She gets up and tells her mother that he's back.
- Buttony - A teacher takes her young class for for a ritualistic game, where certain kids have acquired roles. A strange piece.
- Good News for Modern Man - Dr Birch is on an island near New Zealand. He's trapped a giant squid, Mabel, in an inlet. He chats to Charles Darwin, an occasional visitor. He used to believe in God. He doesn't any more. He's been on the island over a year. He wants to go home but he wants to release Mabel first, which he can't do alone. He enlists help from the Catholic girls school where he gives talks. One of the girls is called Faith. A group of student protesters arrive. We realise the story's set in the present and Darwin's an hallucination. Birch pretends he's someone else and tells the students to look for Birch in the jungle. At the end "The girls will take hold of the net; I'll watch as they rise through the sea with it in the air. The light will billow and flare around them in the bright wind, and their hands will reach out to Heaven as if strung on trapeze wires. I'll wade through the shallows, wet to my stupid waist, then I'll kick downward and swim. Darwin will observe from the shore in his nineteenth-century socks. And Mabel will fly seaward, holy and beautiful, a bony-beaked messenger bringing no news". The use of "stupid" in the extract is odd, as are other details.
- The High Places - There's a drought. A farmer, Jack, has had to kill and bury sheep that he couldn't sell. His religious son, 16, has a fit when a strange cloud passes. Jack sleeps one night in a truck. When he wakes he's on the move - his son has loaded some sheep and is driving to sacrifice them. Jack suggests a hilltop. They reach one at nightfall and burn the sheep. Jack prays "Almightly God. Make it rain". The boy prays to be changed.
Other reviews
- Christopher Benfey (a pattern of recurrent themes: the lives we share with animals (wild, domestic and imaginary); the vagaries of religious faith; the occasions of impulse or accident when, as McFarlane says of one of her momentarily audacious characters, “another life occurred to him.” ... There is in these tales a recurrent “feeling of queasy anticipation,” ... While lesser writers use similes to render descriptions more vivid, McFarlane’s heighten aspects of her characters and advance her plots. ... My one mild complaint is that the endings of these expertly deployed stories are occasionally so open-ended that I found myself asking, What just happened? [] The enigmatic ending can itself become predictable, and I sometimes wished, with a kindred impatience, for a conclusive click of the shut box.)
- Lucy Scholes
- Rosita Sweetman (favourites are Mycenae, Good News for Modern Men, Unnecessary Gifts.)
- kirkus reviews (McFarlane writes with a deceptively plain hand, and her style gives shape to the unanswered questions of how well we can ever know each other or ourselves. What she leaves out is more telling than what she describes. It's hard to feel warmth from these stories; passions are mitigated or tamped down. But the writing is clever and skillful in spades.)
- Sian Norris (McFarlane has the trick of disconcerting her reader—in this collection characters are rarely who they first seem. Many of McFarlane’s stories deal with the terrors of childhood.)
- goodreads
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