"Sudden Traveller" by Sarah Hall (Faber and Faber, 2020)

Stories from T magazine (New York Times), the BBC etc.

• M - A slow start. A women whose work involves trying to stop a women's refuge being demolished for redevelopment has been having strange pains. She splits with her boyfriend. One night she can't help going to her window. She sprouts wings and flies. She feeds on sleepers, "the product taken out by the tongue's long catheter ... she never visits the same woman twice". Vulnerable, abused women. Also disabled and mentally unwell ones. "And at the end, in the flare of dawn before she gets back to the tower, the whole embryonic mass is ejected from her mouth, like a senator's feast". She kills a rapist on the grounds that "why not remove one to prevent ten". She flies over deserts - seeking the man whose money is behind the redevelopment? She thinks it all wouldn't have happened had she not been abused as a child - "We'll do that again tomorrow, shall we, before Mummy gets back home?". Some of the language is rich - "The trees are black and stiff as railings. Long, productive darkness, but at dawn, and in twilight hours, there are great studios of teal above the city" - and some is rather obscure - "Fission's nocturne: it is painless now, a habit. Scars develop on her back, faint cords of white and grey. Near her shoulder is a small dry hole, incomplete closure, insignificant, but these are the scales. For advance, for primacy: a levelling. Mutability. Glory. Brevity.". She goes back to see her childhood village, her abuser. I don't understand the ending.
• The woman the book read - In a Turkish sea-side town a man awaits his business partner in a cafe. He sees a girl go by, someone he knew years ago for a year. She's with another woman. Should he approach her? He doesn't. Details are fuzzy. I think he might have wanted to marry her mother Catherine but she died in an accident? He has no wife or kids. It looks like the girl's a lesbian. It didn't work for me.
• The Grotesques - Cambridge. On her way back from shopping for mum, Dilly sees a famous tramp (allegedly a genius once) on his back, his face covered in fruit like an Archimboldo - a student prank? He wakes and she carries on. There'll be a party with scones because it's her birthday. She thinks her boyfriend Sam won't be there - maybe it's over. She recalls comforting Rebecca (upset about her baby) telling her that Peter (Dilly's older brother) really does care. She's been to a therapist. She'd like to tell the story about the tramp but overthinks, worries about her delivery, etc. It's an awkward social gathering - family members with secrets, a priest, a potential employer. A late guest arrives saying that a body's been found in the Cam. "She already knew everything, could see the body laid out on the towpath ... and the face underneath, so peaceful and untormented, was hers"
• Who pays? - There's a wood with the first trees of the world. In its middle is an ancient well. Young men celebrate there twice a year. Sometimes young women too. This time when the men go, a lamb is killed. Beer is put in a sack and dripped down a well, but the knot slips. A man who'll host the celebrations next year is lowered down, but the rope breaks. The women are at home around a table, a coil of good rope in front of them. At the end in the well there's "Water, come from the past, in one form or another, rain, river, sea, thoughts like tears in clouds, as old as it is new, designed to serve no purpose other than its future"
• Orton - An old widow with an implant (like a pacemaker but more crucial?) that she can turn off returns to Orton after 54 years, where on her first date with her husband-to-be they had outdoor sex. She turns off the implant and sits on a bench, waiting to die. I'm not impressed.
• Sudden Traveller - 2nd person. It's been raining. The graveyard's flooded. The rest of the family (brothers and father, each trying to cope in their own way) are trying to get the grave ready for the mother's funeral the next day while a suckling mother's in a car. She had visited her mother at her hospital deathbed with the child. "You are so tired there are moments you are not sure if you are awake any more. It feels like those early newborn days, the fugue state of new motherhood ... What you sense is mutability, the selves within the self. The terror of being taken, ahead, into sheer darkness ... We are, all of us, sudden travellers in the world, blind, passing each other, reaching out, missing, sometimes taking hold. But, sooner than you think, after this flood, after the darkness, the loss, the loneliness, someone is going to take your hand and tell a story". She repeatedly compares being a new mother with having a dying mother - "It has occurred to you that you have been neither a very good mother nor a very good daughter over the past year. Caught between two extreme experiences, incoming and outgoing, to put it bluntly, you felt some kind of internal paralysis ... you can't say that you felt truly present, or receptive, or mindful. Where were you? There but not there. Waiting for something to change.".
• Live that you may live - A mother's woken in the night by her daughter who says there's a bird in her bed. The mother settles her back to sleep, thinking "She is already quarry, already hunting reason, lost between imagined worlds./ So the artists make us. So the artists promise./ But I made her". The mother imagines a story about birds carrying a girl away on her bed to a part-mythical place. She tried to walk home - "followed the red throne of the setting sun", sleeping in many beds from magic realism, etc. She "Forgot the name of her mother. She drew no face in the river. She believed only in living, believed in very breath, except the last.". Her daughter whispers "Mummy, tell me" but she's already sleeping. The mother realises that the daughter is "of what I cannot know. Unmade. Ready" and that the birds are coming.

When I read "The Beautiful Indifference" I thought Sarah Hall would become one of my favourite writers. One way and another I've been disappointed by the books of hers I've since read. This book has some plain stories, and some stories with good paragraph or pages. The title story has tear-jerking components (dying women visited by little grandson who's weaned on the day of her funeral) and symbolic weather. I like the "sudden traveller" idea, but I don't think the story adds enough to its ingredients.

Other reviews

• Kate Clanchy (The [second] story is, by Hall’s standards, downright soothing. A man in a Turkish resort follows a young woman and recognises in her the child that he once knew. The landscape is full of light and beautifully realised, but tension is lacking ... Hall is at her best when she lets her stories displace us in time; when they reveal gaps, not connections, between people. “The Grotesques”, for instance, makes magnificent play of a mother who fails to let her daughter tell her own story ... It is not comfortable on this edge, and it is easy to understand why Hall has retreated from it a little. Harsh as it may be, though, I can’t help but hope that this exceptional writer will go back to that verge soon.)
• Hannah Beckerman (As the title suggests, all the characters in Sudden Traveller are journeying towards something both unknowable and yet inevitable)
• Goodreads
• Roger Cox ([In "Orton"] Hall’s writing is so subtle that you reach the end of the story with an incredibly rich sense of who this woman is, and yet no idea where that sense came from. It’s only when you go over the text again that you pick up the small-but-telling asides that make up the mosaic of her character)
• Radhika’s Reading Retreat (In ‘The Grotesques’, Hall has brilliantly conveyed the sense of claustrophobia in close family settings. ... Sex and eroticism is an element that is vital to Hall’s writing. ... The title story ‘Sudden Traveller’, which to me is the highlight of the collection, is a beautiful meditation on death, loss and grief. ... A lot of the characters in these stories witness a big change or are thrust into situations suddenly and are compelled to survive and make best of the situation. )
• ramblingsofanobody (Hall expertly builds character without resorting to explicit description, and allows us to feel we know far more about the characters than you’d expect in short form.)