"Best British Short Stories 2023" by Nicholas Royle (ed) (Salt, 2023)

Stories from books and magazines. The magazine list - Tate etc, Extra Teeth (2), Fictive Dream, Personal Beasts Journal, Granta, Lunate, London Magazine, Soanyway - includes a few I've not heard of.

In his wide-ranging introduction, Royle writes that he doesn't like the term Flash Fiction - "it's such an awful term, which has somehow taken hold and spread, like dry rot ... the very nature of the term, with its implications of speed and ephemerality, is, I think, unhelpful ... I do recognise that I have a bee in my bonnet about this". He also quotes from Philip Stevick's "Against Subject: fiction in search of something to be about" - "Is it possible to have a fiction that is coherent on its own terms but so tentative and exploratory that its writer seems never entirely clear what its centre is, not even at its end?"

• Islands - The life of a woman born on an island of breadfruit and callaloo who moved to the UK to marry and have 3 kids, become a nurse. One grandson was interested in her island. He flew there, found gravestones and a few remaining relatives. So the story must have been selected for the style - there are many short (often one word) paragraphs, with empty lines between paragraphs. No.
• The Lowing - Only 3 pages. "It was only a short walk from the farmhouse to the barn" appears 6 times, for reasons that become clearer. Yes.
• The Statistics Revolution - Only 5 pages. A class of med students play a joke on their stats lecturer. No.
• The Incorruptable - 5 pages about the last days of Robespierre by the women who thought she was his de facto wife. No.
• Somewhere out there west of Thetford - A man living in a caravan park starts doing little favours for defiant, old Mrs Grote, a neighbour, a loner. Her unfriendly, rarely seen daughter's a barmaid in nearby Brandon. When Mrs Grote dies, he finds £1200 in a bag in her caravan. He throws it away. Atmospheric, with interesting characters but an unsatisfyingly predictable end.
• The Nights - Jean (lone sheep farmer), Claire (single mother) and Anna (secretly out with boyfriend) take turns at being PoV. Night in a rural setting. Lights, then bangs. At the end the omniscient narrator tells us about the hunter. We presume the corpses are animals.
• Elephant - 1st-person PoV is Coco, a servant. When Lord Dallows dies he leaves everything to his son, Edward, who's not been seen for years and who is now an elephant. The Lord's daughter Cynthia is a married nymphomaniac. Edward returns, and the house is adapted for him. A herd of elephants roams the grounds. The family make it into a money-earning Safari Park. Coco becomes his companion, rides on him, stays out at night with him. At the end he takes Coco to a ridge where his looks down at a thousand fires - his people. Yes.
• Chimera - 3 pages. "You" and "She" visit a basement bar. All life is there. Suddenly they return home where "your" parents are soon due back. The 2 characters are aspects of 1?
• The Clearance - A thoughtful estate agent is selling a house that relatives are emptying. Long, multi-claused sentences. “Some rain falls. The way it so evenly covers the patio is a wonder, a splendour even, he thinks, to an estate agent who has seen so many patios, so many wonders”. I liked it though it took some getting used to.
• The thinker - About 5 pages. A man takes over upkeep of a caged human when a friend dies. He breaks into the deceased man’s house and things get stranger. Yes.
• Middle ground - Brighton, 11, is a schoolgirl. She and friends use primroses for devination. Foregrounds are easy. Backgrounds are harder to comprehend. She walks with a boy. She sees what older girls are like. She begins to take chances. She’s not scared because it’s her choice. Feels like an extract.
• Still life - A man wakes. He’s another thinker. “I try to isolate this moment as a specific event, something with a clear beginning and end so it’s easier to understand, when really everything organised itself so gradually that I’m still only approaching the reality of how things were all these years later”. His partner stops paying the rent, but still uses the place like a girlfriend might, visiting while he's away. He empties the place, dispersing the contents around London.
• When we went gallivanting - Richie's in a tower block when it starts walking. A committee is set up to manage food and power. Big brash Athena Righteous-Fury continues giving swimming lessons (with benefits) in her bathroom. The tower block reaches the sea. She teaches Richie to swim in 15 mins. Yes.
• Qx - Less than 4 pages. A book-lover buys another old copy of a novel where chess pieces come alive. In a cafe he sees a woman beating a man at chess. She leads him out. A slip of paper with "Qx [something]" falls from the book. I know "Qx" means "Queen takes" but I don't get the ending, beyond the obvious.
• The Beard - Leading males in a Muslim state disappear from public view when they turn into women. Their beards drop off and collect in wind, ending up as a bundle in the square. A woman sets the bundle alight. I think more could have been made of the interesting idea/satire.
• The slime factory - It's the 2030s. London's flooded. Nesterov, a billionnaire thanks to exploiting the computing power of slime mould, disappears from view. The narrator's a journalist. His biotech girlfriend goes to work at Nesterov's secret lab. 7 years later she contacts him saying she's worried that a colleague, Thomas, has disappeared. The narrator finds that the colleague is being disappeared from the WWW. Nesterov suddenly re-appears, fat and bold, inviting people to a launch. The narrator goes. Nesterov's created in Gloucestershire a retro landscape of windmills and Morris dancers. He says that mankind took a wrong turn in the neolithic, turning against nature. He presents his idea of the future - an organic train. It has a face - the face of the lost colleague. A year later there's a new train with his ex-girlfriend's face.
• Bonsoir (after Ithell Colquhoun) - Less than 5 pages. I don't get it.
• Common Ground - I think Royle often likes Alison Moore's stories. I don't think this is one of her best.
• The Bull - Someone leaves a wake and walks where they walked with their father long ago - "How did I become this person and not another?" they ask themselves. They'd found a shed/container which they'd thought empty but when the father lifted the child up to see through the grill, there was a bull. We're dripfed with info. The person is female, Chloe. The father stopped work after a colleague died and left the family when Chloe was 13. He had anger issues. She feels she's always resembled him. She's become a men's barber. The last time she saw him he'd come in and asked for a mohawk. Only now are we told that "In his septum he wore the silver ring that he'd worn ever since I could remember" (ah, like a bull). She has "dark ink and fine white scars" on her arms, piercings in lip and eyebrows. She reaches the ruined shed and the story ends - "Tears pricked my eyes, as the hot stink of a huge animal swelled around me. Then, with the roar of great bellows, the darkness began to breathe"
• Tinhead - Nearly 30 pages long - easily the longest piece. Anecdotes and reflections. Rafi, recently moved to Manchester, not far from where he grew up, goes to buy boots for a walk when Darren, from his home village of Hayfield, sees him. Darren tells him about the village deaths and criminals. Rick Tinsley - Tinhead - leapt off a bridge and died. Rafi thought him an intellectual - in spirit anyway. He performed that social role at a village level. Thanks to Tinhead, Rafi had escaped the small-minded village. He thinks that what saved him from Tinhead's fate was that he grew up in a home with books. He'd offered Tinhead his "Nausea" novel which he'd refused. Rafi visits the suicide scene then drives on to Hayfield. His parents had moved there from Manchester. He chats to Tinhead's brother in a pub, fearing he might turn violent. We learn that Rafi had been to Oxford Uni to do a Ph.D but had to quit. Mental breakdown. Later, back home, he thinks he was never of the village - he "he had learned to live in a state of alienation from myself and others".

What you rarely get in these Royle anthologies are New Yorker stories (or Alice Munro stories) where people in normal enough situations deal with what life throws at them.

Other reviews

• Kim Wiltshire (There are clear themes that run through the collection: concerns about the world we live in, and where it is heading, alongside the loneliness of life for so many.)