"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.)

"Madame Zero" by Sarah Hall (Faber, 2017)

• "Mrs Fox" won the BBC National Short Story Prize. A childless wife turns into a fox. Her husband (his PoV, 3rd person) tries to keep her in the house, then lets her go. In the wild she has cubs. He visits. It's a well-written piece which doesn't stray from the course it sets off on. Fades at the end.
• "Case Study 2" - written as a report about a child brought up in an alternative life-style commune, the writer a childless woman who finds the task too much of a strain.
• "Theatre 6" - 2nd person. A female doctor has to deal with an emergency miscarriage. Lots of medical detail with geese thrown in to add a literary feel.
• "Wilderness" - I like this. A woman with her boyfriend have moved to S.Africa. With a friend of his they're having a country walk which involves a rickety bridge. She has a panic attack, and isn't happy about how the relationship's going
• "Luxury Hour" - young mother has chance meeting with ex-lover. Minor.
• "Later, His Ghost" - Post-apocalyptic. Norwich? A boy scavenges in a windswept, almost deserted city. An older woman (his ex-teacher) is staying with him, heavily pregnant. Could be the start of a novel.
• "Goodnight Nobody" - A young girl's PoV. A dog has bitten the head off an unattended baby down the road, but the main theme of the piece is the girl's growing up and her attitude to death (her mum works in a hospital mortuary). Rather long, though I liked it.
• "One in Four" - 4 pages.
• "Evie" was shortlisted in the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award. A wife experiences disinhibition especially regarding pleasure, the Chekhov gun of her husband's old single friend Richard just waiting to go off. Again, the course of the story has few surprises. Again a husband's third person PoV, and a lack of children. It turns out that she has a benign brain tumour. The change in the friendship between the husband and Richard could have been explored more, and there's scope for investigating how [temporary] personality change might affect "the self" but there's insufficient room to deal with these issues because of all the sex.

"boundary issues" are sometimes mentioned explicitly. Even when not, characters note when behaviour is unconventional. Motherhood's a theme too. Not as knock-out a collection as I was hoping for.

Other reviews

• Kate Clanchy (None of these stories offers any redemption, personal or global: instead, like “Mrs Fox”, they say bluntly, insistently, in Hall’s smooth, clear prose, “Look, this darkness is here.”)
• Lucy Scholes
• Emily Mitchell (Hall’s language is at all times remarkable, moving between evocative lyricism and cool precision as the stories demand. The collection mixes the fantastic, the speculative, and the realistic, and, in general, this works well. But the author’s forays into science fiction are not as successful as her work in other modes. ... Hall is at her best when delving into intense psychological states and powerful emotions.)
• Emily Harrison
• Rachel Swirsky (["Mrs. Fox" and "Evie"] are the strongest in the collec­tion, and most clearly underscore Hall’s recurring themes of alienation, identity, and the impossibility of truly understanding ourselves and others.)

"The Electric Michelangelo" by Sarah Hall (Faber and Faber, 2016)

Having much enjoyed her short stories I didn't expect this novel to be as much of struggle as it was to read. The main narrative voice is usually coloured by whichever character it's focussed through at any one time, but it's always wordy. The first paragraph has "If the eyes could ... If the eyes were not ... The trick of course ... The trick was ... If he kept his eyes away". The rhetoric repetition helps stoke up the story I suppose, but what about the following? - "The little smoulder gathered strength and in the strong sea breeze it spun into a persistent glut of flame. Then the fire, suddenly very confident, spread to the ground-floor ceiling of the structure and lay upside down across its rafters. The great pavilion of the Taj Mahal went up in a blaze the likes of which the town had never seen before. The golden dome of the building shone in the darkness as reddish flames leaped upwards from the wooden strutting of the deck" (p.42). "little smoulder"? "spun into a persistent glut"? "reddish"? And what about

• He also possessed a boisterous, cane-happy left arm and a good aim for catapulting loose objects from the blackboard shelf at chattering individuals, but that was by the by (p.56). Who's saying that it's "by the by"? Why "loose"?
• A man was wiping the bar down with a cloth, he nodded his head to Riley when he entered, in cursory greeting (p.71). I don't think "down with a cloth" is needed, nor "his head" or ",in cursory greeting". It's a run-on sentence too. Maybe just "A man wiping the bar nodded to Riley when he entered" would have sufficed.
• The man appeared thunderous with concentration and premeditation, as if some kind of vendetta were in operation (p.76). Is the rhyming deliberate?
• Like magic, like an illusion, or a trick of the light, or some other unspecified miracle (p.84) - why all the words?
• she arrived a week later, smelling of old lace and apprehension (p.105)
• Cy thought to himself (p.295)

We learn about the tourist trade in Morecambe, pissing contests, suffragette visits (don't know why), quicksand, a pier fire, Aurora, and the effect of the first world war. It sounds well researched. I liked the description of Riley on p.90-96, and the analysis of the tattooist-client relationship, the nature of tattooing, and the symbolism of the designs, and how they might summarise a person - "Humans had gone well beyond the red hourglass and the simplicity of natural informative markings. They had evolved, complicated life, refined it and lost touch. They had tried to push back the basics, the cruelty and poison, the seeds and urges, the nurture and beauty" (p.149). On p.140, Cy, the main character, now over 30, parentless and childless, suddenly goes to the States using a false passport. He opens a booth on Coney Island, calls himself "The Electric Michelangelo".

• For all the city's obscure adaptions and unclear reveries, for all its urban confusion and impacted allegories, Brooklyn did have one uncomplicated feature. It had purity of light (p.172)
• Coney Island, as it turned out, was Morecambe's richer, zany American relative. A fat, expensively dressed in-law with a wicked smile and the tendency, once caught up in the mood, to take things too far (p.182)
• Coney Island offered up inebriation with startling dexterity and precision and for a time it could predict the vulgar thoughts of the masses like a mind-reader, responding with tailor-made surrealities and rides which were pure stimulant (p.189)
• Coney now had all the desperation of a mistress high on some cheap substance, eager to please her lover, terrified and motivated by the knowledge that he was becoming less interested in her charms and she could no longer instinctively guess his fetish (p.194)

He has the gift of the gab now, he's even swotted up on The Dodgers. After a few years he meets Grace, who reminds him of his mother - "Grace has solemn eyes that were territorial and displaced and dark ... Her eyes said that she also arrived young in a foreign country, or on the cusp of two ages ... The eyes spoke somehow of abandonment and resolve ... They spoke of adopted parents ... They said something of failed immigration procedures" (p.214). "Her eyes, even in the inadequate light, were each a litany of struggle, strategy, and survival" (p.219). Grace wants him to tattoo eyes all over her. She thinks that "The secret was that if the city tipped just so against the light you could see a fine web between corresponding human hearts throughout it, like a spider's web ... And the beauty was, if you turned and looked behind you, perhaps you would see that you had spun a separate strand" (p.215). She has "a mind that went out like a rider on horseback to meet an enemy, both courageous and negotiating " (p.217). She plays chess. In the phrase "news of a queen's gambit broke" (p.213) I suspect "Queen sacrifice" is intended - there's nothing unusual about the Queen's gambit. It's 1940. He still has flashbacks to earlier times. They can feel rather forced - on p.293-4 the boggart and quicksand return. Only on p.231 did I realise that his mother was an abortionist. Grace tells him that in Europe Jews have numbers tattooed onto them. She asks if he's seen the work of Braque. He has. She's a victim of an acid attack done by a man who wants her skin restored to its original condition. She recovers, but it takes a while. He sees her skin grafts. He helps her to take revenge. In 1946 he returns to Morecambe, soon in decline. He resumes his profession and takes on Nina, a punk, as an apprentice.

I think some of the wordiness is sloppy, but most of it looks like a chosen style. I got used to it, though I prefer a more minimalist style.

On p.336 "unkown" looks like a typo.

Other reviews

• Jem Poster (There's evidence in the detail of the text that the novel has been edited with rather greater haste than was good for it, but this doesn't significantly affect its essential virtues)
• Kirkus Review (There is a torrent of whimsy and caressingly lyrical description, but the effect of all this poetry is not enchantment; it’s weariness. The characters are flat, the story travels far without ever really going anywhere and the occasional attempts to philosophize about tattoos are generally fatuous. A lot of flash, and not much more.)
• Michael Caines (The Electric Michelangelo is not a light-footed novel, and its imagery jangles heavily as it plods through the years in chronological order)
• Peter Mathews (The plot itself is linear and curiously pedestrian ... Hall ... is monotone in her heavy-handed attempt to generate meaning in her novel. Her metaphors are clumsy and unsophisticated, ... Even more questionable is Hall’s decision to engage with history in her novel. The vague references to the Renaissance, especially to Michelangelo, are so shallow as to be laughable)

"The Beautiful Indifference" by Sarah Hall (Faber, 2011)

"one of the greatest writers of her generation", says the blurb. She certainly knows how to spin a literary yarn - the interspersed details are sharp, the progression and surprise of the characters' thoughts are persuasive. She may be best known as a novelist, but the craft of short story writing is evident here.

The main characters in this book are all female (teenage to middle-age) and articulate. They often display body/emotion splits mediated by animals. The characters are (or will be) unhappy, or someone dies. The themes don't vary that much - life boils down to love and death with a bit of sex in between (the blurb describes the writing as "deeply erotic". I think not). The women don't internally change much during the stories. Instead they come to terms with their situation, begin to live the way they (secretly or otherwise) think. There are few similes. Animals and water are used as key symbols.

In "Butcher's Perfume", Kathleen is friends with Manda from a physical (even rough) family who work with horses. Kathleen's mother is dead. Her father's rather passive. Manda's parents run the family. Kathleen observes them with interest. In a barn, Kathleen sees a horse that's endured long-term mistreatment. She fetches Manda's brother who thinks Kathleen wants sex with him. When he sees the horse he freaks, and gets his brothers to help him maim the horse's owner. At the end we're told that Manda's mother has called her new pony "Sweet Kathleen".

"The Beautiful Indifference" features a female author awaiting her male lover in a place like York for a weekend break. She doesn't like reading fiction. She's reading a book about modern protheses, those which can be directly controlled by the mind. Her lover's a doctor who helped amputate a leg recently, but the patient died. In the street a horse breaks free of its carriage, running away. The lover helps the injured driver who may have a broken hip. The driver seems more concerned about the horse than himself. We learn that the lover's maybe 20 years younger than the woman, that she's childless (maybe barren), that her married friends think she's taken the easy option. He leaves, she drives homeward. In the middle of the countryside she stops. She has 3 packs of painkillers in her purse. We learn that her mother killed herself at the main character's age. At the end "The hills were around her. She took up her purse, opened the car door and stepped into them. it was like opening a book"

This story has the most mind/body references - runaway horse vs rider; city vs countryside; protheses; her physical enjoyment of life vs her suddenly revealed unhappiness.

"Bees" is in the 2nd person and alternates between 2 strands. In one the main character finds dead insects on her lawn. A bee on her palm is like "Teasel. Half-burnt paper". She wonders what killed them. In the other thread we learn how she escaped from a marriage that included domestic violence. At the end she's in the garden with a fearless fox that "follows the heavy, resinous flight of a bee. It is a candid little hunter. It crouches for a moment, then springs up on its back legs. The jaws open and snap shut, and as it lands it shakes its red head furiously" Pain? Revenge?

In "The Agency" a bored mother of two young childen mixes with the older, well-to-do women of the area. She finds out about "The Agency". Our guesses about what it is are confirmed when at the end she's returning from hotel sex and meets a friend who seems to know what she's been up to. The weakest of the pieces.

"She Murdered mortal He" - On an African holiday a couple have argued. The woman walks off along a beach. A stray dog follows her. At the next village she shoos it away, stops for a beer, decides that they're going to break up. As she starts walking back the dog rejoins her. There's blood around its mouth. At the base of a cliff the waves are surging, covering the beach. The dog goes no further but she makes it through, soaked to the waist. When she returns to the holiday complex in the jungle she finds that her partner's been taken to hospital, a tendon bitten through. She asks "What was it? Was it a leopard?" "No", one of the workers tells her, "There are no leopards". The dog is her familiar. It does what her own body can't do. It's the body that takes revenge, the body that decides.

In "The Nightlong River" nature's showing signs of a cold winter ahead. Magda, Dolly's friend, is ill. Because of the weather, minks invade from the North, living by the river, killing for the sake of it. There's a cull. The main character's involved - "the night welcomed me, gave me senses. I was struck by the ability of the river to ferry odours on its back. It seemed to enhance everything it touched" (p.160). Dolly collects the skins, makes a cape for Magda. There are record snowfalls, the premonitions were true - "I remembered the lavish berries in the autumn hedgerows and thought of those telltale stains on her petties". Magda dies in May, buried with her cape. After, "night after night I dreamed of the river. I dream it now: a river of stolen perfumes, winding its way through our reverse Eden" (p.166). Life goes on, the river keeps flowing.

"Vuotjärvi" - A couple are staying by a lake. The water's red, nearly body temperature with mysterious depths. Her lover decides to swim to an island an hour away. She worries about him, wants to commit herself to him, decides to set off in a rowing boat, but when the boat starts to sink she heads back - to the nearest point of the coast if not their rented cottage. Water takes them both over.

Other Reviews

• Elizabeth Baines
• Justine Gordon (Guardian)
• Jodie Mullish (Telegraph)
• Bookmunch
• Pam Norfolk (Beverley Guardian)
• Performative utterance
• Sarah Hall (New Welsh Review)
• Leyla Sanai (Independent)