Stories from BBC, Short Fiction, etc. Several commissioned pieces.
- In "The Thaw", set in 20s Canada(?) 29 year old Marjorie is at a ball when the black double-bassist asks her for a dance. She says yes. The floor empties. William - 50, married, funeral director, gambler - defuses the situation by asking if he could take over dancing with her. The friends who gave her a lift to the dance refuse to give her a life home. He drives her across the frozen estuary. The ice breaks and she dies. Lots of detail.
- "Solo, a cappella" - A boy (18, his first-person PoV) and girl (15, studious) both black, live in Tottenham. They decide to meet on a night of riots and looting, but they never meet. After, she disappears (maybe because her parents are illegal immigrants and a video of her sparking the riot goes viral). The language is mostly black/London - “Just the fact that she wanted me to know how to say her name made me high with hope. … They had the Feds under manners. On smash. On lock”
- In "The Heart of Dennis Noble", heart-themed scenes from the London life of Denis (a heart surgeon; father a taylor) are interlaced with the narrative of his heart transplant. He recalls his lover who was attending the Lady Chatterly's Lover trials while he was using an early computer to analyse heart beating. They talk about wholeness and the location of love. Thanks to a dream he has a breakthrough. He survives the operation and decides to live more dangerously with the help of his family.
- "Sylvia wears pink in the underworld" is an article about visiting Plath's grave and reading "Birthday Letters". The narrator too needed to adapt to UK conditions. Colourful (flowery?) language - "At the village's heart, the soot-dark ginnels and archways still remember an emptiness - a wind-shot summit, the strange glow of moorland - while at the edge, the trees won't grow upright. They know the truth, as do the drystone walls that tremble at the lure of gravity"
- "There are precious things" - a sequence of points-of-view of people in a tube. A mother, a nun, builders, a chorist, etc. At the end a racist argument breaks out and voices mingle.
- "Oscillate Wildly" - Liam, 52, on his deathbed in his house with family and lover, recalls his Irish upbringing, his French mother dying when he was 15, the visit to his French uncle who looked after a Paris cemetary, who had the severed genitalia of the angel on Oscar Wilde's tomb. Liam inherited the genitalia, had to leave for London during the Troubles because of a death threat, hears The Smiths "Oscillate Wildy" through the wall. In the final paragraph the events are recapitulated. He imagines the genitalia returned to the angel and the angel flying away.
- "Dreaming Diana: Twelve frames" - A personal essay, including 4 photos of a day when Princess Di visited her town. Public image and reality are compared. Later, 6 years into marriage, the narrator wonders what's up with her relationship. Appearances are deceptive. She reads about Di and Dodi Fayed, hears how her mother in law had advised the narrator's husband to marry a friend, because love will come. Perhaps the narrator, like Di, was never loved. She lists some reactions to Di's death - the suicides. A friend described the narrator's marriage as a "slow car crash". She goes to London on the funeral day, buys flowers. Later she looks through the CCTV footage of Di's last hours, imagines Di's thoughts in the final minutes.
- "In praise of radical fish" - Humourous. 3 budding fundamentalists from Peterborough are waiting for the call to action on a burner. Meanwhile, they visit Brighton, hardening themselves against earthly delights. They are questioned by the police for lurking at the nudist beach, waiting for the young women who never come. At the Aquarium the narrator experiences beauty. The call comes through. They ignore it.
- "Imagining Chekhov
- "Woman with little pug" - A 50 y.o. husband alone in Brighton chats up a women using her dog as an excuse. The women (a wife) locks the dog in her hotel room while they take a walk. When they return to make love the dog has gone. The man says it never existed. It was only ever a device. "All the lights on the Pier had gone out. Even the full moon had been extinguished from the fictive sky."
- "Chekhov's telescope" - A steamer has run aground only metres from Yalta ("the new Russian Brighton"). On it, Chekhov gives Olga a telescope. Through it she can see the past, an orchard, the manuscript he's working on. Once ashore they try to continue their relationship not realising that a journalist is spying on them.
- "The death of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov" - It begins with "Omniscience is, admittedly, a dubious gift". He sees things he rather wouldn't.
- "How to make a citizen's arrest" - A woman grabs a man's hand in a deserted London street - a famously nice man whose house has a 24-hour guard. He just popped out to Waitrose. She ties herself to him. They sit in a caff. She explains that he saw her with wife Cherie years before. She criticises his Iraq War decision. She says he isn't trying to escape because he wants to confess. They pop into a church, light votive candles. She video-chats to her little niece Evie 4,000 miles away (Quebec?). The niece tele-transports into the woman's arms. A helicopter hovers over the church. Evie fears suicide bombers. The woman and man exit the church and meet the police.
- "We are methodists" - I've read this before, in "The Best British Short Stories 2018". I liked it then and still like it. A divorcee (history lecturer) who's moved into a house near Brighton (an ex-chapel) has the help of 40-ish workman Toby, an ex-commando (captured in Iraq). He has kids, a young 2nd wife and a fishing boat. He has a busy life and envies her loneliness. He secretly fishes. His wife thinks he might be having an affair. Sand drifts under her door in the night
- "all the beloved ghosts" - Angelina Garnett, a confused old (90-ish) woman whose memories superimpose onto the present, is helped from her old kitchen at Charleston to the marquee. She sees her mother, Vanessa Bell, painting. She climbs onto a stage, hears a speech about her. She's interviewed by her biographer. She deals well with the questions until she's asked "do you ever dream of Charleston?". She recovers her sense of reality, mostly.
I like how she manages to combine naturalism and artifice without damaging either, and I enjoyed most of the stories. I wasn't so keen on the latter 2 Chekhov pieces, perhaps because I know little about Chekhov. And "all the beloved ghosts" seems a relatively weak finish.
In the Acknowledgements she writes that Angelica Garnett read and approved her story. Prof Denis Noble collaborated with her.
Other reviews
- Ann Skea (fact and fiction are woven together, often with iconic figures at the center of an imaginative vision ... My favorite story is "We Are All Methodists")
- Yoona Lee (One of the most striking pieces in the collection is MacLeod’s rumination on the late Princess Diana, the complicated role of the media, and the dissolution of her own marriage. ... even if [“Solo, A Cappella”] was written with the best intentions, its romanticized angle could be construed as problematic and simplistic. ... The beginning of “There are precious things” best demonstrates MacLeod’s innovative use of language.)
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