- Peregrine - 2 nestling-stealers at night launch an inflatable for a raid. The small one (who's bossed by the big one) who's on the cliff side is haunted by an incident with a boy he'd bullied years before, throwing away his rucksack - a boy he thought he saw on the clifftop the day before. Something had happened to the boy after. The man feels guilty. A rope slips and he thinks he'll fall like that boy's rucksack did. He's left dangling. The ending's fragmentary - maybe the nestlings escape and the man feels absolved.
- Reindeer - A man is asked by a policeman to shoot a bear. He goes up into the mountain, wounds a deer as bait, and determines that the bear is more hungry than rogue. The bear knocks him out and drags him. He finds dead reindeer tied to a buried sleigh with bells and presents. He returns down the mountain, gets a lift from a farmer who says "That guy. Last year. There's a lot of us think it was right, what happened to him". There were earlier hints about the man having been involved in an incident.
Odd. Was the man hallucinating? - Cow - A pregnancy test is negative. He lives on a farm with his wife and her parents. It's lambing/calving time. He's unfit, hasn't played football for weeks - "Thought of his knee, opened up, the physio saying, You wouldn't need a general. Then, of her, a cannula in the back of her hand" (who is "she"? His mother-in-law?). They look after the orphaned lambs in the "hushed shed, the hospital sense of compromised bodies. Resting, recovering, waiting. Relegated to a purpose". A calf is stuck during birth. The father tries brute force and asks his son-in-law for help. His daughter is angry and makes them call the vet. He does a caeserian. The son-in-law thinks the calf is dead but it shows signs of life. The ending is "Come on, he begged. Come on."
- Stock - His shop is closing down(?) so he gives carrier bags of goods away to his regular clients. He visits his nan who lives an hour away. He helps Ifan, who's having to sell his animals. Someone lives in a converted chapel. Annie drives a car, Mari's in the back. He's scared about the police. He has locked a grocery delivery man in the back of their van, threatening to kill them.
I think I can learn from this. What's gained from fogging the details? This isn't just delaying facts to add suspense. It's not simple "Unreliable narrator" tactics. Even when we know what's going on, details are withheld. From the start of the piece we suspect that the main character is under strain - "He sat integrated amongst the felled trees". Later, the odd sentence loses clarity - e.g. "Bones of a sudden watery, as if he was unmixing". His thoughts come fast, and not always clearly. In "He waited. Bloomed with heat again. A slight chill immediately meeting the edges of his sweat. His neck vein thick, suddenly. Too small." what is too small? His vein? I had to re-read too much. Is the shop his? Is Ifan his uncle? Is Mari his daughter? Everything is closing down, coming to an end. - White Squares - A man shoots ducks on a river with an air-rifle. The other ducks in the flock don't react. Further downriver kids and parents wait on the bank, his ex and son (who he's not allowed close to) among them. Each has a piece of white paper with a number on it, the number of a plastic duck. He wants his son's duck to win. He wants his son to be lucky. Right at the end the man recalls how his father (who had also left his wife) taught him to shoot - How his father had moved the bottles further and further away each time he hit one. How he'd at last been allowed to shoot targets on a small white square of paper
- Pulse - a couple with a young child are in an isolated wood cabin in Wales. There's a storm which threatens to make a tree fall onto power lines which might dangle into the wet ground, electrocuting them all. He tries to cut the tree down, then calls from help. Tree surgeons cut down the tree then go. They said that "It's not the trees that go.It's the ground". A week later he's still trying to clear the fallen wood. Another tree is coming loose. There are sparks from the power lines to a bough. They rush from the house. The ending is "The air was like the sea. The storm alive. Stepping off the porch like leaving a boat, into the deep crashing water// If the power's in the ground. If the force is in the wet ground.// The cattle, catching fire. His tiny child in his arms". It was in "The New Yorker"
There are blank lines between paragraphs. The paragraphs are often short and often combine description with figurative language or sonics -
- The landscape regained its vastness when he cut the engine before the ground got too steep. With the gradient rising sharply, the trees loomed (p.19)
- In the firelight, the world was only the immediate trees and the circle within the firelight. Beyond was a thumping blackness (p.20)
- The prip prip prip of postage stamps parting from their perforations. The thudunk of inking pension books (p.97)
- Her scream smashed him from sleep (p.172)
Other reviews
- David Hayden (These stories are spaced out in very short paragraphs, many of only one sentence, and these often of just a few words. It is a device that in less skilful hands might produce a false reaching after of poetic effect; here it brings a physical rhythm that generates a maximum of force, presence and meaning.)
- Rhys Thomas (you can feel the cadence and delivery, the tension, how each word has been painstakingly considered – but it’s subtle, never distracting, and never reads as though forced. In fact, as with many great prosaists, it is so distinctive and hypnotic that occasional moments where it falters feel almost jarring. This very rarely happens; where it does more commonly is within the dialogue which is by no means bad, but can lack the same poetic magic of the prose at times, pulling you out of rhythm slightly. ... Often these stories, particularly ‘Peregrine’ and ‘Stock’, show that Jones has pass to roam the same corridors as [Hemingway and McCarthy].)
- bookmunch (he is fond of rural settings, of short stichomythic sentences, of sudden shocking incidents (in which you may not always know quite what has happened) and back stories delivered like rumour that the narrators tend not to want to discuss. The writing at its best is frequently obtuse, alien and beautiful.)
- Carl Wilkinson (beyond the crystalline details of the moment that holds our horrified gaze lies the pain carried by the characters that is only hinted at: the old farmer with his constant dry cough, his wife ill in bed and the young couple longing for a pregnancy that has failed to materialise. ... “White Squares” feels under-developed, packing less of a punch than the other tales. But it underlines how powerful Jones’s writing is in the rest of the collection.)
