A Blander Shade of Pale

My desk at work is on the twelfth floor. There's a sort of mezzanine-cum-thirteenth-floor above half of the twelfth, leaving the rest of my floor with double-high ceilings. I sit just beyond the point at which the ceiling doubles. It's a nice airy space, this double-high section, but the acoustics are terrible. Conversations within a ten metre radius are impossible to block out (thankfully most of this double-height area is filled by the finance team, so they're pretty quiet souls). Sometimes it can be very difficult to tell where sounds are coming from.

At moments throughout the day, I hear a radio. I've decided it's probably coming through one of the internal windows of the thirteenth floor above me. I don't think this person listens to the radio all the time (though I have no idea what people do on the thirteenth, having never been there), but every now and then the sound of the radio drifts over to me. Sometimes I can pick the song, and based on this sample ('Hey Jude', 'Summer Breeze', 'Do Wah Diddy', 'Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay'...) I reckon the station is Solid Gold FM.

Ordinarily, I would have no beef with the station but, due to some quirk of the acoustics, certain frequencies reach me easier than others. This, combined with the limited weekday playlist of Solid Gold FM, means I feel as if I am forever hearing the ocarina solo in the Troggs' 'Wild Thing'. It's a shame, because -- and I can say this with some authority -- it is the greatest ocarina solo in rock history, but hearing it disembodied on a daily basis is quickly becoming grating.

The last two mornings, the organ from 'Whiter Shade of Pale' by Procul Harem has caught my ear. It’s another great song (one about which I had a long talk with a work associate in Brisbane, who turned out to be a collector of vintage organs) which seems set to make my Endangered Greatness list.

While the specifics of my situation would not be that common, there is something typically 'office life' about having songs you quite like being systematically ruined by unseen forces.

The challenge, as I see it from the sanctuary of my study during my leisure time, is to notice these snippets of 'office life' and distil them into useable fiction, without letting the office beat me.

The Lynx Hunter and Other Stories

This is not a review of The Lynx Hunter and Other Stories. There will be two more posts this month which will 'not review' Coming Home In The Dark and Watch of Gryphons.

Why did I choose these three books to 'not review'? Because these are the three Owen Marshall short story collections I have read most recently, so the impressions are fresher in my mind. A full review without payment of three older collections seems like thankless work, and I'm all for expedients.

It helps that these three collections are spread over a period of eighteen years, as I want (with a minimum of effort) to give some picture of how Marshall manages to imbue each of his collections with a distinct character. In part, I'm trying to justify my argument against relying on the two Owen Marshall's Greatest Hits anthologies
to find the real Owen Marshall.

In these 'not reviews' I will also list my five favourite stories from the collection and compare this with the Best Of selections. A brief description of my favourite stories will hopefully serve as advertisement enough for the collection, and may also highlight my prejudices when it comes time for me to do a proper review at the end of the month (Marshall's latest collection, Living As A Moon).

The Lynx Hunter and Other Stories


Published 1987 (Marshall's fourth short story collection)
23 Stories, 171 Pages (an average length, therefore, of 7.5 pages per story)


The vibe
I bought my copy at this year's Second Hand Book Fair at the TSB Arena, so it's actually the most recent collection I've read. Owen Marshall selected 11 of the 23 stories from this book for inclusion in his The Best of Owen Marshall (2002 edition). Vincent O'Sullivan selected seven. The big surprise for me was the amount of experimentation in the collection, given the bias towards realism in the anthologies.

The epigraph for the collection comes from Oscar Wilde: "One's real life is often the life one does not lead."

Stories such as 'The Castle of Conceits' and the title story look at these internal lives. They follow a logic, but it is a logic foreign to stock standard realism. According to the Book Council's profile of Marshall, "the narrator of 'The Lynx Hunter', who is walking to work, sets up in free indirect discourse a series of surreal self-representations, projecting himself onto his external environment, then interrogating and evaluating the self he sees reflected back."

'Melodrama at Closing Time' is experimental in style (a five part melodrama) and out-there in subject matter (futuristic politics and oratory). 'The Visualiser' looks more like a standard story, but centres around the main character's dreams of the Krools (who are farming humans in a Matrix-before-the-Matrix way). 'Chevalier' is less than two pages long, talks of armoured crusaders, Saracens and chocolate, and went completely over my head.

By my reckoning, ten of the twenty-three stories are out-there in terms of style, content or both. It feels like the weighting is even higher.

My five favourite stories in the collection

Convalescence in the Old City

The first story in the collection. The first paragraph was enough to win me over ("…And in that city there was a faint scent of the past — desperation and unrequited injuries — which mingled with the steam from sewer covers, the smell of new baked saasi bread and sprays of blue, upland lilies carried to the sanctuary, and the sleeping breath of crowded people.") Nothing much happens: a kiwi teacher is convalescing in a small hotel (we are not told why, just as we are not told where we are exactly), and has a passing acquaintance with a Polish engineer who is accused of robbery and arrested. As the narrator says early on: "I can't claim any general knowledge of the country, just the experience of a short time in the city" and his story captures the truth of being a stranger in a foreign city. [Selected by Marshall for his Best Of but not by O'Sullivan.]

Another Generation

A satire set in a future where the younger generation are obsessed with money the way kids-these-days
are obsessed with sex. In fact, physical contact with notes and coins seems to have replaced the act of sex itself. There are obvious jokes, like the dude's name being Franc (aside: before the Euro, there were so many more opportunities for currency puns), but like the best South Park episodes, it's the fresh perspective you're left with that matters. [Selected by O'Sullivan but not by Marshall.]

The Frozen Continents

A combination of realism and out-there. The narrator is charged with cleaning out the Antarctic display at a museum with a fellow named Beavis who only speaks in disaster soundbites ("Typhoon Agnes hit central Philippines on November 5 claiming more than 800 lives"; "More than 500 died when a liquid gas depot exploded at San Jaun Ixhuatepec, a suburb of Mexico City"). Beavis seems unable to look after himself, catches cold in the freezing Antarctic display, and the narrator nurses him back to his disaster soundbite ways. The story succeeds because the narrator does not comment on the unusual nature of his colleague, nor does he spell out what the nature of "the PEP scheme" that has bought them together to labour in the museum. There's enough mystery to make you believe what you are being told, but also to step back and question why these things (disasters, Antarctica, male bonding) are being placed together. [Selected by both Marshall and O'Sullivan.]

Joining The Ishmaelites

I freely admit this story appeals to me mainly because I'm a writer. It begins, "True literary achievement depends upon extremes in life; the gathering of emotional and social copy." The narrator is planning to live the life of Jack London, Maupassant and Melville; to work as a male stripper, reptile house curator and nasella tussock grubber to get this copy. These are thoughts I'm sure all writers have from time to time. There was a personal ring of truth when the writer says, "Accounting… government service at greater than subsistence level, are the ways in which genius and literary commitment are bled away." But the examples of jobs and lifestyles befitting a writer are so plentiful, so specific, so wack, and the case argued so eloquently, that one is forced to consider the opposite. After all, wasn't Owen Marshall a boring-old school teacher for all those years before he became a full-time writer? In the end, it's a backhanded argument for the power of the imagination. That a writer can have an accounting degree and work for the Ministry of Education and still come up with some worthwhile copy. That's my (optimistic) reading of it, anyway. [Not selected by either Marshall or O'Sullivan.]

A Poet's Dream of Amazons

Like 'The Frozen Continent' the story is told by a first person narrator to give it the ring of realism, but there's a character who refuses to fit into the narrow confines of the real world. Esler is dying, or so he says. He's dreaming of a Big Woman smothering him; "a preammunition of death" as his mother puts it. But it just seems like another asthma flare up. "Perhaps," the narrator says near the end of the story, "Elser is simply dying of his poets' amazement at the world in which he finds himself." The collection begins with a specific description of an unspecified city — the "mucus domes upon the cobbles" that look like "fish eyes" — and ends with a world so full of wonder it might be fatal. Nice. [Selected by both Marshall and O'Sullivan.]

Notable omissions: 'Mumsy and Zip' has been paid canonical reverence by several critics, and it is a fine story, but one I am unable to gush over. 'Valley Day' is similar in that it sticks to really real realism, excels at it, but in this collection it seems over-powered by stories that reach beyond the norm.


[For those looking for a proper review of an Owen Marshall collection, a visit to his website might be in order.]

Do we read enough Kiwi-made?

The Sunday Star Times recently did a piece for NZ Book Month called Why Don't We Read Kiwi-Made?  

The piece begins by saying "...only 5% of the fiction we choose to buy is published in New Zealand," which seems to contradict the assertion we don't read Kiwi-made.

5% isn't nothing.  It could be a lot more.  But then the percentage of NZ books borrowed from libraries could be higher.  Maybe that's why Brian Edwards was so pissed off a few weeks ago.

[Aside: Took me a while to find the link to Brian's brain explosion as he later removed all traces of it from his website (and conspiracy theories abound about the affair's disappearance from wikipedia).  More info on the saga here.  Got to love a) Google's caching abilities and b) a classic case of blogger's remorse].

Who cares about the percentage, anyway.  The real question we should be asking, once we've decided what a Kiwi-made book is (NZ author? published in NZ? printed in NZ? about NZ? some combination of these?), is: What do NZ books do that books from elsewhere don't?

There's that whole 'Telling Our Story' boilerplate which underpins so much of our arts funding, but I think there's something less tangible that comes with reading work by local writers.

After graduating from university with (amongst other things) a BA in English Lit, I could still probably count on my fingers the books I had read by New Zealand authors.  I purposely avoided the NZ lit paper without ever thinking through my prejudice.  Shame on me.  As a late-teens, early-twenties male I felt NZ literature was staid and unexciting.  I know now I hadn't read widely enough.


Then I moved to Australia and I could walk around as if NZ books didn't exist.  My time in Australia was punctuated by a nine month stint back in Wellington where I got a taste of the local writing scene and discovered a few more local writers, but the desire to read NZ authors only really struck me while living in the UK. Blogging about writing and books and reading other NZ lit-bloggers had something to do with it. Getting published in NZ literary journals and websites had something to do with it. The Scottish Poetry Library's great collection of NZ poetry had something to do with it.

These all seem like entirely personal reasons, and I wouldn't want it any other way.

All I can say is: why not make 5% of your books this year Kiwi-made, and if you like it, go from there. I'm ready and willing with some recommendations.

The Best of Owen Marshall?

If you haven't read Owen Marshall's short fiction, I suggest you pick a collection at random, but don't pick either of his 'Best Of's:

• The Best of Owen Marshall's Short Stories, 67 stories chosen by Owen Marshall, first published in 1997, reprinted in 2002
  
• Owen Marshall: Selected Stories, 60 stories chosen by Vincent O'Sullivan, published 2008

As I discussed last week, although short stories are able to be digested individually, there are joys to be derived from their combinations. If you'll permit me to extend this food metaphor (and even if you don't): a good collection should be like a banquet, with all the dishes of the highest quality but moving through are variety of flavours and textures. As with goat's cheese petit fours and chocolate mud cake, stories with the most pronounced tastes need to be carefully placed and their quantity precisely determined.

Not all short fiction writers follow this banquet maxim. Instead, they serve up roast pheasant after roast pheasant: excellent stories of unquestionable quality, but after a while, I find myself craving a peppermint magnum or a stick of chewing gum.

I don't know about Owen Marshall's culinary abilities, but he sure knows how to put together a literary banquet.

In the coming weeks I will briefly discuss three of his collections (The Lynx Hunter, Coming Home in the Dark, and Watch of Gryphons), and how they each provide different reading experiences, before looking at how his new collection, Living as a Moon, advances his oeuvre while finding that all important point of difference.

When I read stories from several collections in the one anthology (be it Marshall's selection or O'Sullivan's), however, I find the banquet is somehow diminished.


As Vincent O'Sullivan says in his introduction, another editor may have included more of Marshall's stories which, "let fantasy rip, or stories that are driven by the sheer gusto of language." To O'Sullivan, these experimental stories, for lack of a better term, are minor successes.

And I agree that the most memorable and most affecting of Marshall's stories could be described as realist (or roast pheasant, perhaps). But those of Marshall's stories which are more concerned with language and form rather than their characters do serve a purpose within each collection.

'Wyldebaume at the Frontier' in The Lynx Hunter and Other Stories (1987) is sandwiched between two stories that play their realism straight. In 'Essie', a middle-aged man runs into the eponymous character, who was both a lover and a promising high diver many years ago. In 'Babes and Brothers in Arms', Frank accompanies his wife to a reunion and the imperfect nature of his marriage is laid bare by a friend going through her own divorce. 'Wyldebaume', in contrast, describes how the narrator, a law clerk in the office of Laystall, Zimmermann, Laystall and Clone, was fired for taking his shoes off. Already, from the names and the subject matter the difference to its neighbouring stories is apparent. The text itself announces its experimental, metafictional nature in the first line:
    
           "I (persona rather than alter-ego) had worked part-time in the old Clerk's Room…"

We are soon told that the narrator will "imagine [what sort of work he did in the office] later so as not to detract from the forward movement of this opening section." The story, it seems, is being created before our eyes.
The reader, addressed several times during the story, is given definitions and snippets from notebooks which link in with the story, if only at odd angles. The notebook entries, dated between 1981 and 1986, invite the reader to consider an author beyond the "I (persona rather than alter-ego)" of the story. Are these actual entries in the notebooks of Owen Marshall? It's a game, of course, in a story full of tricks and gimmicks. A purging of the puckish energies Marshall must restrain in stories such as 'Essie' and 'Babes and Brothers in Arms'. But, having concluded 'Wyldebaume…', one cannot quite forget him (Wyldebaume and Marshall), and the restraint and detail in the following story are drawn out when otherwise they might be overlooked.

In The Best of Owen Marshall's Short Stories, the reader gets 'Essie' followed by 'Wyldebaume…', but 'Babes…' is omitted. Instead, 'Wyldebaume…' is followed by 'A Poet's Dream of Amazons', in which the narrator visits a fellow poet who claims to be dying, in part due to his dreams of being smothered by a "Big Woman." The story lies somewhere between leaden realism and untethered experimentation. It's funny and contains wonderful details and observations, such as 'I knew Mr Esler becomes desperate late at night when all the sports programmes end; when he finds himself with hours ahead and no team to join, and none to hate". But some of that friction between 'Wyldebaume…' and 'Babes…' is lacking. The frisson is lessened by the removal of an admittedly average story.

In O'Sullivan's selection, we only get 'A Poet's Dream of Amazons'.

The anthologies, no matter how generous, are that little bit more sterile than Marshall should be. Even though Marshall includes half of the stories from Coming Home in the Dark in his Best Of selection, the sheer volume of stories that precedes them somehow diminishes the sense of variety.

Such a generous selection from one collection also threatens the experience of reading that collection as a whole, if you ever get around to it. As with musical Greatest Hits collections, there's always the temptation to move on to something new rather than buy an album from which you already own the best tracks. How much more is there to Jimi Hendrix beyond his 20 track best of? Another 40 tracks, perhaps one or two ('Highway Chile', 'Are You Experienced') deserving of a spot alongside 'Wind Cries Mary' and '6 was 9'…

O'Sullivan's selection of 60 stories represents one third of Marshall's short fiction output over 30 years: surely you can just read those sixty and move on to 'Living as a Moon', right?

Yes, you could. But you might be surprised when you read 'Living as a Moon'. The writer you thought so earnest, so faithful to his Southern towns and Southern men, is suddenly writing about female, Australian, celebrity impersonators? And what's this story told in the form of a one way phone conversation? This, dear reader--this combination of covert and overt craft, humour and pathos--is the true Owen Marshall.

BNZ Katherine Mansfield Awards 2009

Congratulations to...

• Alice Miller (pictured), winner of the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Premier Award for 2009 for her story, 'The Windmill', as judged by Dame Fiona Kidman.

• Karen Phillips, winner of the Novice section, for her story, 'The Visit', as judged by Carl Nixon.

• Emma Robinson of Awatapu College (Palmy represent!), winner of the Young Writer section, for her epistolary tale, 'Skipped The Censor', as judged by Kate De Goldi.

I now know how to use jump-breaks, so you'll have to click 'Read More' if you wanna year about the ceremony...

How do you read short story collections?

There are two basic ways to read a short story collection:

1. In order from first to last

2. Out of order

There's only one way of doing option 1 and many different ways of doing option 2 (if my high school maths is correct, the number of different orders in which you could read a collection would be equal to the number of stories squared, so an 18 story collection has 324 different order combinations - - correct me if I'm wrong). And then there's those collections you don't ever finish, regardless of which order you read them.

I used to read collections out of order, jumping ahead to titles that took my attention or stories whose length matched the reading time I had available. Over the last few years, however, I've taken to reading them through in order. I'm not sure if this is because my reading has become more targeted (I have to read x number of books this month), or because I was beginning to compile my own short story collection and was forced to think about order (one day I might discuss my own ordering…). It may just be that I'm reading faster and more often these days, so picking a story to fit my reading time doesn't seem an important consideration any more.

One argument for reading short story collections in order, which only just occurred to me (so I can't claim it really factored into my shift away from reading on shuffle), is that there's a higher chance you're reading the book in the same order as someone else. That is, for all the 324 different orders in which an 18-story collection can be read, the order presented in the book is likely to be the most predominant. If you're going to review a book, discuss a book with someone, or even read someone else's review, you might want to do everything in your power to assure as much common ground as possible. Or not.

For this argument to have any sway, one must concede that the order in which stories are read influences your reading, understanding and enjoyment of said stories and the collection as a whole. I doubt there's any empirical evidence either way (when was the last time the book industry approached anything scientifically?), and even if there was, it would probably conclude: in some cases.

The obvious case where reading in the order specified by the author (and/or their editor/publisher) is a linked collection. I read Charlotte Grimshaw's Opportunity (2007) in order, and I got the feeling that the payoff of some of the connections (e.g. marginal character X from story 2 returns as narrator in story 7) was down to the order. It may well have been the same payoff if things were reversed (narrator of story 2 appeared as a marginal character in story 7), but what about the spacing between the stories? If the character returned in the very next story, that might be too soon. Part of the payoff with those sort of connections is the reader feels a flush of pride in recognising a returning character and being able to bring a little extra information to the table. If the stories are back to back, it doesn't exactly flatter the reader's abilities. And conversely, if the stories are too far apart, it may be too much work to recall who character X was way back at the beginning of the collection.

I won't spoil it for those who haven't read Opportunity, but the final story in the book only really works as the final story. It places a frame around all the preceding stories that gets you questioning what actually happened.

So there are definite incentives to reading a linked connection in order. One may look upon these books however as not quite short story collections. Grimshaw herself referred to Opportunity (and even more so it's follow up, Singularity which is in my to-be-read pile) as more of a novel with a huge cast of characters than a short story collection, or what the kids these days are calling a novel-in-stories. Perhaps linking short stories is an attempt by novelists and novel-mad publishers to enforce order on the reader's experience? Perhaps they're missing the point of short story collections? Should every piece be able to exist on its own. Cadbury does not specify the order we must eat Roses chocolates in, though they may well have a theory about which order maximises utility.

But to argue that all orders are created equal ignores the fact that even un-linked story collections have an order imposed upon them by the author (&editor/publisher). Decisions were made. Books were printed and there was no going back.

I now believe, having worked through the process of ordering a short story collection (and seeing two other short story fiends mould their collections during my MA year) that there is something more to be gained by reading a collection in the author's chosen order. It's one of those' the whole is greater than the sum of its parts' ideas. Looking at the order, you could guess that the author thinks certain stories work well together. Or the author thinks the reader should start of with a happy story, or a brief story, or a violent one. The author may not have got the order bang-on for your tastes, but by reading it their way, you might glimpse a bit more of them as a writer.

I was once told by an agent (in the middle of a rejection letter), "I like your brain". This still rates as the best praise I have received in the book world (followed closely by "You're a freak"; my editor at Random House upon learning the year of my birth). While I'm down with the show-don't-tell mantra and would hate for anyone to think I am a chauvinist just because I wrote a story about one, I do think one of the joys of reading short story collections in getting a multi-faceted view of a writer. I feel like I can step back after reading a short story collection and say, "I like this writer's brain."

I felt as if I could say, "I like Owen Marshall's brain," after reading whichever of his collections I read first, and find particular joy in discovering new facets, or old facets expressed better, to this brain in subsequent collections.  Some of this is obviously to do with the stories themselves, the genres they broach, the voices they project.  But some of it comes from from the pairings of like or unlike stories, and the placement of the more memorable (like the brutal 'Coming Home In The Dark' to end the collection of the same name).

In the coming years technology will also factor into how we read short story collections. While the uptake of e-readers is unlikely to be universal, just as not everyone today owns an mp3 player, there'll be a swathe of readers out there who won't have to worry about front and back covers and physical bookmarks. Novels may be better served by a glorified pdf format, but short story collections may suit a web-format where each story is linked from the contents, and at its conclusion you return to the contents page and choose another story. You could even have a shuffle function so that you read stories from different collections and different authors in an order determined by fate (or an Apple algorithm).

I suspect that the further away one steps from reading a collection in its entirety, the greater risk one runs of losing a sense of what makes that book special or worthwhile. Then again, musicians everywhere probably think the same thing about albums, and when was the last time I listened to an album in sequence and uninterrupted? (Actually I'm listening to one now - Jarvis Cocker, Further Complications… trying to decide if I go to his show in December...).

For the time being, most of us will settle for a nice paperback (and paper-inner), but the question remains: what order will you read it in?

For collected editions or anthologies containing more than one author, they often take the easy way out, using chronological or alphabetical orders. Chronological order can be useful in charting the development of a writer (Lorrie Moore's Collected Stories goes backwards, but the intention is similar) or a particular literature (like Essential NZ Short Stories or The Penguin Book of Contemporary NZ Short Stories). Alphabetical works well for reference material which you'll dip in and out of, but in terms of creating a reading experience, it's no better than a random order, so why stick to it? (I think alphabetical order in journals like Sport and anthologies like Best NZ Fiction is just a way of not stepping on people's toes, but I digress.)

Owen Marshall Month

To celebrate NZ Book Month, the recent launch of Owen Marshall's 13th short story collection*, Living as a Moon, and the fact I purchased it from Unity Books today, I hereby declare October Owen Marshall Month** on this blog.


Tomorrow I will post something general about short story collections, then throughout October I will drip-feed items about most recent Owen Marshall collections I have read, before reviewing Living as a Moon at the end of the month.


Promises, promises.


--
* I think my maths is right (9 proper stand-alone collections and 4 collections containing stories that appeared in other collections)

**random posts about kiwifruit notwithstanding.

Things I'll Take Away From Reading The Count Of Monte Cristo This Month

(rockin' the bullet points this week... can you tell I've returned to the workforce?)

• I really want to see the film version starring Jim Caviezel again. I suspect they melded the 3 baddies into one (Guy Pierce) but maybe that's just what seven years of brain cell decay will do to one's memory of a film.
• The book was too long. I know, how can anyone level such a claim at a 1,200+ page book? I enjoyed the first 200 or so pages and selected chapters near the end, but I wanted excitement and intrigue the whole way through. Didn't happen.
  
  
• Linked to the length: I liked the narrator to begin with, but found his shifts and conceits irksome as the novel progressed. Like when we first meet Franz and see things from his perspective for chapters without having any idea who he is or why he's important… then we meet the Count of Monte Cristo, who we all know is Edmund Dantes, but the narrator daren't mention this fact…. Irksome.
• The chapter where Bertuccio describes his oath of vengeance against Villefort and it's (semi)fulfilment is just as vivid in my memory as Monte Cristo's quest for revenge. Again, length and complexity doesn't necessarily equal riveting revenge saga.
  
  
• I'm actually quite surprised how nonplussed I was by the middle section of the book, which is essentially a novel of aristocratic matchmaking. I may not have liked these sorts of stories as a younger male reader, but these days I see the artistry in Jane Austen and the humour is P.G. Wodehouse. Adding a revenge plot into a tea-table novel should be awesome. Think Howard's End with Leonard Bast secretly plotting to poison, disgrace or defile the Wilcoxes/Schlegels. But then again, Howard's End is only 340 pages…

As I stated at the beginning of this journey, I had the embryo of an idea for my own revenge saga. From time to time my thoughts drifted from Dumas' story to my own. I'm not sure I know anything more about what will happen than I did at the start of the month, but I feel like there's enough sustenance there to leave it gestating and move on to something else.

That something else is another novel - quite different from 'The Count of Monte Cristo meets A Good Keen Man'. In fact, this novel, which I tried writing last year ('Novel B' for those familiar with my old blog) is more like Tim Winton meets Awakenings.