In the quirky corners
Stuart Kelly goes off the beaten track to put the spotlight on three lesser known authors and their books that made a mark in 2020.
So many books, so many must reads, so many “the most (insert adjective here) you’ll read this year” or “the next (author you’ve heard of )”: being a humble reviewer often feels like being an unpaid cog in the hyperventilation machine. As winter draws in, I like to shine a little candle on the overlooked, the odd, the quirky and the not-like-anything else.
There are some gastronomic combinations that sound wilful – mackerel and gooseberries, strawberries and balsamic vinegar – but are perfect. B. Catling’s Munky might be called M R James with a soupcon of P G Wodehouse and a dash of Viz. Pulborough is off-the-beaten track and famous for its abbey. The ghastly Verger Chyne treats it as his fiefdom, and loathes visitors who are not taking worship, as they are usually looking for a public convenience. An affected spiritual experimenter, Walter Price, is summoned from London and settles himself in the Coach & Horse, owned by the spherical and lecherous William Penney, who runs it “like the surly captain of a dubiously credited ship”.
From this apparition spirals a gallery of grotesques, and there is a discussion of afternoon tea more stomach churning than a micturating monk. I’d recommend starting it an hour before sunset so you finish at night, and be warned: Don’t expect pat answers.
Perhaps winning this year’s Goldsmiths Prize for innovation in fiction might bring the astonishing oeuvre of M John Harrison to a wider audience. If one is slightly daunted at embarking on either the Viriconium Trilogy, a good place to dip the bibliophilic toe is this Settling The World: Selected Stories.
Each story twists and writhes in different forms. Unsettling, or unheimlich, is taken as a trademark of the gothic. Settled is altogether different. It certainly doesn’t mean being tucked up. Rather, again and again these works are about the settling of scores.
Which brings me to Robert Shearman’s We All Hear Stories In The Dark .Somemay balk at paying £90 for a book, even if it is lavish, in three volumes and beautifully illustrated. No, it’s cheap because it’s astonishing form means you are getting somewhere in the region of ten octillion books. Nothing quite like this book has ever been attempted before. The premise is that stories always change their meaning dependent upon the order in which you read them.
An old woman sits in the dark. She has 101 stories to tell you the last stories in existence. But the route through them is challenging. Each tale branches into multiple paths, dependent upon the choices you make.
You, the reader, have to navigate your way through a labyrinth of colliding and contrasting tales.
Some readers I know just read sequentially anyway; my brother got so frozen by responsibility he set his phone to choose at random for him.
None of this would mean anything except that the stories are just so wonderful, involving Snoopy, new plays by Shakespeare, the most mediocre man in heaven, a sinister balloon animal maker and every form of invention from plangent to slapstick.
Because the order keeps shifting, a funny story can seem glib when it is followed by a tragedy and the same two can seem hyperbolically wrought then sweetly redemptive taken vice versa.
It is the most magical of books about the magic of books.
■ B. Catling, Munky, The Swan River Press, £32; M. John Harrison, Settling The World, Comma Press, £9.99; Robert Shearman, We All Hear Stories In
The Dark, PS Publishing, £90.