"Usually when I pick up a collection of stories, I dip in at random, but with Fire-Ready, I read greedily through from beginning to end ..."
Jane Rogers is a fabulous novelist. I’ve enjoyed everything she’s written to date and was excited to get hold of this latest collection of her short stories. It’s fascinating to see the variations and combinations of her usual themes of family dynamics, marriage, ageing, babies and children, and the sheer grittiness of human life, as well as visions of a dystopian future for the earth.
Usually when I pick up a collection of stories, I dip in at random, but with Fire-Ready, I read greedily through from beginning to end, then left a period of reflection to see which stories would rise most readily to the surface. Although I love the vivid title story, the one that made the most impression on me was Letting Things Go. This is a quiet tale in which we see a man who, having taken meticulous care of his wife up until her death from dementia, finds his own mind becoming strange. He begins to hear odd memory-triggering sounds, to see a radiance, a sort of resonance in the most mundane of objects, staring at items for hours on end – all to the consternation of his adult daughter, who tries to persuade him to see a doctor. What I most admire is the way it’s left ambiguous whether the man is in the early stages of dementia, or some other brain abnormality, or has simply found a source of harmless joy in the world. Such boldness is a trademark of Jane’s style.
Another stand-out story, and one that I can see as the germ of a novel (in fact I wish it would become a novel!) is The DNA of Bats. This delicately nuanced, beautifully turned tale is narrated by an unimaginative woman who considers herself a failure, a disappointment to her joyous and artistic mother – and later to her own daughter. Always wonderful at voice, Jane exactly and wickedly catches the embittered tone of this narrator. In a vivid flashback childhood scene, we witness her trauma at finding an apparently lifeless bat in the wash basin of a holiday cottage. In contrast her mother is excited and inspired by the find: ‘My father wanted to wrap it in newspaper and put it in the bin. But my mother needed to sketch it, it was so perfect, the outstretched wings especially, she could use the design for a cloak.’ Later, the narrator’s grown-up daughter, now a scientist, tells her mother that bats have been discovered to contain a possible key to immunity and anti-ageing and this theme of bio-technological advance over human frailty is a theme shared by several other stories in the collection.
Hope is such a one. Planet earth has become uninhabitable. Human survivors live aboard spaceships, while drones scan the scorched planet for signs of regeneration. Here the relationship between a husband and wife, suffering grief over a lost son, is rendered through sharp, sparky dialogue – another key feature of all Jane’s fiction. Hope is a plaintive tale, which aches with nostalgia for the natural world. This takes the form of diary extracts from the husband’s grandmother, one of the first generation of spaceship dwellers. The contrast between the sterile interior of the spaceship with the grandmother’s exquisite descriptions of aspects natural life on earth could not be more resonant. True to its title, this story leaves us with a grain of hope for the revival of the planet.
Two more future fictions rise to the surface for me: Clearances and Daytrip to Glastonbury. The former is a bleak, dystopian tale – verging on horror story – that, using the Highland Clearances as a metaphor, shows us the marginalisation of the economically null and void. These unfortunates are trapped in high rise blocks in their thousands, fed by nourri-bots, their minds constantly numbed by Virtual Reality – and plans are afoot to get rid of them. It’s a nightmare glimpse of a possible future for our planet, a frightening, tough, dystopian vision.
Daytrip to Glastonbury is another excursion into the future – perhaps not so very far ahead – where, due to climate change, the sea level has risen and the familiar landscapes of Britain have been transformed by water, with most citizens sheltering behind the flood defences of cities. From Bristol, a young couple take a trip to Glastonbury Tor by coach and then by boat, the only means of transport. The story is illuminated by vivid details of the natural world threatened by the rising water. I found this precise, unsentimental description particularly moving: ‘On this side overgrown bushes were dotted with swollen rosehips; a couple of small brown birds scuffled in the dirt beneath them, as if it were ordinary.’
The phrase, ‘As if it were ordinary,’ makes an interesting lens through which to view the collection. Many of the stories are fuelled by righteous anger and concern about climate change and the state of the planet, but most are also shot through with light, with hope, with a loving appreciation of nature, and the wonder of birth and regeneration.
In Weeping Beech, an old man chains himself to a tree in the hope of preventing the felling of the tree. During the long, cold vigil of the night he tilts back his head to enjoy the stars, and a line from a Leonard Cohen song comes to him: ‘There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.’ And despite the bleakness of some of these stories, reading the marvellously eclectic collection from beginning to end left me with the overwhelming impression that yes, that is exactly what there is.
Usually when I pick up a collection of stories, I dip in at random, but with Fire-Ready, I read greedily through from beginning to end, then left a period of reflection to see which stories would rise most readily to the surface. Although I love the vivid title story, the one that made the most impression on me was Letting Things Go. This is a quiet tale in which we see a man who, having taken meticulous care of his wife up until her death from dementia, finds his own mind becoming strange. He begins to hear odd memory-triggering sounds, to see a radiance, a sort of resonance in the most mundane of objects, staring at items for hours on end – all to the consternation of his adult daughter, who tries to persuade him to see a doctor. What I most admire is the way it’s left ambiguous whether the man is in the early stages of dementia, or some other brain abnormality, or has simply found a source of harmless joy in the world. Such boldness is a trademark of Jane’s style.
Another stand-out story, and one that I can see as the germ of a novel (in fact I wish it would become a novel!) is The DNA of Bats. This delicately nuanced, beautifully turned tale is narrated by an unimaginative woman who considers herself a failure, a disappointment to her joyous and artistic mother – and later to her own daughter. Always wonderful at voice, Jane exactly and wickedly catches the embittered tone of this narrator. In a vivid flashback childhood scene, we witness her trauma at finding an apparently lifeless bat in the wash basin of a holiday cottage. In contrast her mother is excited and inspired by the find: ‘My father wanted to wrap it in newspaper and put it in the bin. But my mother needed to sketch it, it was so perfect, the outstretched wings especially, she could use the design for a cloak.’ Later, the narrator’s grown-up daughter, now a scientist, tells her mother that bats have been discovered to contain a possible key to immunity and anti-ageing and this theme of bio-technological advance over human frailty is a theme shared by several other stories in the collection.
Hope is such a one. Planet earth has become uninhabitable. Human survivors live aboard spaceships, while drones scan the scorched planet for signs of regeneration. Here the relationship between a husband and wife, suffering grief over a lost son, is rendered through sharp, sparky dialogue – another key feature of all Jane’s fiction. Hope is a plaintive tale, which aches with nostalgia for the natural world. This takes the form of diary extracts from the husband’s grandmother, one of the first generation of spaceship dwellers. The contrast between the sterile interior of the spaceship with the grandmother’s exquisite descriptions of aspects natural life on earth could not be more resonant. True to its title, this story leaves us with a grain of hope for the revival of the planet.
Two more future fictions rise to the surface for me: Clearances and Daytrip to Glastonbury. The former is a bleak, dystopian tale – verging on horror story – that, using the Highland Clearances as a metaphor, shows us the marginalisation of the economically null and void. These unfortunates are trapped in high rise blocks in their thousands, fed by nourri-bots, their minds constantly numbed by Virtual Reality – and plans are afoot to get rid of them. It’s a nightmare glimpse of a possible future for our planet, a frightening, tough, dystopian vision.
Daytrip to Glastonbury is another excursion into the future – perhaps not so very far ahead – where, due to climate change, the sea level has risen and the familiar landscapes of Britain have been transformed by water, with most citizens sheltering behind the flood defences of cities. From Bristol, a young couple take a trip to Glastonbury Tor by coach and then by boat, the only means of transport. The story is illuminated by vivid details of the natural world threatened by the rising water. I found this precise, unsentimental description particularly moving: ‘On this side overgrown bushes were dotted with swollen rosehips; a couple of small brown birds scuffled in the dirt beneath them, as if it were ordinary.’
The phrase, ‘As if it were ordinary,’ makes an interesting lens through which to view the collection. Many of the stories are fuelled by righteous anger and concern about climate change and the state of the planet, but most are also shot through with light, with hope, with a loving appreciation of nature, and the wonder of birth and regeneration.
In Weeping Beech, an old man chains himself to a tree in the hope of preventing the felling of the tree. During the long, cold vigil of the night he tilts back his head to enjoy the stars, and a line from a Leonard Cohen song comes to him: ‘There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.’ And despite the bleakness of some of these stories, reading the marvellously eclectic collection from beginning to end left me with the overwhelming impression that yes, that is exactly what there is.
Fire-Ready is published by Comma Press.
Lesley Glaister answers questions about her latest novel, A Particular Man, here.
Jane Rogers answers questions about Fire-Ready here.
These stories sound excellent - thank you, Lesley, especially as at the moment my mind won't quite stretch to whole novels...
ReplyDeleteThanks Lesley for a lovely review. 'Letting things go' is secretly my favourite, and I was very nervous that readers might find it silly or weird, so it is deeply pleasing that you enjoyed it! And a heads-up; 5 of the stories have just been commissioned for broadcast on radio 4, week beginning March 1st.
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