The Sea Change and Other Stories by Helen Grant

It takes a lot of skill to write gothic stories without them sounding ham or predictable. I’ve tried a few and never been satisfied with the way I manage transitions or plant the seeds of doubt. A lot of stories in this genre are a bit too obvious. There’s also a bit of a tendency to stick to the traditions, keep with the old tropes, write in a particular, style, often more or less a pastiche of the old masters of the genre like MR James. There is one such story in Helen Grant’s excellent collection, The Sea Change and Other Stories, but that’s quite intentional, as we shall see.

There are seven stories in The Sea Change, and they are admirably varied in location, subject matter and style. The writing is cool and controlled, drawing the reader into the particular worldview of each story, spinning the central mystery around them and drawing them towards a series of satisfying denouements.

The first story, set in an unidentified German town, revolves around a song which gives the story its title, “Grauer Hans” and features a young girl as a narrator. What she doesn’t understand but somehow intuits, and of course we can see quite clearly, is that she is in some jeopardy, cloistered in her small, upper-floor bedroom with window looking out onto the rooftops of the town. Terror is visited and then revisited. Decidedly eerie.

There is a complete change of style for the second story, the title story of the collection, “The Sea Change”. The author draws on her knowledge of scuba diving for a tale that is truly creepy, with some beautifully (by which I mean horribly) descriptive writing and an ending that is inevitable but still unsettling.

The next story, “The Game of Bear”, is the one I alluded to at the beginning, when I said one story was written in the style of the turn of the early twentieth-century experts in the genre. What I didn’t realise until I’d finished was that this was a prize-winning entry completing an unfinished work by MR James himself. The first 1700 words or so were his, the remainder the author’s. I didn’t see the join. Helen Grant convincingly pulls together the strands of James’s original puzzle in a way that feels completely unforced. An impressive feat.

“Self Catering” is a brief and humorous slice of almost whimsical horror. It’s essentially Mr Benn Goes Horribly Wrong and is tremendous fun.

We shift next to “Nathair Dubh”, a story centred on rock-climbing. The rock in question, of course, has a reputation for strangeness, and an eerie mist that descends on the climbers portends trouble. Trouble duly arrives.

“Alberic de Mauléon” is another MR James-related competition entry, this time to write a sequel to a James story, in this case “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook”. This is set in the late seventeenth century and there is a very fine sense of place and time here. The inhospitable cold of the time, the life-threatening harshness of the era, is brilliantly conjured and the story’s twist is effectively engineered.

The last story, “The Calvary at Banksá Bystrica”, is probably my favourite, if only because although the mystery is perfectly laid out, it refuses to reveal itself totally. It is set in Slovakia and is based on a real place which the author visited and which she renders in vivid detail. Some of the descriptive writing in this story is truly excellent, creepy beyond measure but finely controlled.

This is a highly recommended collection, published in a good quality paperback edition by The Swan River Press. Seek it out. It’s worth it. 

Barossa Street coming soon

 Barossa Street, my follow-up to Cuddies Strip, will be published on 11th May by Ringwood Publishing.

It is available for pre-order here. 

20th January 1936, and King George V is dying.

The same day, Bob Kelty accompanies a friend to the house of a local recluse. There, they find Hugh Smithson brutally murdered in his bed. 

Horror turns to nightmare as Bob’s friend, Richard Hamill, comes under suspicion of the murder and Bob reluctantly becomes embroiled, once more, in the investigation of a terrible crime in 1930s Perth. Gradually, he begins to uncover the truth, and it is something nobody expected... 

Set against the backdrop of the abdication crisis and the looming shadow of war, Barossa Street examines the prejudice of 1930s society and its impact on the justice system. Will this lead to the police jumping to conclusions and prosecuting the wrong man? Or will Bob save the day?

Of Stone and Sky by Merryn Glover

 

Of Stone and Sky is a hard novel to classify. One hundred years of highland living are the canvas on which Merryn Glover shapes her story of a tenured family of sheep farmers facing the constant threat of poverty and worse. There’s a mystery at the heart of the story – the opening scene is a eulogy for the life of Colvin Munro, the most recent of forty generations of shepherds who have worked this Scottish landscape. Colvin went missing seven years before but his possessions turn up regularly and inexplicably over the years following.

From here, we are introduced to the wider Munro family, Colvin’s alcoholic and bankrupt brother Sorley, named after the great poet Sorley MacLean, the boys’ indomitable mother Agnes, their father Gid, Mo, a kind of half-sister cum mother figure, Colvin’s Bolivian wife Liana, their children Alex and Tess and a startling array of secondary characters. An entire glen, a Scottish estate with its tenant farmers, gamekeepers, serving staff, travelling folk and sundry locals is painstakingly brought to life. The characters who populate the book are rich and alive, the story mysterious, the history sad and affecting.

So the novel is a family history, then, but it is more than that. These people are rooted in their landscape, and that landscape – the Scottish highlands that once was the home of clans living and working in unity but was cleared after the Jacobite rebellion and fell into the hands of estate lairds whose husbandry and motivations were questionable – is a difficult place, as harsh as it is beautiful.

This is a land that is steeped in history. Forty generations have come and gone. Life is different now but the memories of the past remain, echoing through the glens into eternity. It is no coincidence that Sorley is named after Sorley MacLean, nor is it a coincidence that the book ends with a quote from MacLean’s masterpiece, Hallaig. The opening of that work might serve to give a sense of the thematic direction Glover’s impressive novel: “Time, the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig.”

In times past, these glens were cleared. Families were replaced by more lucrative sheep. When the trade in wool began to weaken, the sheep were replaced by hunting, estates becoming home to fashionable shooting parties attended by the rich and famous. The Travellers who for generations had crossed the country selling their wares stopped travelling and a whole way of life died out within a single generation. Life was never easy but it grew harder. Yet, through it all, these communities held to the thread that bound them together. The ghosts of the past – time the deer – revolved and recycled. Old connections cannot be broken. Memories are passed on, father to son, mother to daughter, generation to generation, the old to the new. Communities persist. Nature endures. And so does love, because it is the most perfect emotion of them all.

Perhaps, after all, Of Stone and Sky really is quite easy to classify. It is a love story. Love of land, love of community, love of family, love of life.

The Redemption of Alexander Seaton by SG MacLean

 

When The Redemption of Alexander Seaton begins the eponymous hero is a disgraced former divinity student, now an unhappy school teacher, although we do not yet know the cause of his disgrace. He is beset principally, it seems, by his own conscience and already we sense this is a man too hard on himself.

In Banff, on a stormy evening in 1626, apothecary’s assistant Patrick Davidson staggers in the street and falls to the ground, apparently drunk. Alexander Seaton witnesses the event but does not intervene, assuming he will be fine. Also witnessing the scene are two town prostitutes and they, in an attempt to help Patrick, leave him in Seaton’s schoolroom. By morning, he is dead, poisoned.

Thus begins SG MacLean’s atmospheric historical crime novel. The tale that unfolds takes in a possible popish conspiracy and perhaps even an invasion of Scotland, witch trials and witch-burning, the banishment of women for crimes committed by men, love and loss, virtue and dishonour and, of course, the gradual, reluctant redemption of Alexander Seaton himself, a good man who cannot forget or forgive his one misadventure.

Suspicion falls on Charles Thom, a music teacher and friend of Seaton’s. He is arrested and seems likely to be charged, but Seaton is convinced of his innocence, as is Doctor Jaffray, another friend of Seaton’s and another good and honourable man. They endeavour to help Thom.

A discovery among the possessions of the dead man, meanwhile, point to a possible alternative solution, with apparent evidence of a popish plot to invade Scotland. Seaton is sent by the Banff authorities to Aberdeen to seek the assistance of men whose expert knowledge might throw light on proceedings.

Or so he thinks.

The novel rattles along and the character of Alexander Seaton increasingly develops depth and credibility. He is a man at odds with his surroundings and with himself. Although he cannot forgive himself for the actions which brought an end to his ministerial ambitions, his several acts of kindness and decency in the course of the novel mark him out for us as a good man and we wish, simultaneously, for him to solve the crime and to seek an accommodation with himself.

Shona MacLean has a PhD in the history of Aberdeenshire in the seventeenth century and it shows, although she wears her knowledge lightly. There is a tremendous sense of place and time here, without any of the detail ever overwhelming the narrative. It is a complex novel with a satisfyingly confusing plot and characters who all feel well rounded and not just making up the numbers. This is highly recommended.

O Caledonia by Elspeth Barker

It isn’t a spoiler to say that the main protagonist of Elspeth Barker’s wonderfully unclassifiable masterpiece O Caledonia dies on the final page, because we are advised of this death on the first page. What unfolds between initial declaration and final explication is the creation of a character utterly unique. In real life, Janet would probably be unbearable but as a character on the page she is mesmerising. The novel recounts her life from birth through to her untimely death at the age of sixteen and is one of the funniest but most thought-provoking works I’ve read in some time. 

In a family of eccentrics, Janet stands out for her oddness. Living in Achnasaugh (“the field of sighing”) in the north of Scotland, amidst Calvinism and its associated dourness, the family eschew the moroseness of life around them. The family motto is Moriens Sed Invictus – Dying But Unconquered – and they mean to live up to it. Janet’s mother, Vera, is a harridan waging perpetual war against everything. Cousin Lila is a drunkard gradually reducing her life to squalor. And Janet – brilliantly clever, totally introverted, heroically unsociable – lives inside her own head, enjoying her dreams, enduring her nightmares, deprecating the horrible reality around her. 

Read any review of O Caledonia and you will see it variously described as bildungsroman, nature writing, gothic drama or tragicomedy. In her introduction to the current edition, Maggie O’Farrell notes: 

In these 200-odd pages of prose [Barker] gives the nod to a number of literary genres while deftly navigating her way around and past them. There are more than a few allusions to the Gothic Novel, to classical myth, to Scottish literary tradition, to nature writing, to Shakespeare and autofiction. 

However, she continues, trying to fit it into any category is reductive because O Caledonia “at once plays with and defies genres”. She’s undoubtedly right about that, but one category in which I think it does naturally fit is “Scottish writing”. There’s the imagination and sheer love of words of Alistair Gray; there’s the gothic dread of Stevenson; the mordant wit of Muriel Spark; the stunning evocation of landscape and place of our great poets, Sorley Maclean, Kathleen Jamie, Norman MacCaig, George Mackay Brown et al; in Janet, a spiky free spirit, there’s a resonance with the wonderful Dinah and Dorinda in Eric Linklater’s neglected children’s classic The Wind on the Moon – truly, here are three girls ready to take on the world; and above all, there’s the classic Scottish binary of Calvinism and liberalism John Knox and Robert Burns. 

All of this is told from the perspective of oddball Janet, determined to go her own way, do her own thing, gripped by learning and a passion for every living thing except human beings, especially her family. She is clumsy, distracted, probably dyspraxic, unwilling to participate in any activity which doesn’t meet her approval. And, of course, like all outsiders and nonconformists, she gets a reputation for being strange. Even her mother is disappointed in her. After her death, “Janet’s name was no longer mentioned by those who had known her best. She was to be forgotten.”

Gloriously, she isn’t forgotten because every reader of this novel will remember Janet forever, the girl who either didn’t care or cared too much, depending on your perspective, the girl who simply wanted to live on her own terms.

And, in Scotland, depending on which side of that Scottish binary you’re on, that approach is either maleficent or magnificent.

To this Scottish reviewer, Janet is and always will be magnificent.

Rose Nicolson by Andrew Greig

Going right back to his earliest novels, The Return of John Macnab and the luminously odd Electric Brae, Andrew Greig’s books have been marvellous page-turners. That’s not only because of the plot – he’s no mere Jeffrey Archer or Dan Brown – but because of a conjunction of occurrence and consequence in the narrative. Things happen, and they matter, and the story unfolds in moments that feel connected and timeless. 

As well as being a master of narrative, of course, Andrew Greig is a poet and his poetic ear and eye are well to the fore in his new novel, Rose Nicolson, in which we take a journey into the souls of Reformation Scotland and of the narrator William Fowler and the eponymous Rose Nicolson herself. 

This poetic inflection can be seen particularly in the openings of chapters, where Greig paints an image, or a thought, or a problem, one which will give spine and shape to what comes next. Take this, for example: 

The world’s wheel spins. The soft clay of the self spins with it, awaiting shaping hands.

The first sentence, on its own, could be thought trite, even cliched. But then comes the second, amplifying, sentence and we are led into the thematic core of the novel, its vital questions: whose are the shaping hands? how do they shape us? can we, should we resist? what say have we in the final outcome? 

In the ensuing chapter, Will Fowler is attending his studies in St Andrews in 1575, a young man of independent mind, not yet determined on whether to be a follower of Plato or Aristotle, a Divine or a Humanist. He is invited by the Dean to assist with the removal and sale of a cache of items, bowls and platters and jugs, candlesticks and cups and, most significantly, wood-carved saints and a single chalice – symbols of Popery, in other words, and thus highly dangerous in Reformation Scotland. Will’s family are traders and it makes sense for him to help, but make no mistake this is dangerous. Will agrees, and the moment he does the world’s spin gathers him up and the shaping begins. What will be the outcome? 

Rose Nicolson is a wonderful historical novel, with a fine sense of place and history and characters who feel important, stories which matter, events which are, at once, particular and timeless. It is a love story, and is that not the oldest story of all, the one we all live ourselves, some time, somehow? But it is also Will’s and Rose’s love story, and that is unique and personal, infinite.

Some thoughts on writing a short story

Having recently finished a second stint as one of the judges of the Ringwood Publishing Short Story Competition, I thought I’d make a few observations on the stories I’ve read and perhaps give a few pointers for people looking to enter future competitions. 

Firstly, to everyone who entered the Ringwood competition, or who has entered any writing competition at any time, congratulations. Congratulations twice over. Once for conceiving, starting and finishing your story. And once more for having the courage to enter it for a competition. That isn’t easy, I know, and the sense of disappointment when you don’t win or get on a shortlist can be dispiriting. So well done, and thank you for sharing your work with us. Please don’t give up. 

Now, looking at the stories this time round, I have to be honest and say my first observation is that quite a high percentage of the stories entered weren’t ready. In many, there were simple punctuation, grammar or spelling mistakes which point to a story that hasn’t been fully edited. That alone isn’t enough to eliminate a good story from contention, but alongside those mistakes there were, in many instances, clear signs that the story needed more work. 

No story will be a finished article on the first write. Even the second write. Third write. Fourth, fifth, sixth. Short stories are an unforgiving medium because they allow for no wasted words, no longeurs, no unnecessary scenes or scene-setting. Get into your story immediately. Tell that story as concisely as you can. Then leave the story at the first moment you can safely escape, your story told, the point made. You can only do that when you’ve written and rewritten and rewritten it, removed every unnecessary word, distilled the plot to its essence, left nothing but the hard, sharp form of the tale itself. 

There’s no doubt a high percentage of stories would be immediately improved by deleting the first two, three or even four paragraphs. So many stories began with a protagonist going somewhere, or preparing to do something. Nobody cares about that. Start when the action starts. 

Read your story aloud. How does it sound? Are the moments of tension tense, the moments of love tender, the moments of humour a relief? And, more importantly, does it sound like a story from your head, or is it like any other story you might read on the web? 

Years ago, when I was in Alex Keegan’s Bootcamp, an online writing forum, Alex used to do an exercise where he would take a paragraph each from up to ten stories by different members of Bootcamp and stitch them together. Naturally, the story made no sense, but what was notable was that although the plot was nonsense the voice was consistent throughout. In other words, we were all writing in the same way, with a generic voice (usually Raymond Carver’s), with nothing distinctive, no way of grabbing the reader and saying to them “listen to this, listen to me, this story is amazing.” 

Voice is such an important aspect of storytelling. It’s about the way your sentences work, the words you use, your tone, the rhythms of your sentences, the ebb and flow of emotion. Voice is the way you tell your story. No one else can write your story. You are unique and your story is unique so make it sound unique. 

When you do that you will start to see your story crystallise on the page. It will become specific, real, an imagined world made flesh. Your characters will be more than names, your locales will be more than streets or hills or enchanted glades. They will be Ash Harker, young and frightened and alone, travelled 5,000 miles in search of truth; they will be that street, Milnab Street, the street where you were born in your big brother’s bed; they will be the Knock hill, trees and heather and blaeberry bushes, stretching high over Crieff and nestling between the Grampians and the Ochils; they will be the enchanted glade where you fell in love, where your life truly began, where the wonders of the world were revealed. Everything in your story will be real. Specificity is everything. Without it there is no story, just words. 

Take chances. Be bold. Search for that perfect, beautiful phrase, one that nobody’s heard before, one that sings, soars, hits you in the solar plexus. Make mistakes. That’s okay. You’re still learning. Ray Bradbury said the first million words was your apprenticeship. I’d rather read something where the author’s tried too hard and it hasn’t come off than something where they’ve settled for the first description or action that came to mind. I want to go on a glorious adventure with you, my mind and yours perfectly in union. 

To end where we began: congratulations on your immense good fortune in being a writer. It’s a grand business, and I wish you all the very best of luck in making your writing wonderful. Hopefully, we can do it all again next year.

Class of '37 by Hester Barron and Claire Langhamer

Class of ’37: Voices From Working Class Girlhood, by Hester Barron and Claire Langhamer, is an extraordinary book because it is about ordinary people. The voices of working class people through the ages have seldom been heard. And the voices of working class children, specifically girls, are heard even less often. We all know the cliche “history is written by the victors”. Well, it’s true, but history is also written by the rich. There are novels of working class life, from Robert Tressel’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists through to the angry young men (and women) of the fifties, to modern classics such as Shuggie Bain. These are important works, all of them, because they catch the rhythms and the idioms of their working class subjects but for all their importance as chronicles of ordinary lives they are still essentially works of fiction. The true voices of the working class, meanwhile, remain concealed behind the “respectability” or “properness” that informed so much historical record over the years. No one wanted to hear from these people. 

But we do. 

The Imperial War Museum’s Forgotten Voices projects covering the First and Second World Wars, Burma and the Falklands, gave voice to ordinary men and, sometimes, women who explained the impact of war on their lives. They were mesmerising for the way they brought to life people whose lives would otherwise have been neglected. But they told of life in wartime, life under stress, life away from the norm. So, still, we weren’t hearing the voice of authentic working class lives. 

Enter the Mass Observation movement. This was a research project that began in 1937 and ran through to the 1960s. The aim was to record everyday life in Britain, using observers who would record the conversations and behaviours of ordinary people and issue questionnaires and diaries on various topics. One can question the efficacy of this approach, and the research methodologies used wouldn’t stand up to modern academic standards but, for all that, Mass Observation has given us a treasure trove of thoughts and actions and stories from people who would otherwise be totally lost to history. 

One of the first studies was in Bolton and it is this material that Barron and Langhamer have formed into their beautiful book. In the Mass Observation archive they found thousands of pages written by working class boys and girls, giving us a unique insight into their worlds, their thoughts and beliefs, their hopes, their fears. This is the untrammelled voice of working class childhood and it is astonishing to have these children come to life in front of your eyes.  

We follow in particular a group of twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls from Pikes Lane Elementary School, who were given a series of essays to write by their teachers on subjects such as “heaven” or “the Royal Family” or “how I spend my holidays” or “What I learn at home that I don’t learn at school”. Through these essays we are drawn into the lives and thoughts of these girls and in the course of the book we come to know them. We are also given the pen pictures written of them by the Mass Observation observers and we can see how wrong those observers sometimes were, the lazy generalisations and casual prejudices that lay behind their impressions of the girls they were studying. Through the girls’ essays we can see beyond these generalisations into the sophistication of their thought, the ambitions they held – sometimes modest, sometimes not but always strongly held – and we see how the poverty of the times and the lack of opportunity shaped their existences. Most of them came from families who had worked for generations in the mills. Escaping the mills was a common aspiration. Some girls wanted to work in shops, others to become hairdressers, others to enter nursing. All of them, whatever they wanted for their lives, spoke of their ambitions in clear and moving prose. 

What makes this book even more poignant is that once they had finished their research the authors contacted the families of these girls. Many of them still lived locally, and they were happy to talk about their mothers, and were even happier to read the words their mothers had written as young children. And so we learn which of the girls achieved their ambitions, who lived full lives, whose lives were cut short. The authors write movingly of talking to their feelings as they talked to the families: 

[they] are mostly grandparents themselves now. It was oddly disconcerting to hear these elderly voices telling us about their mothers, who lived in our minds so vibrantly as living, breathing twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls. It felt the wrong way round, as if the generations had been swapped. 

Class of ’37 is a gem of a book, bringing to life a cast of wonderful and vibrant young girls. History is written by the rich, and somehow we have to find a way of changing that.