‘A tidy little stocking-filler for your more literary-minded loved ones this Christmas’ – The BBC National Short Story Award 2010 Anthology

The BBC National Short Story Award is a biggie in the short fiction world; with a fat wad of cash reserved for the winner and an impressive list of past recipients since the prize’s inception in 2005 (James Lasdun secured the inaugural award for ‘An Anxious Man’; last year the poet Kate Clanchy won with ‘The Not-Dead and The Saved’. Other authors shortlisted in previous years have included Jackie Kay, William Trevor, Rose Tremain, Clare Wigfall, Naomi Alderman and Lionel Shriver), it’s definitely worth a gander.  The shortlist (and it is a short list) this year included Aminattta Forna, Sarah Hall, Jon McGregor and Helen Oyeyemi, and, of course, the overall winner, David Constantine.  Comma Press have published a mini-anthology with all five of their stories, so I’ve had a read and I’ve got to say, the standard was high.  Seven quid for a tiny book with only five stories might seem like a lot, but they’re good ones, and I reckon it would make a tidy little stocking-filler for your more literary-minded loved ones this Christmas.

So, leaving the winner until last, let’s tackle the rest one at a time.  Aminatta Forna’s ‘Hayward’s Heath’ tells the story of Attila, a doctor who studied in the UK and left his girlfriend behind, years ago, to pursue his career abroad, in his home country.  Now, decades later, he returns and tracks her down only to find her living in a care home, suffering from some form of dementia or memory loss.  It’s a touching story and sensitively written – Attila’s quiet love for Rosie is rendered with graceful, domestic gestures, like hunting down her favourite sweets, knowing she may not remember either him, or the sweets.  Forna’s language is simple and rather formal, reflecting her immigrant character’s careful English, and the story’s structure is traditional, starting in the present moment and looping back to the past – Attila and Rosie as young students, dancing, laughing and arguing – before making both Attila and the reader face Rosie’s present decline.  It’s not a particularly inventive or thought-provoking tale – but it’s crafted with great skill, and it does pack an emotional punch.

Sarah Hall’s ‘Butcher’s Perfume’ wins the Best Title prize as far as I’m concerned, but you probably want to hear more than that.  It’s about teenage girls, violence, graft and a twisted honour.  Kathleen, the narrator, falls in with Manda Slessor, only daughter of a notorious local clan – horse-breeders, fighters, descendent of gypsies and ‘fire-mongers’ – and uses the connection to wreak a gruesome vengeance on a despicable neighbour.  Hall evokes her place, the Cumbrian borderlands in the North of England, incredibly well:

‘But sometimes there’s strange beauty up here. It’s found in deep cut places. It’s found in the smoke off the pyres and the pools on the abattoir floor.’  

Ancient enmities, grievances and war haunt the roads and the pages and seep, like a poison drip, into her characters’ lives.  And the characters themselves aren’t far behind, in terms of masterful rendition: the Slessors have a bloody, elemental quality to them that put me in mind of Annie Proulx’s grizzly rural creations.  I haven’t read Sarah Hall’s novels, but if they’re even a fraction as fleshy and memorable as this story, I’ll have to hit the shops before the year is out.  Most of this tale is given over to descriptions of Manda and her family; the present action of the piece is limited to the very end, when Kathleen calls in a favour. It’s enormously atmospheric, and Hall achieves in a handful of pages what some writers struggle to get down in hundreds of thousands of words – a family, a community, a world.

‘If It Keeps On Raining’ is Jon McGregor’s offering; it’s a slow-burner, a quiet, descriptive piece that reveals itself in scraps and hints.  The main character is a policeman who was involved in the Hillsborough football stadium disaster; now out of work, separated from his family and still traumatised, he spends his days by the riverside, building a tree-house to protect his estranged children from the Biblical-style tsunami he sees coming.  McGregor describes the river water, the fisherman on the far bank, the locals who drink in the yacht club and make fun of our protagonist, the weather and the passing boats.  The increasing sense of danger and claustrophobia that builds with the story is shocking; it seems, at first, very contemplative, very natural – and then the violence of people crushed to death, swept away, and the overwhelming fear of a lack of control, of brute force taking over – that replaces the pastoral, relaxed tone, and left this particular reader with a very physical sense of space being invaded, choice removed.  It’s told in a slightly odd way – the nameless narrator reports what this man does, thinks and feels – says ‘He thought you should know.’  He’s probably right.    

The final story in the anthology (we’ve still to swoop back to the start to check out David Constantine’s winning piece, don’t forget) is Helen Oyeyemi’s ‘My Daughter the Racist’ (my Title Comp runner-up).  This one’s set in an African village occupied by foreign soldiers, and the narrator’s eight year-old daughter has announced that from now on, she’s a racist – a racist against the soldiers.  Her widowed mother is struggling with an unwanted marriage proposal, while the child stands up for her people by pelting the soldiers with stones; when one of the soldiers, off-duty and impressed by the girl’s resistance, begins to court the mother, it causes a local scandal and endangers the lives of both mother and daughter. Like Forna’s story, this one is a straightforward narrative, with an uncomplicated structure and clear, simple language – and this makes the tragedy of these women’s lives even more stark and heartbreaking.  And yet Oyeyemi manages to add humour to the mix, too, with the child’s haughty, politicised speech.  It’s no dogmatic tale of Evil Invaders versus Poor Natives, but a more nuanced portrait of an idealistic woman placed in a very difficult position.

And (drum-roll) the winner is David Constantine’s ‘Tea At The Midland’ – the shortest of the lot, so another reminder to those short-story-cynics that size isn’t everything.  Here, an illicit couple sit in the window of the Midland Hotel in Morecambe and argue about truth and perception and beauty.  The man refuses to countenance the frieze on the hotel wall because it was created by a rapist and a paedophile; the woman says his refusal to look at things in isolation means he drains the beauty and the meaning from them.  Finally, they part, and in contrast, she sees a father show his daughter the frieze, and listens as he explains its story.  Constantine’s piece is a blast of intense poetic description and very heightened emotion – a whole relationship reduced to one abstracted argument set to the backdrop of anonymous kite-surfers riding the waves of the huge, flat bay outside.  It’s both tight and intimate, and vast and inhuman; a powerful efffect in such a short story.  I’m guessing this is why the judges chose it – the way the author condenses the couple’s affairs and its tensions into a single short conversation gives most novels a run for their money.  James Naughtie’s introduction describes it as ‘admirably-managed’ which sounds a bit reductive, but it’s easy to see what he means – the simultaneous economy and breadth of it is very impressive.      

Any Cop?: Definitely worth a look (though I’d say a tad expensive for the tiny size of it); there’s not a slacker story in here, and there’s enough range in the five stories to suit different people’s tastes.  Personally, I’d probably have voted for Sarah Hall, but I do have a predilection for gritty teen swearing and violence.  Have a read and see if you agree with me or the judges.  You’ll like it either way.

Valerie O’Riordan