‘Ripe and red like blisters of blood’ – The Beautiful Indifference by Sarah Hall

The Beautiful Indifference is Sarah Hall’s fifth book and her first short story collection. So far I’ve only read one of her novels (How To Paint A Dead Man), though The Carhullan Army’s been on my wish-list for ages, and, now, having devoured The Beautiful Indifference, my determination to get hold of her back catalogue has only increased. It’s not a long book – a mere seven stories – but it’s a powerful sample of work from a writer whose talent isn’t showing any signs of waning.

My first introduction to Hall’s writing, other than by reputation, was via the inclusion of her story, ‘Butcher’s Perfume’, in the BBC National Short Story Award Anthology 2010. The story didn’t win that year’s competition (though I still maintain that it ought to have done) and a year later, it still strikes me with the same raw power and heat that it did last winter. When I reviewed it then, I said it had a ‘bloody, elemental quality’, and I stand by that. It’s the story of teenage Kathleen who becomes unlikely friends with Manda Slessor, the only daughter of an infamous Cumbrian clan of horse-breeders and gypsies. When Kathleen discovers a neighbour’s deformed and misused horse, the Slessors wreck a bloody revenge upon the guilty farmer. It’s a story as much about the violent history and legacy of the Borders landscape as it about the two girls’ friendship or Manda’s unusual family: ‘This was burnt-farm, red-river, raping territory.’ And Hall’s huge triumph is in not reducing her characters to brutal, single dimensions – there’s as much love and pride in ‘Butcher’s Perfume’ as there is fear and intimidation.

Following that gut-punching opener, we’ve got the title story, ‘The Beautiful Indifference’, a haunting tale about (massive spoiler alert!) a woman’s final meeting with her young lover before she kills herself. This one’s all about the unbridgeable gulf between people, the secrets that we all hold, and in what seems to be a characteristic of Hall’s work, it’s steeped in nature and cruelty. The protagonist’s backstory – her mother’s suicide, the injury of a class pet – is slipped in skilfully, and the hopeful, waiting figure of the father is heart-breaking. This was one of my favourites – it’s bleak, yet beautiful, and the ending (sorry, I know I ruined it for you) hit me like a slap in the face.

In ‘Bees’, the narrator finds herself single in London, having walked out on her abusive, unfaithful husband; she has to restart her life in a new environment, feeling as though she’s lost part of herself. Here Hall uses the same second-person narration she used, I think, to greater effect in How To Paint A Dead Man; there, the dislocated voice was that of a bereaved twin, and here, it’s that of a woman torn asunder by the breakdown of her relationship and it doesn’t have quite the same necessity. Aside from that, though, it’s a strong story, and the final scene, with a ‘blaze-red’ urban fox is really affirming – which isn’t a quality I expected to find, here.

‘The Agency’ is possibly the weakest story – a woman, dissatisfied with her suburban life and marriage, is referred to the eponymous Agency by a friend, and the Agency, of course, turns out to be a discreet male prostitution service, established, it’s hinted, by that same friend. There’s a touch of The Witches of Eastwick in this one, with its coven of glamorous ladies taking control of their own lives, but the reveal (the brothel) is rather weak, and though the Stepford Wife-esque atmosphere is interesting, it feels like well-worn ground.   

‘She Murdered Mortal He’ is a return to form, then, with its African jungle setting, a treacherous sea, menacing creatures and relationship-meltdown, not to mention the bloody finale (I’ll spare you the spoiler here). Relationships feature strongly in this collection, and in this one Hall nails the shock and helplessness of an unexpected break-up. The narrator’s panic and terror as she’s chased down the shore-line by an animal unknown; the locals’ nervousness around her; the vivid descriptions of the pull of the sea and the precipitous dunes: this story is thirty pages long, but it’s got the power of twice that. Plus she really gets the disorientation of the European in Africa: ‘Now the birds around her sounded electrical, like mobile phones.’ Brilliant.

‘The Nightlong River’ is also about loss, but this time about the loss of a friend. While Magda gets sicker and sicker, Dolly helps her brothers hunt mink, the scourge of the area, so she can sew a cape for her friend. Magda, dying, instructs that she be buried in it. So it’s about mourning and heartache, but, like ‘Butcher’s Perfume’, it’s also about the land and the permanence of our connection with the land. Dolly says,

‘What remains are moors and mountains, the solid world upon which we find ourselves, and in which we reign.’

Well, the land is definitely where Sarah Hall reigns. Listen to this: ‘Everywhere [the berries] were hung and clotted in the bushes, ripe and red, like blisters of blood.’ Glorious.

The final, unpronounceable, story is ‘Vuotjärvi’, which lifts us out of England and plants us on the edge of a Scandinavian lake, where a couple have gone on holiday. The man swims out to a distant island and the woman, left behind, gets nervous and sets off after him in their boat, forgetting to do a vital safety-check first. The tone here escalates from languid to terrified in a way that will ring bells with anyone who’s ever had a moment of irrational fear about a loved one’s safety, and the protagonist’s heart-thumping sense of doom switches her from grief to defiant, crude self-preservation so powerfully in the last instants of the story that I almost felt like I, too, was out on that sinking boat.    

Any Cop?: Yes, without a doubt. Go and buy it. All of you.

Valerie O’Riordan