How to write about How to Gut a Fish? Not by using fish and knife analogies, although Sheila Armstrong certainly has a scalpel sharpness. Let’s begin instead by saying that this collection of 11 short stories is, from first to last, poised, distinctive and excellent.
The short story has its own arcana. And people often like to conceptualise the form as a kind of Fabergé egg, finely wrought, pristine, perfect, all that fine filigree work capturing a moment of realisation or something. But it can operate in other ways too, as Sheila Armstrong shows. Hole, about villagers disappearing into the earth, and Dome, a rolling, panoramic seascape, are wide-angle compositions, vigilant and beautifully observed. We close in on certain individuals and then move out again, once more in and out again, to cumulatively expansive effect.
The short story can be “the art of the glimpse”, the snapshot, but again Sheila Armstrong can work differently. Because that needn’t be the way. In Cautery, for example, the reader encounters Anna’s grandfather, then learns of her childhood and her life as a student before eventually moving to Spain. It’s less a quick take and more an exploration of repeated elements across generations, the detail freighted with significance. In Lemons, my favourite story in the collection, we see two sisters as children, then as adults. Days, years, decades skip, as we are held in worlds of complication and strangeness.
Because, yes, there is definitely oddness in this collection. A family is consumed by an animal – “It swallowed for the first time at our knees, and then we slipped in like a minecart on rails” – and people are eaten by a sinkhole. Other characters encounter a star jelly, which skewers the world into kaleidoscopic pieces. Often the oddness is all the more disquieting for being located in a scene of relative normality.
In the stunning Red Market, there is a country marketplace complete with a mobile falafel van, and a stall selling CBH oil and cosmetics. There’s a statue of Freddie Mercury, a PlayStation controller and “a disembowelled Xbox”. But what’s that over there, beside the secondhand le Creuset roasting tins? It’s a girl on display, her “elbows bound together behind her back. Her shoulder blades are sharpened like the wings of a moth, and her ankles are tied to her wrists.”
The risk is that the unexpected can swiftly become the norm. When a door is opened by a hippo or a pair of boxing gloves becomes cows’ udders we can think, oh well that’s just what happens in a book like this. No biggie. But Armstrong doesn’t allow the strangeness ever to become normative. People may be eaten by the earth, but it’s just as likely that we will be invited into the lonely life of a hit-and-run driver who likes making things, or that we might consider the bond between sisters.
Armstrong’s expression is so quietly, routinely inventive. The particular shine of a hare’s eyes in the dark. The feel of polystyrene between someone’s teeth. The look of what remains when a chapter is cut from a book. But ultimately that’s not going to be enough, for me at least. All of that kind of thing needs to be put to some purpose. And it is.
There’s a cool look at the casual malevolence of the natural world, but also its beauty and otherness; there’s the precarious nature of existence; there’s parenthood, wonder, change, routine, fear, travel, love. There’s sustained focus on the body, particularly its vulnerability: the naked girl in the marketplace, commodified, reduced to her constituent parts; and in The Skellington Dance a child’s scar “bright pink after heat, the double row of needlepoints [escorting] the exquisite straightness of a spine”. In another story a spinal cord twists like “the kneading of a cat”. And a child peers through the hole in an old man’s calf.
Children appear frequently and variously; they are vulnerable, precious and self-absorbed, among other things, but never cute. Thirteen-year-old girls, friends so new that the “thread between them remains spiderweb thin”, jump into the sea and are “pulled under into a swirling, grey-green crypt”.
A man, in his final moments, thinks sadly of his younger sister’s daughter, her smile like “freshwater pearls”. A grandfather delights his little grand-daughter with drawings of composite creatures, lobsters with the heads of rabbits, before she disappears back to Australia with no wave of acknowledgement, only the “casual cruelty of a child”. A baby has a yellow eye socket from an accidental kick when she shuffled to her parents’ room late at night.
For sure, there is Sheila Armstrong’s novel to look forward to. Bloomsbury will publish that in due course. In Cautery, a child is asked, as children often are, what she is going to be and she responds simply, but to much adult laughter, that she already is. Likewise, for now, let’s just enjoy this great collection.
Wendy Erskine’s second collection Dance Move, is published by Stinging Fly Press
