Thomas Morris’s 2019 debut, We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, was a vibrant, varied collection of stories that announced a writer of note. The book went on to win the Wales Book of the Year Award, the Rhys Davies Trust Fiction Award and a Somerset Maugham Award. Named earlier this year as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, his stories have been broadcast on BBC4 and published in Zoetrope, Best European Fiction and The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story.
Originally from Wales, Morris has lived in Dublin for a number of years, where he is editor-at-large at the Stinging Fly. His new collection, Open Up, has the same probing intensity as his debut, but the stories feel riskier, an author opening himself up to new forms and styles with a notable playfulness and ingenuity.
The first surprise is that there are only five stories in this relatively short book, which in the hands of another writer might be too few. Morris uses the space to his advantage, taking the reader deep into the worlds and mindsets of characters who are invariably undergoing some kind of personal crisis, many of them rooted in family and legacy, others in a more general existentialist malaise.
Morris is a clever writer who doesn’t advertise his cleverness. His stories of disenfranchised lives are philosophical in tone yet retain a sense of urgency because the big questions are grounded in character, in the protagonists’ attempts to find meaning and a place for themselves in a world that is often beyond their comprehension. As with another recent Faber publication, Yan Ge’s collection Elsewhere, the diverse forms these stories take feel earned, surprising, not tokenistic. There’s method in the madness.
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In Passenger, a young Welsh man, Geraint, is on his first foreign holiday with his girlfriend Niamh, trying desperately to hide from her his emotional baggage, fearful she will leave him if she discovers who he really is. Narrated largely in the third person, shifts into the surreal, the past and the second person voice work wonderfully to highlight Geraint’s pernicious self-loathing: “And now you must dwell in this sorry place, where the tides are drawn by hostile moons … And then you say out loud: if I treated others the way I treat myself, I’d be in jail by now.”
In other stories, a soft humour is used to achieve an intimacy of voice. “Slow down, will you? I’m literally only ten,” says the boy narrator of the opening story, Wales, en route to a football match with his dad. The second story, Aberkariad, goes from incredible to utterly convincing within a few short pages because of the witty narrative voice that charts the lonely, unfulfilling existence of seahorses: “He said he wanted more from life than a succession of casual encounters, followed by multiple births and the dereliction of parental duty.”
Morris’s instincts as a writer are on show again here: the impact of this deceptively whimsical story creeps up on the reader and ends up being effective not in spite of but rather because of the fact it’s about a seahorse, whose hopes and fears are both of our world and estranged from it. Similarly, the final story, Closing Teeth, mixes fantasy and reality, featuring a young vampiric man thirsting for escape from his life trapped at home in Caerphilly caring for “Mother”. All Glyn wants is a dentist to give him fangs – a fantastical, funny set-up with the serious undertones of a person desperately seeking surgery in the hope of a clearer sense of identity and belonging.
If it all gets a bit What We Do in the Shadows meets The Truman Show by the end, this is offset by the amount of insight Morris packs in along the way: “Sometimes we encounter people who strip us of everything: they puncture holes in our ozone, and they destroy our atmosphere, disrupt our magnetic poles.”
The psychological impact of early losses is a recurring theme, the elusive quest for identity in adulthood that seems nebulously tied to the past. Little Wizard explores this to great effect with an unreliable narrator, Big Mike, whose feelings for his schoolfriend Rhian form the surface part of a story with darker depths, a sense of menace that is underpinned, once again, by self-loathing and loneliness: “Whoever this person was, whoever had been going around pretending to be him, they were pathetic. He took a photo, to catch the imposter off-guard.”
Cumulatively, the five stories combine to an impressive whole. As with the best short stories, they expand not necessarily on the page but in the reader’s mind. Open Up is an enjoyable, rewarding book whose wacky scenarios contain multitudes – a thrilling excavation of lives under water in more ways than one.
