It is intriguing that Camilla Grudova’s The Coiled Serpent – her first book since being named one of Britain’s best young novelists – is a collection of short stories.
As in her superb 2017 collection The Doll’s Alphabet, Grudova’s wonder-full tales read like the cheese-dreams of a condemned person, careering majestically between the astonishing and the terrible to create something uniquely gripping. However – where her previous stories were largely placeless – the relentless neo-Victorian hysteria which infuses these pieces is recognisably British. One of the most brilliant, ‘Ivor’, is set in a lifelong boarding school. The pupils grow up, grow old but never leave. This is never questioned though, the story is instead about their idolising of Ivor, the strangely evergreen head boy.
What makes Grudova’s writing seem weird is her prodigious instinct for story. By throwing out all the naturalistic furniture with which ‘normal’ writers fill their work, she makes for exhilarating new connections, so that reading them feels like being in the back seat of a stunt car.
Nor does her surreality ever feel whimsical – the narration is definite, matter-of-fact and deeply compelling; the batshi**ery fuels her stories with an oddly swirling energy, creating tiny eddies of pure storyness; for example, in ‘The Zoo’ we read that: “Four months after Fan died, the painter returned to her grave and had her coffin dug up so that he could retrieve his drawings.”
Grudova notices with a sensuous, omnivorous fascination for people – we feel that, instead of inventing, she is uncovering the lives of people as she goes.
The concision and pace makes for thrilling escalations – ‘Madame Flora’s’ is set in a Victorian sanatorium for women who do not appear to be menstruating. When a young man sneaks into these very oppressive confines, the inmates make the most of him, one of them sitting on him, “while the other girls cut him and drank from him like a fountain in a garden.”
Many of the protagonists are ridiculously poor (the narrator in ‘The Meateater’ writes: “My a****le itched all the time, but the worms made me feel less alone.”) With very little to lose, the characters’ astonishing agency comes from their desperations, forming a book that features a very satisfying amount of blood, custard, poison and other relishes.
