I’ve never quite got into Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series but I’ve happily lapped up several of her standalones and so was pleased to find this volume of short stories, published in 2024.
Yes, the uncapitalised title says it all. They don’t. These stories plunge us into a world of talking horses, fairytale princesses, hapless women trying to pick a way through the 21st century, a character called Franklin who keeps popping up at different points in his doomed (maybe) life. There’s a sparky story about the engagement he gets himself trapped into but there’s something very odd about the coven of women in the family home of his future wife, as he soon discovers. Each of these stories is a discrete tale but there are witty cross references, The Void, for example is a world shattering phenomenon somewhere between Covid and what happened in John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos – and, after one story, which is centred on it, is repeatedly referred to as a quirky, quasi dystopian given.
In places these stories are laugh-aloud funny. My favourite is about a second-rate, dimmish American actress and porn star named Skylar who meets a “spare” British prince who falls in love with her. Not, of course, that it rang any bells …
And I loved Pamela! who thinks and talks in exclamation marks and has “been thoroughly divorced for some years now.” The characterisation is terrific. Yes of course she’s exaggerated, like a well-meaning, but absurd, Jane Austen character, but the observation is bitingly shrewd. We all know a Pamela!
And woven into all this are issues of fertility, folklore and the conventions of fairy tale narrative: the Queen, for example, who rules over a queendom that is between sunrise and sunset and whose heart is “sore because she had no child”. So she visits a wise woman, who of course, lives deep in the heart of a nearby forest and the deal, inevitably comes with a curse. And that’s linked with Florence, who lives in a different milieu and whose family is seeking a benign au pair.
These intelligent stories are wickedly clever, often surreal and gripplingly entertaining.
Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce
