"Words From a Glass Bubble" by Vanessa Gebbie

Words from a Glass Bubble by Vanessa Gebbie

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars


"Words from a Glass Bubble" by Vanessa Gebbie is a collection of nineteen of her short stories, compiled in a handsome hardback from Salt Publishing. There's no overarching narrative, but although the stories are very different, some themes and images crop up more than once.

Gebbie's talent is to shine a light onto her characters, giving us brief insights into their lives, their hopes, their disappointments, and--most of all--their mistakes, before moving on, leaving us with the hope that the characters too will carry on, make better decisions, have better luck, once the spotlight is removed.

Each story has its own voice, from "Words in a Glass Bubble" itself, where a family tries to come to terms with the loss of their son, to "Smoking Down There", where a child naively recounts her friend's story of how she almost inadvertently saved her baby brother from being disposed of at birth. The fragmentary, butterfly narrative convinces as that of a child. 'But then, if you smoked down there why didn't the hairs catch fire? That's what I wanted to know. But the bucket. Why wash out of a bucket when there were perfectly nice china things?'

Gebbie doesn't shy away from the darker side of life. One story, "Irrigation", goes into great detail--too great detail for this reader--about an enema. In "Dodie's Gift", the central character is left lost and wondering, "...if someone takes something you were going to give them anyway, is that stealing?' Reading this story, it's hard to decide whether to give her a hug or a good shake. Either, you think, might damage her beyond repair.

This story contains an image that recurs--'But there, at the bottom of the hollow, a gull has had a meal, and the sand holds white bone, red bone, skin....' The predator devours, leaves what it doesn't want, and moves on. What's been devoured, abandoned, somehow has to move on, too. Its life now may not be what it envisaged, but it still holds significance.

None of the stories is too long, although it's easy to feel some are too short. The characters live on in our minds and we can't help wondering what will happen next. If they'll come out all right.

This collection is definitely one to savour. Read a story, put it down, think about it, come back--the whole can't be devoured in an afternoon.


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"Molly Fox's Birthday" by Deirdre Madden

Molly Fox's Birthday by Deirdre Madden

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars
I think unfortunately I was in the wrong reading mode for this book. I've been set on SFF for too long and nobody switched me to litfic.

In SFF--nay, in commercial fiction generally--you're told:

NEVER begin with a dream sequence
NEVER begin with someone waking up
NEVER have someone describe themselves in a mirror.

"Molly Fox's Birthday" shamelessly breaches rules one and two. The playwright protagonist (who either isn't named or whose name is entirely unmemorable) wakes from a dream and then potters through the rest of her day thinking about her close friends, the eponymous Molly Fox, an attractive vivacious actor, and Andrew Forde, an art historian with a disturbed background and gravitas. It's Molly Fox's birthday, but she's in New York and she doesn't celebrate her birthday anyway.

The narrative goes on to explore the relationships between these three people, and a few others who wander in and out, while examining the nature of bereavement, acting, writing, and other significant topics. Most of this is done in a series of flashbacks, although occasionally characters in the story--who all seem incapable of remembering that Molly's in New York--wander on set for a while.

At first I was waiting somewhat impatiently for the backstory to end and the story to begin; nearly 30 pages in, I realised the backstory WAS the story. A disappointment, certainly--I like scenes, and this novel is 90% gloss. There's an interesting story to be told, but I think for me it would have been more interesting if the novel had started with the narrator's first meeting with Molly, or with the start of her friendship with Andrew, and told the story as it happened, rather than through ruminations and flashbacks.

There are other problems, as well. The dialogue all seems the same regardless of who's speaking, and much of it reads like extracts from articles rather than how people would naturally speak. A bit off-putting really. The narrator has an unfortunate tendency towards repetitiveness. But the worst issue, for me, was that insights that might seem touching and fresh were they come across by the characters in the course of an active narrative seem banal and obvious when presented as the culmination of hours of reflection.

The forty-odd-year old Andrew opines, "One thing the making of this series convinced me about--that memorials of any kind have more to do with the living than the dead."

If we'd seen him going through the process that brought him to that conclusion, if we'd really understood, rather than just being told, in the course of conversation, that his brother's murder had closed him off to this kind of analysis, maybe it wouldn't come across as quite so disturbingly trite.

I am I suppose too set in my opinions as to what makes for an engaging narrative. I like scenes, I like to be shown rather than told, I like elliptical and naturalistic dialogue. Too picky, that's me. Which leaves me thinking that there was a fascinating story here to be told, especially with the glimpses of genuine emotional insights on the part of the narrator that sometimes appear through the gloss. But this isn't the way I would have chosen to tell it.


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English Commonwealth Flag

So I'm upstairs reading The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain: 1649-1815 by N.A.M. Rodger, which opens with the English Commonwealth's Navy (known as the State Navy). And I'm reading about the English Commonwealth's flag. And it occurs to me that never in my life have I ever seen this flag.



And that's ridiculous. So there it is.

Issue 3 Pre-launch Buzz Contest

Issue 3 is an amazing creation, crammed full of stories and art, with poems, Flash fiction and an entertaining report to leaven the mix. Whether we're battling a mechanical daemon in "A Song, a Prayer, an Empty Space" or experiencing jealousy towards unusual rivals in "Soon You Will Be Gone and Possibly Eaten", we're following the theme of Mechanical Flight into strange and unexpected places (and at times flying further afield).

Here's the (self-referential) Pre-launch Buzz Contest: blog about the launch contest with a link back to this post--then leave a comment at this post with a link to your blog post.  You'll be entered to win A FULL SET OF GUD, HARDCOPY (Issues 0-3). If we don't receive at least 100 entries, we reserve the right not to award this prize, so BE SURE TO TELL YOUR FRIENDS!  You've got seven days to help spread the word (give or take -- through the end of Friday, Pacific Standard Time)

BONUS: First ten entries win a PDF of Issue 3!  And we'll spread a few more goodies around if response warrants it. :)

BONUS 2: Everyone creating an account gets a freebie from Issue 3 just for signing up (it'll be in your account, waiting).  Everyone who already had an account?  You've got a new freebie waiting for you, too.

What's in Issue 3?

 
SO SPREAD THE WORD! :D

A Small Announcement

I shall shortly have a slightly bigger announcement to make :). However, this just in:

Nancy Fulda has kindly accepted my story "The Grey" for Anthology Builder.

The idea behind Anthology Builder is devastatingly simple--would-be purchasers choose which of the stories available on the site they want included in their anthology, which is then printed just for them.

"The Grey" was first published in Issue 4 of NFG (RIP), and will, perhaps, feature in one or two future anthologies. Maybe? Who can tell!

If Shackleton Had Had A Mobile Phone....

Two Water Shots

Just a mallard variation? A mallard crossed with...what? It's a mystery!

"The Devil in the White City" by Erik Larson

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson

My review

rating: 2 of 5 stars

Here's how I imagine it went.

Larson: I wanna write a book about the architects who designed the World's Fair in Chicago. Also, pork.

Publisher: Nobody wants to read about architects. They're boring.

Larson: But the World's Fair--

Publisher: Boring.

Larson: The mayor gets murdered.

Publisher: When?

Larson: At the end.

Publisher: (yawns) Too late.

Larson: If I could find some juicy murders to spice it up...?

Publisher: We'd take a look.

This isn't so much a book about Mudgett/Holmes and his unpleasant habit of murdering women and selling their bodies, not to mention murdering children just for the fun of it, but rather a book about the World Fair and its architects and how it was all built and how wonderful it was that Chicago managed to go "neenah neenah" at France for having the audacity to, yanno, hold a fair and get some visitors.

At times, the childishness is breathtaking.

Behind that, and the endless trumpeting of how wonderful it is to pursue power and wealth while people are dying of starvation in the garbage-piled streets (after all, you need all that wealth to get your own children the hell out of there), there's a fairly interesting story about the World Fair, and its architects, and how they all almost got it ready on time despite wasting months choosing a site for it. About Olmsted and his vision for the future of Landscape Architecture. About the electric launches and the first-ever Ferris Wheel. About the woman who won the competition to design the "Woman's Building", who was paid a tenth of what the men got, didn't get to appear in the group picture and was eventually driven into a nervous breakdown by a society dame who wanted to fill the Building with junk...and then disappears from the story. We get to find out all about the mayor's funeral, but not if Sophia Hayden ever recovered.

This book isn't kind to women. It sets the tone by referring to cattle in the stockyards being "murdered". Yep, the callous killings of women and children are equated with the slaughtering of animals. Throughout the book, Larson emphasises how Mudgett/Holmes had an almost vampirical effect on women, yet fails to explain why he had to go out of state to find a suitable victim. I'm sorry, wasn't he surrounded by them? Similarly, Buffalo Bill has all the women at the Fair staring lustfully at him. Sometimes this book has a bigger ego-trip than Mudgett/Holmes's.

Overall, Mudgett/Holmes and his Murder Hotel feel like an afterthought in a book about architects.



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