Rhyming ecopoesis with piss and other literary debuts: Book review of Picador New Writing 13
May 3rd, 2005 by Ashok
(This review appeared earlier in The Hindustan Times, New Delhi.)
New Writing 13
Edited by Toby Litt & Ali Smith
Picador
Indian price L 4.99
paperback; 356 pages
This paperback anthology features 46 disparate short stories and poems under the very broad thematic umbrella of ‘new writing from established writers and names to watch’.
Published in association with The British Council and Arts Council, England, it’s an annual round-up of promising new talent, as well as old talent that has, presumably, lived up to its earlier promise.
It’s one of several similar annual paperback roundups like the Granta series that do for British fiction and poetry what magazines like New Yorker, Esquire and Atlantic Monthly do in the USA: provide a glimpse of what’s new, what’s hot, and what’s not.
Like any such anthology, it’s a mixed bag, a gunny sack from which you warily pull out a few gems, a lot of elegantly composed writerly pieces, a couple of innovative showoffish contributions, and the now inevitable Asian writers - who, it must be said, spring out jack-heeled from the rest of the bunch.
Overall, this is an unremarkable collection.
You could skip it and not miss out on anything important.
The best writers are best read elsewhere - David Mitchell, Fay Weldon, Shyam Selvedurai, Romesh Gunesekara, Nicola Barker, Lawrence Norfolk all have novels or even short story collections that command more attention than their slight contributions here.
So it’s really the new ‘discoveries’ that keep you turning the pages, in the hope of finding that one brilliant writer you’ve never heard of before.
Editors Toby Litt and Ali Smith seem painfully aware of this. In their introduction they speak of the anticipation and care with which they perused the unsolicited submissions, hoping to find that gem of a new talent.
Instead, they admit, what they found was a dismaying number of stories set in what they rightly call ‘Short-Story-Land’, that ’strange, pseudo-English country’ where ‘peculiarly short-story-like things happen’.
Anyone who has been stranded in an airport with too many issues of New Yorker would understand at once what they mean.
They were also disappointed by the ‘dauntingly undaring’ submissions from women writers, most of which were ‘disappointingly domestic, the opposite of risk-taking’.
In the end, though, they express confidence that ’some of the names here you’ve never heard before will become very familiar’.
It’s a dubious expectation: at least one of the writers included, John Logan, seems to have become a professional ‘new talent’ with extracts from his various novels included in several such literary anthologies over the years, without a single novel being taken up by either an agent or a publisher.
Others, like Tim Jarvis, Donald Paterson, Martin Ouvry, wax eloquent in their author bios at the back of the book about their first novels-in-progress, clearly hoping to lure agents and editors.
But there is genuine talent on display here.
Azmeena Ladha’s Twenty Gods and the Pomegranate Seeds is a marvelously wrought story with a delicacy of style and phrase that’s very accomplished for a debutante.
Romesh Gunesekara’s Goat, while not quite a successful story in itself, has a beautifully written last paragraph that redeems the entire story.
Kamila Shamsie’s Miscarriage, while not particularly remarkable as a story, is eeirily reminiscent of Michael Oondatje in its use of cinematic-literary cross-cuts: “The boy tripped, hit his chin on the handlebar of a bicycle. The man snapped open his lighter and, scant feet away, the boy’s mouth filled with blood.”
Heloise Shepherd, apparently still 18 and studying at University, turns in a perfectly shaped story that is more readable than many others in this book.
The borders between literary fiction and genre fiction having been boldly crossed by giants of the contemporary novel like Haruki Murakami, Kazuo Ishiguro and David Mitchell, it’s not surprising to find strong elements of fantasy, science fiction and horror in several of the stories.
A.S. Irvine’s Novel is a wild, whacked-out, inventively imaginative ride through one writer’s imagination. Niall Griffiths’ Adrenalin, Tim Jarvis’ Beyond the Pale and Peter Hobbs’ Deep Blue Sea, apart from the fact that all three writers’ names end with ’s’, are equally playful in their use of genre tropes for literary effect.
The other running theme is of art, with Lawrence Norfolk’s very enjoyable essay The Words on the Page and the Noise in My Head vying with Paul Bailey’s The Stricken Nightingale and several others for the best ‘writing about writing’.
But veteran Muriel Spark trumps them all with a short yet amusingly insightful poem Authors’ Ghosts.
David Mitchell, who, with just three novels, deservedly occupies the highest place among contemporary novelists, turns in a rare short offering, Hangman, about the plight of a stuttering schoolboy.
Speaking of poetry, Ramona Herdman’s Eight poems are beautiful and almost worth the price of admission themselves.
As are Ciaran Carson’s simple, and simply splendid The Lemon Trees and Ballad Written in a Hospital.
But my personal favourite was Gerard Woodward’s Ecopoesis, apart from the fact that any poet who can rhyme ecopoesis with piss has my admiration.
So in the end, do we make any new discoveries after all?
Well, let’s see.
There’s Azmeena Ladha, Kamila Shamsie, A.S. Irvine, Ramona Herdman, Gerard Woodward who stand out.
But for me personally, Martin Ouvry’s Narcissus is simply brilliant, perhaps the best piece in the book.
It’s for this kind of unexpected brilliance that you feel, that perhaps anthologies like this aren’t an exercise in futility. Bring on New Writing 14.
