An Account of the Decline of the Great Auk, According to One Who Saw It by Jessie Greengrass
John Murray Originals, 2015
Ebook*, 192 pages
*Review copy kindly provided by the publisher via Netgalley
Who could resist the title of this short story collection? It promised something faintly grandiose, something amused and aware of it's own pomposity, something flush with character. Which is pretty much what Jessie Greengrass offers in her debut work: a deftly accomplished assembly of stories, written with a strange mix of gravitas and fun. I got what I came for, with stories about stranded Antarctic whalers befriending penguins; survivalists dreaming about finding the perfect cat video on Youtube; job-hunters fantasizing that about becoming polar bear hunters on Svalbard; and middle aged men waking up surrounded by dead people. There is a lot going on in this slim meticulously crafted collection.
An Account of the Decline... came out last July (this is one of those neglected Netgalley requests I was referring to in my New Year's Resolution post) from JM Originals, a new imprint of John Murray dedicated to "fresh and distinctive" writing. "Fresh and distinctive" being, I assume, a synonym for "niche", for writing that they wouldn't otherwise publish because of the risk. Debut short story collections are notoriously difficult to sell, and it's hardly surprising that Greengrass represented a bit of shot in the dark.
I think it's a measure of how much I enjoyed this collection that when I sat down to chose about my favourite story, I couldn't decide which to settle on. Instead, I'll say that I had two favourite types of story. First, the period pieces: the title story, plus "The Lonesome Southern Trials of Knut the Whaler" and "Theophrastus and the Dancing Plague", which together use the past to evoke hardship, arrogance, loneliness and ecological tragedy. Greengrass has a strangely antiquated writing style, dense with complex many-claused sentences, that suits the cadence of her settings. It's eight parts eloquence, one part humour and one part histrionics; it's a pleasure to read. Here she is, for example, musing on the causes of the dancing plagues in "Theophrastus and the Dancing Plague":
Might he not see how how after years of shuffling to misery's stolid ostinato one's life might, in the space between this breath and the next, become intolerable; how, desperate for escape, one might step out into the street and, in the lifting of the breeze, find a call to more rapid movement; how fierce joy might rise in equal parts with anger and despair to fill and feed itself; and how, having started, one could not stop, there being no way out but to return.
Second, the interiority pieces, by which I mean the stories which are told by anonymous first person narrators in hindsight about experiences from earlier times in their lives. "On Time Travel", "Other Jobs" and "The Politics of Minor Resistance", for example, each focus on people in moments of extremis, at a time of strain and self doubt, whether because of the death of a father, unemployment or psychological inertia. They are less stories and more excerpted clarifications about past selves, snapshots made from a distant emotional stillness. Some are incredibly beautiful - "On Time Travel", in which a grieving child dreams that it is possible to step through a door into the past, particularly so - while others find humour in the banal horror of, say, choosing the better of all evil desks for your shift at a soulless call centre. They don't have a plot really to speak of; they are more like confessional monologues, or emotional cluster bombs.
That said, some stories didn't quite deliver for me. "Winter, 2058", one of several sf pieces, seemed a build a lot of momentum only to dismiss the tension too quickly. The narrator recounts, at length, their experiences of observing phenomena at so-called 'intrusion sites' - wild places in England where time and space have started to go a bit woozy - generating a pleasurable sensation of unease, but this dissipates rather too rapidly and readily in the final paragraphs. "Three Thousand, Nine Hundred and Forty Five Miles", in which a research student spends a lonely summer struggling with her thesis and missing her ambivalent boyfriend, resonated with me on one level - a very good evocation of what it feels like to struggle with a PhD - but felt rather flat and slight on another.
After a while the smooth accomplishment of Greengrass's tone, seductive as it is, starts to seem troubling. Each story is written with the same ornate, antiquarian style with little delineation from one narrator to the next. Whether they're recounting a trip to an aquarium aged nine or the extinction of a sea bird or the banality of job searching, each individual speaks with the same voice. It doesn't matter whether they're addressing you from the past, present or future. And, since all but three of stories are first-person narrations, this increasingly struck me as problematic. So that while I consider the couple of hours I spent with with these stories very well spent, I can't call them an unmitigated pleasure.
~~Victoria~~