I don’t read as much new writing as I should. I’m currently
rereading some
Kelman and
Irvine Welsh, tried and trusted, although they make
strange bedfellows. There is so much new writing out there that sometimes it’s
difficult to make a choice. A couple of years ago I was introduced to
Jim Murdoch's work, and have subsequently published some of his poetry
here and
here on Wee Fictions, so it was with anticipation that I received a review copy of
‘
Making Sense’, his new collection of short stories. The stories Murdoch has
included are, in the main, first person narratives – monologues, if you like.
Indeed, one of them, ‘Funny Strange’, one of four stories written in a variety
of dialects, was originally performed on stage. This, I find, gives a certain
form to the collection, in that the reader soon gets into a rhythm. As I read
further into the book, I began to wonder how Murdoch managed to create nineteen
distinct voices for the nineteen stories gathered here.
Murdoch is best known for his poetry and
novels, but it’s clear
from the outset that he knows what he is doing with the short story form. The
flow of ideas in the characters’ heads manages to keep the reader engaged. The
first story, ‘√-1’, is about a man who is obsessed with numbers. He is regarded
as the ‘local eccentric’ and wants to tell us why he ended up visiting his
doctor. The first line of the story is
It was not a nervous
breakdown.
which immediately grabbed my attention. A nervous breakdown?
Denial? It is followed by
Those were the six
words he used but that was not what he meant…Often we say things we do not mean
or say one thing and mean something else entirely…As a doctor his words would
carry weight…We trust them because we have to trust someone or we would all go
crazy.
The main character, Thomas, relates everything to numbers.
They are the crutch he leans on:
Mathematics is the
language of the universe. Numbers never lie. They never let you down. So many
things in this life disappoint.
After some digression, he gets round to telling us about the
visit to his doctor:
I was not taken on
time. The wall clock in the waiting room was wrong but even taking that into
account he was still four minutes late and seven minutes late by my watch which
I had checked with the BBC only that morning. It would be too much to believe
that the BBC had the wrong time.
There is so much in this story, but there has to be. Thomas is an obsessive. As in all of the stories in this collection, Murdoch makes
some excellent observations:
He frowned and tapped
his pen on the desk. It was an old Parker 61 fountain pen in burgundy…it must
have been the first bars of a tune because in Morse code it was nonsense…You
cannot attribute old-fashioned values to someone simply because they write with
an old-fashioned pen.
and
I have found that
there is an order to things and there is never anything left after the point if
you do your sums right.
That last part is the crux of the story. ‘…there is never
anything left after the point if you do your sums right’. This is Thomas’s problem. He needs numbers to make sense of his life, and he knows
that if he tweaks them in just the right way then everything will make sense.
Don’t we all do that to some extent? I well remember studying undergraduate
chemistry – it seemed that the whole laboratory were fudging our titration
results because, having boned up on the theory, we knew what the answer was supposed to be. But life isn’t lived under
laboratory conditions, and there is no textbook to crib from. Why would someone
feel the need to fudge their results, to make things come out the way they, for
want of a better word, should? Is it to avoid the truth that we are all just
winging it?
Thomas eventually has a rather public nervous
breakdown – he has a vision of an angel who speaks the language of numbers. Is
this the divine personification of √-1? That’s the way I choose to read it.
One can’t help but notice the variety of voices and themes in
the stories. In ‘Poise’, the unnamed narrator has a reverie about a woman on
the bus. The narrator harbours feelings for the woman, but can’t approach her.
Murdoch strings the reader along nicely here (I won’t give away the ending) but
again he touches on themes which are much deeper than you might assume on a
first reading. Interestingly, the woman appears later in the book – in the story
‘Islands’ (a number of stories have female narrators) – and so we get to see things
from the other side:
Sometimes, on the bus
to work, I get the feeling I'm not alone. Of course I'm not on my own—I 'm surrounded
by thirty or forty people—but none of them are with me. Only sometimes I get an
inkling that feeling might be wrong. I look for Billy but he's never there.
In ‘Objects of Affection and Intention’, a young woman, Eve,
finds out, quite graphically, that her boyfriend is gay. Sexuality features in
quite a few of these stories and Murdoch is good at writing about it – one of
the reasons he’s good at it is because he knows how to make it funny. Better
than Irvine Welsh, I would say, who lays it all on rather too thickly for my
47-year-old sensibilities (although I thought he was the bee’s knees when I was
27). Eve tells her mother that she has broken up with her boyfriend and
immediately gets grief:
…she knew I needed to
be out of the house for something to happen with my life.
Getting over David
wasn’t the problem. I was the problem.
She decides to take art classes and, after a few weeks,
poses nude when the model doesn’t show up. She becomes an object for the other
students in the class:
When the class was
painting, it wasn’t painting me, it was painting my body and that was fine. I
didn’t mind being a body for them. I minded being a body for David. I thought I
didn’t but I guess it turns out I did.
Her teacher asks her about her painting:
‘What’s the subject?’…
‘A skull and some pears?’… ‘No, no, no. They’re the objects. You are the
subject of everything you paint. It’s through these objects that you get to
understand yourself.’
Murdoch, of course, isn’t just talking about painting.
‘Jewelweed’ – for me, the highlight of ‘Making Sense’ –
features a man talking about how he met his schoolteacher wife. I think Murdoch
should have placed this as the last story in the collection. There is humour in
all of the stories, as well as depth, as I’ve already mentioned, but some parts
of this story are absolutely hilarious. The theme here is different from
elsewhere, in that a man is trying to make sense of his partner. This is in
contrast to most of the other stories, where the protagonists try to make sense
solely of their own existence.
Have you ever caught a
glimpse of yourself in a mirror and seen yourself for what you are, seen beyond
the façade? Vivienne had. I still catch her looking from time to time staring
at herself with a kind of question mark hanging over her head. I asked her once
what exactly she was looking for but she said she didn’t know because every
time she looked it wasn’t there. She wanted to be more than the sum of her
parts, not less.
The jewelweed…its
common name is ‘touch-me-not’ and it’s called that because, like other
varieties of Impatiens, its seedpods, when ripe, will burst open at the
slightest touch.
I like the subtle sexual undertones of that. No undertones
in the next part, which almost had me falling out of my seat laughing:
…if you’d said to me
within six weeks she would’ve given up her forty-year-old virginity to me
across her creaky kitchen table one rainy Saturday afternoon—accompanied by a
recording of the BBC Philharmonic performing the final movement of Mahler’s Fifth
Symphony at the Proms on Radio 3—I
might’ve been shocked, but a part of me would also have been intrigued at the
prospect…Afterwards – to be frank it didn’t take too long—we gathered ourselves
together but when she took one look at me with my hands on my knees and my
trousers still at half-mast, wheezing like an old bull, she burst out laughing.
You know, that kind of infectious laugh that makes you giddy. I looked back at
her hanging out of her dress—I’ll never forget the look on her face and I can
only imagine the look on mine – and I was off too. I’m sure the rapturous
applause of the Albert Hall’s audience helped.
What I most liked about this story is the way the narrator
is made to analyse his wife as a means of analysing himself:
Nowadays, when I look
at Vivienne I know I’m judging myself. I’m pretty sure many think I’ve settled
whereas she’s dug her claws in and hung on for dear life in case her last
chance slips away but it wasn’t like that.
This is a nice twist at the end of the book. When it comes
down to it, this is what we all do when we are involved in relationships. We
try to work each other out. Sometimes we are successful, but you can never
really understand someone else completely. The main point of Murdoch’s stories
is that we can never really understand ourselves completely, either, despite
the internal monologue each and every one of us is privy to.
I realise that I’ve quoted heavily from the book, perhaps
too heavily for a review of this length. However, I wanted to give you a
flavour of Jim Murdoch’s writing as I believe you can only really appreciate
stories as good as these by reading them. With ‘Making Sense’, Murdoch shows us
what an accomplished writer he is. You can get a copy here:
