Feedback by Sheila Roberts
First report
Working Late — Patrick Cairns
Café dreams — Dave Chislet
No fear of Virginia Woolf — Jacklyn Cock
Pancho Gonzales and Maxwell’s Demon — Tickey de Jager
Walking among chickens — Vicky Scholtz
The first problem with this story is that, apart from the surprising line midway down page l, “His words still caused her to shudder,” the reader has no clue what the narrative is going to be about. Something strange, yes, but what? Perhaps a more dramatic way to have begun the story would be with the paragraph on page 2 beginning “She hadn’t slept in two nights.”
The story begins very close to its own climax and anticlimax. The reader finishes reading it without a clear and trenchant sense of why this woman should want to kill herself. The style is too discursive and therefore lacking in the vitality of strong memories, remembered conversations, enacted scenes — all of which would bring the reader closer to this woman’s predicament. The omniscient author, controlling all, keeps the woman in the deadening position of manipulated puppet, reducing her lived reality, and not exploring the nature of her (obviously) despairing thoughts.
The idea is a good one; that of a woman on the very brink of suicide but stepping back. But I think the story could be improved if it started earlier in the day, showed her leaving the office and then returning to it in the early hours of the morning. Such a return in the darkness would really build tension. It’s not enough that, at the end, she should have a vision of a new life if the narrative has not made clear what the quality of her old life was.
The writing is very good and the details inventive and interesting, which makes me believe that Patrick Cairns could do much more with this story — he has the ability. He should entrust the narrative entirely to the suicidal woman. For instance, I did not like the way the moon was forced to participate in the character’s mood. Who is it that thinks “a nervous moon” and “The moon breathed relief?” Certainly not the woman.
I was not sure how to interpret her focusing on the newspaper sent “cartwheeling down the road by the wind”. The images and similes concerning the paper are excellent, but the fact of a piece of newspaper blowing away seems too light to carry the significance it is given at the end of that paragraph. Also, her seeing her own life, or lack of it, within the “artistic mayhem” of the two paintings hanging in the office does not help the reader; we are not allowed to see what she truly sees. We do not know what has driven this woman to suicide; therefore, we hardly care whether she jumps or not. I also thought the explanation that her near-suicide brought her “close to the ultimate expression of her individuality” was unevocative and, in a sense, trivialized the act of suicide. Also, her reading once again the warning on the cigarette pack seemed a trivialization of what she has nearly done.
In summary, I think this story could be pulled together and given weight and immediacy if the author would begin it earlier in the day; give the woman a flesh and blood physicality and an appearance, and allow her to dwell clearly on why her life has turned out the way it has — who are the people harming her and why. Let her explain why she perceives that she has come to this dead-end and what factors then lead her to alter her terrible plan. The story could then take on power.
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This piece lacks most of the elements that readers expect from stories. There is no development of plot or character, no build-up of tension, no complex significance to its own existence. However, the writing is quite marvellous — sensuous, cadenced, and evocative. The images (which I should like to refer to later) are fresh and immediate. All the same, “Café Dreams” seems to me the colourful yet haunting beginning of a longer work, even of a novel.
Like some of the most memorable stories and novels, the narrative relies on the power of memory to transform not only the past but also the present. The juxtaposition of scenes in the present, affected by their relation to the past, is expertly, cinematically controlled.
While the remembering narrator has no physical heft or solidity, what we learn about him, now in his thirties, is how full of life, naughtiness, and energy he was as a ten-year-old, and how likeable. The reader wants to know him better now; wants to follow his car to where he is going (eating stolen candy bars) to the life he lives as an adult.
What is also remarkable about this short-short or slice-of-life is that, apart from some clear references to his boyishness, the story does not insist on the gender of the narrator. Nor does it care to emphasize race or class; nor follow the predictable pattern of looking back on childhood with resentment. This man, about to enter the shabby café badly in need of renovation, notices with mild humour “a scrawny, nondescript dog” that “huddles in the slightest pool of shade, not even lifting its head to question my arrival.” He is wearing “shades” but is bare-footed — surely by choice, or is this an indication of his poverty? As memories of another café like this one, but of his youth, begin to affect his senses, his sharpest recollection is of his brother, a “member of the pack”, cool, skilled, and admired. Dave Chislet envelopes the reader in visual, auditory, and tactile metaphors and images until the fact of the café is overwhelming. I loved the sentence “Yesterday roars in my ears like skateboard wheels on concrete pavements, like bicycle tyres thrumming on tar …” and the phrase “the furious flood” as the girl he has asked out says yes.
I enjoyed the contrast between the young man, living in two time-frames, and the stolid Greek woman behind the counter (the old one or one now like her) who has remained the same. But before he can make his purchases, the man is forced into the old embarrassment of remembering losing his mother’s money — “so much money to lose, so much trust to misplace”. And “My now much bigger ears burn again in remembrance while I stall at the fridge — pinned moth-like in its watery glare.” Superb similes!
I was highly amused by the parallel of the lethargic dog lying in the shade when he enters the café and the SPCA dog waiting for his money when he walks outside; by his remarking at how qualities of bread have changed over time; and by his memory of his own boyish nonchalance when he had lost at pinball.
The ending is just right for the nature of this story. A small, unimportant theft of two Bar Ones which — though he doesn’t touch on this — must at that point have had no firm chocolate to bite off, given the heat and where he has hidden them.
If Dave Chislet has no interest in extending this story, I hope that with his remarkable talent he will consider writing much more extended narratives.
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This is a well-written and engrossing story. I enjoyed its grounding in the Cotswolds and the fine evocative details that enhanced my sense of setting.
However, there are a few occasions when the reader — this reader — needs answers to questions. For instance, is Angela a well-built, strong woman? We assume she must be if she can drown a grown woman in a bathtub, drag her outdoors in a blanket, dig her grave and get her corpse into it. I think some physical depiction of Angela would enrich the story. So far, she is shadowy. Apart from her dark curly hair and narrow face the reader cannot visualize her. In fact, Sarah is also merely a compilation of thoughts, interspersed with some short passages of dialogue. Her physicality, her appearance would help to clarify the story, suggesting her small size, perhaps, and her “wholesomeness.”
Then: Why ever would Sarah, determined to turn Angela over to the police, first decide to take a bath and have her hair washed? This action seems a contrivance on the part of the author to get Sarah in a fairly vulnerable position — naked in a bathtub — but her decision to postpone contacting the police remains unconvincing.
Why is only one of Angela’s victims, Godfrey, given a name? The information we get about Godfrey makes him sympathetic, as do the details about the unnamed man Angela kills. But unless the author wants to allow for an omniscient narrator controlling the story, Angela cannot know Godfrey’s name. Are these two men rendered human and recognizable for the reader in order to arouse disgust at Angela’s ongoing project of attacking, robbing, and humiliating male tourists? There is an element of the comic in her painting their genitals gentian violet, yet the reader is expected to believe that this is her revenge for the dreadful rape she experienced when young. There is an unexplained hiatus between Angela’s own rape and her invention of this form of revenge.
We are given a long narration regarding Sarah’s commitment to her feminist activities, yet she reacts with shock on learning of Angela’s generous donation to the Rape Crisis Centre in Burford. Of course, 500 Sterling is a lot of money, but Sarah would be more likely to approve of the donation while suggesting that somewhat less money would have been adequate.
It’s only after the first break that the reader begins to suspect that Angela is not merely the lover of books, churches, female saints and country walks that we’ ve taken her to be. From then on the story begins to take shape. However — another small detail — one of Angela’ s prize possessions is her Zeiss binoculars. These should be mentioned again, at least once — perhaps among the stuff Sarah discovers behind the mower. Otherwise the reader forgets about them and their use.
Why is there a mixing of tenses from past to present and back again in the two paragraphs beginning “After Blackwell’s …” and whenever there is a depiction of artifacts?
I thought the ending worked well, Angela’s desire to die in the same way as her favourite author was poignant and very believable.
But I am still left perplexed. It was “easy” for Angela to murder Sarah because she had already grown bored and tired with their relationship. On the first page she briefly compares Sarah’s wholesomeness to the “depth and intensity” she’d experienced with other women. Perhaps this contrast could be developed further, one or two exciting women mentioned, so that the reader feels more strongly and sooner the incompatibility of the two women and gains an early, much-needed sense of tension. The opening pages are beautifully rendered but, for me, too lulling, given what is to follow.
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Pancho Gonzales and Maxwell’ s Demon by Tickey de Jager
I don’ t know much about tennis but I could enjoy the strangeness, the zany improbability of this unusual story.
What might have lifted me out of my sense, at times, of being out of my depth was if the writer could have been consistent in the use of inverted commas (quotation marks). Frequently, I was not sure who was speaking; that is, whether anyone was speaking or characters (names, really) were merely thinking or remembering. I would have liked a more evocative depiction, however slender, of the speakers’ appearance, idiosyncrasies, tics, etc., and a stronger sensuous awareness of tennis-courts — colours, smells, audience, and so forth. Just hearing the voices talking was not enough. I would have liked a couple more examples of what Maxwell’ s Demon is capable of. I wanted to dwell in the story, not simply listen to it (particularly when I did not always know to whom I was listening).
I enjoyed David’ s explanation of the law of increasing entropy; the comical details about Maxwell’ s Demon; and the terrifically magical game of tennis between Pancho and de Jager (?).
I loved the ending with its sense of mystery and official obfuscation.
This story takes its place as a respectable member of the comic genre, of the oral tale, the tall-story, the extended joke with a good punchline.
I want this story to remain in its genre, but I would enjoy seeing it developed more visually. To be honest, I am not sure what is good advice in a case like this.
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The first two paragraphs of the story offer terrific imaginative, visual depictions. The author has expertly placed Traci in her physical and intellectual ambience. However, I think a clearer transition is needed to the third paragraph on page 1. It sounds poetic that ’as the candles burned lower and the incense diffused, the midnight skinny dips in the dam become less frequent, the stolen (why?) garlic less pungent,’ Peter becomes more and more withdrawn. The above details surely have very little to do with Peter’s shroud of neurosis. What we get in the third paragraph is a summary of very important changes, changes which should be given more leisurely treatment, if the reader is not to be left a little bemused.
By page 2, with its admittedly marvellous depictions of Cape Town in the winter, of Traci’s infant son and Traci’s various dilemmas, the reader is floundering in his/her search for causality and meaning. In paragraph three on that page, why not record the conversations between Peter and Traci, adding voice and scenic reality to the situation? That paragraph ends on an abstract, intangible note.
In the next paragraph, what does ‘the profundity of lightness’ mean? Is this a borrowing from Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being? This whole paragraph is too discursive: the author is forcing the reader to do work to discover meaning that she herself should be doing.
As characters, Traci and Peter have no bodily substance; we cannot even get to know them from the manner of their speech. The next three paragraphs beginning, ‘Or rather, as Rob suggested to her kindly …’, ‘Peter’s voice sounded distant …’, and ‘Traci tried stalling …’ should be dramatized with dialogue and lateral movement. Why should the reader care about what happens to Traci and Peter when they cannot be understood and they’ve never emerged as flesh and blood human beings?
The ending, the only line of dialogue in the whole story, comes across as callous and serves to discount any importance the reader might have searched for in the relationship between Peter and Traci.
The writing is articulate. Vicky Scholtz writes good sentences and has a strong feeling for metaphor and image. But this story needs more lived reality to keep the reader interested.
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