Review: Some new ambush

Full disclosure: I am unwell. Not with THAT. I’m 99% sure it isn’t THAT.

‘But how can you tell?’ wails my teenage daughter, who’s been sent home from school for two weeks because she shared a form room with a girl who does have it and as a result is in a state of delicious anxiety at the potential drama of it all.

None of the symptoms, is why, and a few other things – I won’t go into details – that strongly suggest it’s a cold. OK, since you ask, I’ve got a stuffy nose and sneezes.

I have Googled symptoms extensively, of course, not just the NHS – she gets the propensity to high drama from somewhere after all. And if she didn’t keep telling me about all the outliers she’s Googled, I’d be 100% sure it was a cold.

I don’t feel that bad, but I’m clearly not quite the full deck. I’ve taken to sniffing the gin bottle to make sure I can still smell things.

On the other hand, I finished a killer Sudoko in 12 minutes this morning. Which is to say: read on – I may be unfocused but I am not unhinged.

I’m supposed to write every day as part of my MA. Also, read. You read what you want to write. I’m a bit too delicate to focus on anything epic right this very minute, and I have no inclination to write a novel, which leads me neatly to …

Some New Ambush by Carys Davies.

This is her first collection of short stories. Not her last – see also:

Do I want to write like Carys Davies? Oh yes, gentle reader, I do.

Each story is, as you’d hope from the title, a new ambush (this is true of the second collection as well). You never know where you will end up. By the third story, I had that quivering sense I get when I read good crime fiction, alert for every clue. Only once did I guess the ending. This is intensely exhilarating as a reader and a writer.

Davies is a master at ‘show don’t tell’ and her first person narrators are excellently drawn (I’d say 80% of the stories are first person). Like Browning’s famous poem, the narrators often tell you more about themselves than they intend. (If you haven’t read My Last Duchess, you can find it here: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43768/my-last-duchesss)

None of the stories are tricksy. They lead you in one direction then subvert your expectations, sometimes more than once, but in a very unforced manner. They are also portraits of the human psyche, and worth reading for that alone.

The other master at ‘show don’t tell’ I’ve come across recently (albeit a very different writing style) is Jon McGregor.

He immerses you in the characters and worlds he creates – all show, zero tell. It requires concentration, to be that close to the inner workings of a character, but it’s worth it. I’ve read these stories again and again to try to figure out how he does it.