While showing signs of a burgeoning talent, these Welsh tales lack consistency.
A debut collection of short stories speaks of love, vulnerability, and salvation.
Ten tales are offered here, each geographically tied to Wales. The first and longest, “Marged Evans,” tells of the eponymous heroine, a reclusive archivist set in her ways. Her life changes when she receives an unexpected Christmas card, which leads to a chain of events whereby she begins to reconnect with the world. To mirror her protagonist’s fastidiousness, the author delves regularly into overly scrupulous details, which prove engaging when describing street life but less so when dealing with the mundanities of central heating: “Even the heating of the house was kept at the minimum; central heating had been installed during the seventies, and the boiler, although old, was still functional.” The result is a turgid narrative that needs a ruthless edit. Subsequent stories suffer from the opposite problem: they are too short, underdeveloped, and have weak storylines. “Blue Skies” tells of a student taking her first trip overseas but lacks substance; “The Raindrop” imagines a community in the Western world faced with drought but reveals little other than attitudes change without water; and “The Cottage on the Hill: A Monologue” presents a heavily diluted rebuke of the rat race. Where Fletcher-Edwards truly comes into her own is in “Oi, you!,” the story of a child abused by his parents. To make the reader feel as small and vulnerable as this boy requires masterful skill: “His lifetime of crouching, of holding his pockmarked knees to his quivering chin, had left an indelible stain against the age-old wallpaper—the only thing that had seemed to give solace and refuge from the constant pain.” This is a disturbing, heartfelt, brilliant piece of writing that suggests a gifted author striving for consistency. Tales such as “The Annual Outing,” which features an artist setting up an easel on a headland and watching holidaymakers on the beach, reinforce this notion. The author’s observational skills are excellent here, yet the piece reads like a fragment rather than a complete story: “The colour of the shoreline mellowed from dark yellow, where the waves broke, to a golden hue, where the sun had dried the sand.” While readers with a love of Wales may connect with this book, others will likely lose patience with the collection’s imbalance.
While showing signs of a burgeoning talent, these Welsh tales lack consistency.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5246-6245-5
Page Count: 150
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in...
Huzzah! Martin (The Ice Dragon, 2014, etc.) delivers just what fans have been waiting for: stirring tales of the founding of the Targaryen line.
Duncan—Dunk for short—has his hapless moments. He’s big, nearly gigantic, “hugely tall for his age, a shambling, shaggy, big-boned boy of sixteen or seventeen.” Uncertain of himself, clumsy, and alone in the world, he has every one of the makings of a hero, if only events will turn in that direction. They do, courtesy of a tiny boy who steals into the “hedge knight” Dunk’s life and eventually reveals a name to match that of Ser Duncan the Tall—an altogether better name, at that, than Duncan of Flea Bottom would have been. Egg, as the squire calls himself, has a strange light about him, as if he will be destined to go on to better things, as indeed he will. Reminiscent of a simpler Arthur Rackham, the illustrations capture that light, as they do the growing friendship between Dunk and Egg—think Manute Bol and Muggsy Bogues, if your knowledge of basketball matches your interest in fantasy. This being Martin, that friendship will not be without its fraught moments, its dangers and double crosses and knightly politics. There are plenty of goopily violent episodes as well, from jousts (“this time Lord Leo Tyrell aimed his point so expertly he ripped the Grey Lion’s helm cleanly off his head”) to medieval torture (“Egg…used the hat to fan away the flies. There were hundreds crawling on the dead men, and more drifting lazily through the still, hot air.”). Throughout, Martin delivers thoughtful foreshadowing of the themes and lineages that will populate his Ice and Fire series, in which Egg, it turns out, is much less fragile than he seems.
As Tolkien had his Silmarillion, so Martin has this trilogy of foundational tales. They succeed on their own, but in addition, they succeed in making fans want more—and with luck, Martin will oblige them with more of these early yarns.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53348-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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